Seers featured prominently in ancient Greek culture, but they rarely appear in archaic and classical colonial discourse. Margaret Foster exposes the ideological motivations behind this discrepancy and reveals how colonial discourse privileged the city’s founder and his dependence on Delphi, the colonial oracle par excellence, at the expense of the independent seer. Investigating a  sequence of literary texts, Foster explores the tactics the Greeks devised both to leverage and suppress the extraordinary cultural capital of seers. The first cultural history of the seer, The Seer and the City illuminates the contests between religious and political powers in archaic and classical Greece.

"Foster’s central observation about the striking absence of a certain style of religious expert where we might well expect them is new and important for historians of ancient religion and colonialism alike. So too, her writing is clear and the overall argument is well-constructed."
- Reading Religion

"Foster systematically and clearly identifies and explains a significant anomaly in the Archaic and Classical Greek location of authority among the competing media of divine communication. . . . She has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of power, the push and push-back, between dominant and non-dominant cultic programs in ancient Greece—a description that resonates with ongoing discourse in postcolonial studies." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review