Homeromanteion Ὁμηρομαντεῖον

216 Homeric verses, keyed by three throws of a die.

To consult the Homeromanteion, you cast a single die three times. The three results — each a number from one to six — form a key, from 1‑1‑1 to 6‑6‑6, and each key points to a single verse of Homer. That verse, lifted out of its narrative, becomes the answer to your question. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not merely poems in the ancient imagination; they were a reservoir of authoritative speech, and to receive one of their lines by lot was to hear the poet answer directly.

The manuscript

The text survives in a single great manuscript: Papyrus London 121, the London magical papyrus of the third or fourth century, whose opening section is this oracle. We follow the first full publication of it, F. G. Kenyon’s catalogue of the British Museum’s Greek papyri (1893), which prints the Greek literatim — without accents, as the papyrus itself gives it. The later Preisendanz edition is not yet safely in the public domain, so it is used for nothing here.

What survives, and what is lost

The roll is damaged at its start. The oracle as we have it begins partway through: the first sixty-two keys, from 1‑1‑1 onward, were lost with the papyrus’s opening and cannot be recovered. This edition does not reconstruct them. They appear below as withheld — an honest gap, not a guess. Of the whole, a hundred and forty verses are transcribed here.

The external checksum

This chamber has a rare advantage: every oracle is a line of Homer, so every entry can be checked against Homer himself. Each verse is given with its exact locus — book and line of the Iliad or Odyssey — so that any reader with any critical edition of Homer can confirm the text independently. A verse that fails that lookup would be a transcription error or a papyrus variant, and would be flagged either way.

The edition

Primary source: F. G. Kenyon, Greek Papyri in the British Museum: Catalogue, with Texts, vol. I (London, 1893) — Pap. CXXI (P.Lond. 121), the great London magical papyrus.
Scan: archive.org / cu31924022695088
Rights: Public domain (Kenyon 1893). Preisendanz’s PGM (1931) is not used for text — not safely PD.

140 verses transcribed, 76 withheld (the first 62 triplets are lost with the roll’s damaged opening — disclosed, not filled).

Integrity

This edition’s text is served verbatim from the sealed canon file verses.json. Its SHA-256, as recorded in canon/MANIFEST.json:

23c57ff5a05c78b2a0b8c7550331f0a45bc8783d77e289a6a0c9339b70782864

Download the sealed source file — verses.json

Download the file above, then verify it (from wherever it saved):

sha256sum verses.json
# Windows:
certutil -hashfile verses.json SHA256

How to cite this edition

Cite the whole edition: Syrgianis, N. (ed.), The Adyton: Four Ancient Greek Oracle Systems, digital critical edition, 2026, https://theadyton.org/en/.

Homeromanteion, digital critical edition (Adyton, College of Human and Business Efficiency Ltd), after F. G. Kenyon, Greek Papyri in the British Museum I (London 1893), Pap. CXXI. Cite an oracle by its triplet key, e.g. «Homeromanteion 2‑5‑3 (Adyton ed.)», with the Homeric locus (e.g. Od. 4.685). Stable URL: /en/homeromanteion/#h-2-5-3