#80: Fate, the Oracle & Free Will: Did the Greeks Believe in Genuine Agency? Prof. Esther Eidinow

What did the ancient Greeks actually believe about fate, free will, luck and human agency?

Were our lives understood as predetermined by the gods and fate—or did ordinary Greeks believe that their choices could genuinely change the future?

In this episode of The Prometheans, I’m joined by Professor Esther Eidinow, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol and Fellow of the British Academy, to explore the fascinating relationship between fate, uncertainty and human agency in ancient Greek culture.

Drawing on her groundbreaking work on Greek religion, magic, oracles and risk, we discuss what the evidence from ancient Greek life can tell us about these questions.

Why did ordinary people consult the oracle at Dodona about marriage, health, travel and other everyday uncertainties? What do thousands of surviving oracle question tablets reveal about how Greeks understood their own ability to influence the future?

We also explore the intriguing relationship between oracle consultation and curse tablets. If someone asks a god for guidance while simultaneously attempting to influence events through ritual, does that tell us something important about how fate and human agency could coexist?

And what happens when we compare this everyday evidence with the apparently fatalistic world of Greek tragedy—from Oedipus to the wider literary tradition?

Professor Eidinow also discusses her latest research on Dodona and the Virtual Reality Oracle project, which seeks to reconstruct not merely what ancient people believed, but what it might have been like to physically and psychologically experience an ancient oracle.

Finally, we turn to the Greek concepts of moira, tuche and fate, the philosophical developments of Stoicism, and the surprisingly modern question at the heart of all this:

Are we really more in control of our lives than the ancient Greeks were—or have we simply developed different ways of managing uncertainty?

Guest

Professor Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research focuses particularly on ancient Greek culture, religion and magic, using interdisciplinary approaches to understand how people in the ancient world experienced uncertainty, risk and the supernatural.

She is the author of Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks and Luck, Fate and Fortune: Antiquity and Its Legacy, and co-editor of the 2026 Cambridge University Press volume Visiting the Oracle at Dodona: Contexts of Unknowing in Ancient Greek Religion.

She also led the AHRC-funded Virtual Reality Oracle project, an interdisciplinary collaboration exploring the ancient Greek oracle at Dodona through virtual reality, ancient history, psychology and human-computer interaction.

Professor Eidinow was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2024.

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