The Parallels between Aetiology and Prophecy in Ancient Literature

As Annette Harder shows in her contribution to this volume, aetiological stories are often used to anchor innovations in the present: “Sometimes we see that a new or future institution in the present is linked to an aetiological story from the past and presented as sanctioned by these events, as if it were a continuation of something that had been predicted a long time ago or had in some way been there all the time”, as she phrases it. This can take the form of so-called ex eventu prophecies by a deus ex machina in tragedy, as Harder illustrates with examples from Euripidean tragedy. Both in the Ion (1581–1588) and in the Supplices (1191–1195) the goddess Athena enters the stage near the end and prophesies a future that is meant to forecast the present of the Athenian audience watching the tragedy. Later, Hellenistic poets take over this poetical device and use it for their own purposes, but a central function of such passages remains the embedding of some kind of ideological claim (possibly of an innovative kind, as Harder shows) by means of an authoritative speaker represented as prophesying with foresight out of the past. W.H. Auden termed this procedure ‘hindsight as foresight’ in his poem Secondary Epic (1959),2 in which he criticizes its use as found in Vergil’s Aeneid (in particular in the scene of the manufacturing of Aeneas’ shield in book 8 and in the prophecies of Anchises in the underworld in book 6):

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