Classics Colloquium with Jennifer Devereaux

This talk examines a set of Greek and Roman practices—civic divination, judicial timekeeping, and literary representations of emotion—in order to articulate a shared temporal operation that has not been adequately theorized. Across ritual, law, and narrative, anticipation functions not as foresight directed toward future events, but as a formal mechanism that determines in advance when interpretation, response, or action must become binding. Read together, these practices disclose a common logic through which authority is produced by regulating closure: by fixing temporal thresholds at which deliberation ends and judgment takes effect, even as explanation remains partial or indeterminate. What comes into view is a class of predictive structures operating below the level of belief and justification. Rather than explaining outcomes or securing assent, they organize the timing of settlement—whether in ritual action, legal decision, or narrative arrest—within processes that would otherwise remain open. On this account, prediction names neither calculation nor prognosis, but a condition of intelligibility: the structuring of recognition, authority, and response through time.