Abstract
The book includes history and interpretation of five divinatory techniques which were utilized in the Greek and Roman antiquity and partly also in the Latin and Byzantine Middle Age: arithmomancy (divination by means of numbers), geomancy (divination by means of randomly made dots on soil), lithomancy (divination by means of stones), ophiomancy (divination by means of snakes), and necromancy (divination using the dead). The focus of attention in the book is on ancient Greece, but each of the techniques is also tracked in the Roman period and in the Roman milieu even in those cases when it is not possible to prove or assume a direct dependence on the Greeks.
In this sense, then, the book is freely conceived as a history of divination in Greek-Roman antiquity. In contrast to this, the book only ventures into the Middle Ages - Latin and Byzantine - in a detailed manner when a sufficient number of accounts of the technique in question haven't been preserved from antiquity but may have been from that later era (as, for example, is the case with geomancy).
In all the rest of the cases the Middle Ages only serves as a source of interesting parallels and comparisons, which were very selectively inserted into the text.