Seers featured prominently in ancient Greek culture, but they rarely appear in colonial discourse from the archaic and classical periods. Margaret Foster exposes the ideological motivations behind this discrepancy and reveals how colonial discourse's privileging of the city's founder and his dependence on Delphi, the colonial oracle par excellence, entails a corresponding suppression of the seer. Foster explains why the seer's authority conflicts with that of the founder and investigates a sequence of literary works from a range of genres that showcase this dynamic. The first study to analyze the seer and the Delphi-sanctioned founder relationally, this volume 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