Abstract

Œnomaus of Gadara, in his work Detection of Deceivers, of which long fragments are preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, contests Apollo’s oracles in name of the human action contingency. His targets are not only the Democritean and Stoic determinism, but also the Middle Platonic view of conditional fate. In a fictional address to Apollo, he demonstrates the contingency of the action, in an original way, which he extends to the field of the animal action. The examination of his argument shows that the Stoic conceptions of what depends on us and of consciousness are cannibalized against determinism.