Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 13, Delphi: The Magic Eight Ball of Greece. I’m Scott Emmons.

In the last episode, we got far enough along in the story of ancient Greece that the oracle of Apollo at Delphi made its first appearance. So this seemed like the perfect opportunity to take a closer look at the most revered oracle of the Greek world. I can’t honestly call it a “deep dive,” because Delphi is a huge topic. There are so many parts to it, so many rabbit holes we could go down. But this is just a single episode and, in theory at least, one of the shorter ones. So this can only be an introduction, but I hope it will leave you with a good basic understanding of the Delphic oracle and its importance in Greek culture. 

We really don’t know how Delphi got to be the most important oracular center in Greece. Oracles played an essential part in decision making at both an individual and a state level, because it was just a given that for any important undertaking, you needed to get some insight into what the gods were thinking. So there were quite a few famous and highly respected oracles. Way up in the northwest was the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, where the king of the gods gave his pronouncements through the sound of rustling leaves in a sacred oak tree. Greeks also consulted the oracle of Amun, whom they identified with Zeus, way down in the Siwa Oasis in Egypt. One factor in Delphi taking the lead may have been its more central location. It was in what’s called central Greece, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. And it looked out over the Corinthian Gulf, which is the long, narrow waterway that separates the Peloponnese from the regions just to the north. So it was relatively accessible by sea, although it still required a good mountain hike to get there. And for someone traveling by land from a place like Athens or Thebes, it wouldn’t be a walk in the park, but it would be a lot easier than trekking all the way to Dodona.  

That central location is important in ancient myths about Delphi, which represent it as the center not just of Greece, but of the whole world. One foundation myth tells that Zeus wanted to find the center of all creation, so he released two eagles from opposite ends of the earth. We have to assume they flew straight toward each other at the same speed, so where they met was the exact center, which happened to be Delphi. For that reason, Delphi was called the omphalos, literally the “navel” of the Earth, and there was even a stone inside the temple of Apollo that represented the omphalos.  

So how did Delphi become sacred to Apollo? Again, all we have is myth and legend. A long poem called the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo — probably from the mid-6th century BCE, so long after the actual time of Homer — tells how Apollo wandered from one place to another, and when he came to the site of Delphi, he decided that this was where he’d establish his oracle. But first he had to kill a vicious dragon called Pytho. The Homeric Hymn is the earliest version we have of this myth, and it says Pytho was a female dragon. That may be significant, because it’s clear from other ancient sources that way back in the distant past, the site was sacred to the Earth Mother, Gaea. A fascinating thing about Greek myths is that they preserve ancient stories of powerful women and female forces, but the versions we have of those stories come from a time when the culture was highly patriarchal. So literary versions of myths often portray female forces as wild and irrational, and needing to be restrained by more civilized, rational male powers. That may be what’s going on with the story of Apollo slaying the dragon Pytho. The myth reflects the subjugation of the Gaea cult by the male god Apollo, who, among other things, is a god of reason.  

Well, when we first start hearing about Delphi in the historical record, it’s usually in connection with those overseas settlements I talked about in the last episode. Any major venture like founding a new city had to have some kind of religious sanction, and Delphi came to be the place to get it. Delphi offered not just religious sanction, but guidance on where or where not to start a settlement. Some scholars have speculated that Delphi was a sort of clearinghouse for information about faraway places. When you went to consult the oracle, you’d spend a good deal of time waiting. And during that time, priests or temple officials would probably chat you up. “Oh, you’re from Croton? Great city, Croton. How are things over there on the Italian coast? Any trouble with the natives?” And so on. So according to this hypothesis, the Delphic officials would be uniquely well informed and in a good position to give advice. We don’t have ancient sources to support that, so it’s really just a plausible scenario.

So how do you consult the oracle at Delphi? Apollo doesn’t answer questions in person. He has a priestess called the Pythia to speak for him. Ancient authors don’t tell us how the Pythia is chosen, but we know she has to have certain qualifications. For one thing, she has to be a Delphian. And she has to lead a chaste life in the service of Apollo. That doesn’t necessarily mean she has to be a virgin. According to one story, she originally did, until a young man fell in love with a Pythia and carried her off. So the Delphians established a new rule. The Pythia has to be over fifty years old, beyond childbearing age. She may even have been married and had a family, but she gives that up once she becomes Apollo’s servant. We also hear that she should ideally be an uneducated woman from a poor family. The idea being that if she’s illiterate and doesn’t know much, her head will be clear, so she’ll be a better conduit for communications from Apollo. 

