The lives of our ancient counterparts were fitted to their religious beliefs and observances in a way that is hard to imagine in our own time, even for people of deep religious faith, because religion served a number of functions that have since been taken over by other aspects of society. A traditional and strict Baptist of the late 20th century, for example, might turn to the Bible rather than to Darwin to explain the origin of the species, but he or she is likely to turn on the local news to find out what the weather will be like for the weekend.
Citizens of the classical world had no such alternative resources, and so any questions that they had of the world รป from whether the rains would finally come to if their child would recover to whether justice could be expected in a given circumstance had to come through divine intercession.
This dependence of humans on the gods for direct help in everything from medicine to justice probably made people more inclined than we ourselves are today to depend on oracles, prophecies and curses, all of which are direct links between the gods and humans (although in each of these cases some humans might act as intermediaries between the gods and other humans). Moreover such institutions as oracles not only provide for a direct connection between the gods and mortals but they allow for direct action between the perfect world of the gods and the imperfect world in which people had to live, something that must have appealed to people in a time before civil rights and civil suits.
The belief in prophecies and curses along with the establishment of oracles was widespread throughout the ancient world, and this paper provides a brief overview of some of the variation of practices and belief among different ancient groups, focusing on the traditional cradle of civilization along with the classical world.
Before beginning such a survey, it is useful to establish some basic definitions of the ce...