The Well That Answered in Oak

At Praeneste, in the hills east of Rome, the answer to your question was a strip of oak. It lived in a chest carved from olive wood, kept by a sacred well, and a boy pulled it out. He mixed the strips, drew one, and handed it over. Whatever was cut into the grain in old, worn letters was what the goddess had to say to you.

The goddess was Fortuna Primigenia, Fortune the Firstborn. Her sanctuary climbed the hillside in a stack of terraces so wide that on a clear day you could pick it out from Rome, twenty-odd miles off. The oracle sat near the bottom of all that architecture, and it worked by drawing lots.

A man, a dream, and a rock

The story Romans told about where the lots came from survives because Cicero wrote it down in order to laugh at it. A respectable local named Numerius Suffustius kept dreaming that he should go to a particular place and split a flint. His neighbours thought he had lost his mind. The dream would not stop, so he did it, and when the stone broke open the oak lots were inside, already carved with archaic characters.

The same day, the story goes, honey ran from an olive tree on the spot where the temple would later stand. The wood of that tree was made into the chest that held the lots. That chest was still in use when Cicero was writing, in the 40s BCE, and he describes the procedure in the present tense: the strips are shuffled and drawn at Fortune's prompting by the hand of a boy.

Both the mother and the daughter of Jupiter

"Primigenia" means firstborn, first-made. That ought to put Fortuna among the oldest things in the world. But the cult image at Praeneste showed her as a seated woman nursing two infants, and the infants were Jupiter and Juno. Inscriptions from the site call her "Fortuna Primigenia, daughter of Jupiter" while the statue in front of the worshipper makes her his mother.

Cicero noticed the contradiction and enjoyed it. How, he asks, can one goddess be Jupiter's daughter and also hold him on her lap as a baby reaching for the breast? The people of Praeneste do not seem to have been bothered. She was the first principle the gods came from, and she was Jupiter's daughter, and both were carved onto the same stone bases without anyone feeling the need to reconcile them.

What the lots actually said

Almost nothing survives. Not one response that can be securely tied to Praeneste has come down to us. Other Italian lot shrines left inscribed oracles behind, short Latin verses that read like fortune-cookie lines, general enough to fit whatever had been asked, and the Praenestine strips were probably much the same. But the chest of oak is gone and the archaic letters with it. The one detail every source keeps is that a child did the drawing, and it is there because Cicero thought it was the daftest part of the whole business.

The consul who was told no

In the last year of the First Punic War, a member of the Lutatius family wanted to consult the sortes at Praeneste. The Senate stopped him. The reason it gave, in the version Valerius Maximus preserves, was that the business of the Republic had to be run with Rome's own ancestral auspices, not foreign ones.

Two things about that are odd, and both are still argued over. The first is the word "foreign." Praeneste was a Latin town a day's walk away that had been bound to Rome by treaty for more than a century and shared much of its law and language. Calling its goddess foreign was a political choice, not a geographical fact.

The second is which consul it was. The surviving text names Quintus Lutatius Cerco, consul in 241. The historian C. F. Konrad has argued that the man was almost certainly his brother Gaius, consul in 242 and the actual victor of the war, and that the trip to Praeneste was never really about the well. It was about precedent. A commander who consulted Fortuna at Praeneste instead of taking the auspices in the field would have established that a general could skip a step Roman religion treated as mandatory. The Senate was not shielding Rome from a spooky Italian oracle. It was refusing to let a war hero rewrite the rules on who talked to the gods, and how.

"Who of any standing uses the lots?"

Cicero says that lot oracles had collapsed in respectability across Italy, and that Praeneste alone kept its standing, propped up by the beauty of the site and the size of the crowds. Which magistrate, he asks, which man of any distinction, still uses the lots? He answers himself: only the common people.

He wrote that in the same decades that the Roman state consulted its own augurs before every election and every campaign, treated a bad sign as legally binding, and kept Etruscan specialists on retainer to read the livers of sacrificed animals. The line between a sacred instrument of state and a trick for the gullible was mostly a question of who was holding it. A woman on a tripod at Delphi answered kings; a boy with a box of oak strips answered farmers; the difference in dignity was not in the method.

The chest that would not leave

The lots outlasted Cicero's contempt by centuries. Tiberius, according to Suetonius, wanted to shut Praeneste down and did not dare. He had the lot chest sealed and carried to Rome, and the strips were not in it when it arrived. They were there again only when the chest was taken back to the temple.

Domitian consulted the Fortune of Praeneste every year, commending the new year to her as it began. Suetonius says that for his whole reign she sent back a favourable answer in the same words each time. In the last year of his life the wording changed, and the new message mentioned blood. He was stabbed to death in his bedroom a few months later. He had been asking a well every January when he was going to die, and one year it told him.