When you read ancient authors, it often sounds like people are consulting the Delphic oracle all the time. But the Pythia actually delivers oracles on only one day of the month, and then for only nine months out of the year. During the winter, Apollo is out of town. If you miss the day for consulting the Pythia, you either have to go home without an answer or settle for a kind of oracle by lot. There’s some inscriptional evidence for a lot oracle using beans, which could at least answer a yes or no question or say which of two alternatives is better. But if you need an answer from the Pythia, you’ve got to make sure you get there on time. Given the slow pace of travel in the ancient world, that’ll take a while. And then, on the appointed day for consultations, there’ll be a lot of waiting. The sanctuary will be packed with crowds of people outside the temple, waiting for their turn. There are ways of getting around that, though. A very rich individual or more commonly a state can make a lot of expensive dedications to Apollo. And if you make enough of those and cultivate a good relationship with the oracle, you may get the right of promanteia, which translates as something like “first prophecy.” That’s essentially the Delphic version of the Lightning Lane at Disney World or the “Skip the Line” deals that tour companies offer. So if you have promanteia, you get to go in ahead of everybody else. If you don’t have a privileged position, your place in line is determined by drawing lots. 

Now, no ancient author, at least none that we have, gives a full description of the procedure for consulting the oracle, but by assembling bits and pieces from different works, we can reconstruct a basic outline. The seventh of the month is the appointed day for consulting Apollo. But the priests still have to make sure that day is auspicious. So early in the morning, they perform a ritual of sprinkling cold water on a goat, which has to be free of any blemishes. If the goat shivers, that’s an omen that Apollo is ready to take questions. I have to think that, as important as the oracle was for Delphi’s revenues as well as its reputation, the priests must have done everything they could to make sure that goat shivered. There’s even a story from Plutarch that one day the goat wasn’t responding, and the priests finally forced it to shiver by practically drowning it in cold water. That supposedly caused the priestess to go into a terrible frenzy, and she died a few days later. But aside from that one cautionary tale, we don’t have any accounts of a cancellation because the goat didn’t shiver. Anyway, once that ritual is done, the priests lead the goat to be sacrificed on the altar outside the temple. And if the entrails all look normal, the omens are good, and consultations can begin. 

Meanwhile, the Pythia starts her day with a purification ritual, bathing in the Castalian Spring just below the sanctuary. She then goes to the temple, presumably accompanied by attendants, and there she gives a burnt offering of laurel leaves and barley to Apollo. After all her rituals and prayers, she takes her place on top of a tripod in a private chamber called the adyton. The word literally means “not to be entered,” so it’s a pretty good bet that no one but the Pythia is allowed inside that space. 

Outside the temple, the people waiting to consult the oracle have to purify themselves too with water from Delphian springs. They’re sorted into groups according to which individuals and cities have priority — who has promanteia, and so on. Then each consultant has to sacrifice a small cake called a pelanos, which really amounts to a consultation fee. You have to buy that cake from the Delphians at a high price as a way of paying admission. That’s how they get you.  

But you’re not done yet. Now you have to offer an animal, probably a sheep or a goat, for a sacrifice performed by one of the priests or a local representative from Delphi. Unless you’ve brought your sacrificial animal all the way from your home city, you have to buy that from the Delphians too. After that, you can finally enter an enclosure inside the temple where you ask your question. You probably can’t see the Pythia, who’s hidden away in the adyton, but you may be able to hear her answer. If not, presumably one of the priests relays it to you, maybe orally, maybe in writing. 

And now, we finally come to the big question, the moment that I’m sure some listeners have been waiting for. How does the Pythia get her inspiration to speak for Apollo? The story that’s come down to us is that she inhales fumes from a crack in the ground under the temple, and that puts her into an altered state of consciousness where she can receive divine inspiration. The Greek geographer Strabo gives us the clearest account of this. As translated by H.L. Jones, quote: 

They say that the seat of the oracle is a cave that is hollowed out deep down in the earth, with a rather narrow mouth, from which arises breath that inspires a divine frenzy; and that over the mouth is placed a high tripod, mounting which the Pythian priestess receives the breath and then utters oracles in both verse and prose… Unquote. 

Strabo paints a good picture, but notice the opening words of that sentence — “They say.” Let’s put a pin in that. Another author, Diodorus Siculus, tells an origin story. He says it all started when a goatherd noticed his goats jumping around and squealing wildly after coming near an opening in the ground. When the goatherd came near and breathed the fumes himself, he got lightheaded and started spouting prophecies. So the word spread that there was a “sacred exhalation” from the ground, and the Delphians decided to build a temple there and appoint a priestess to be the god’s mouthpiece. Plutarch mentions that divine breath in several of his writings, and he has a little added cred, because he actually served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi. 

Naturally, that image of the Pythia getting high on vapors from the earth has captured the modern imagination. But is it true?  Well, at the end of the 19th century, a French archaeological team first excavated the temple of Apollo. It was an opportune time for it, because this was an era when spiritualism was a hot trend in Europe. A lot of people, including the most educated, were trying to communicate with the dead and exploring various psychic phenomena. So the Delphic oracle was an object of intense fascination, and the archaeologists seem to have gone in with the aim of discovering the Pythia’s secrets in the inner sanctum. Well, the excavators dug out the interior of the temple, and they found — nothing. No chasm, no gases seeping up from below the temple. It was a huge disappointment. The scholarly reaction at the time has a tone that seems downright indignant that ancient authors would play them like that. The director of the excavation, a man named Théophile Homolle, reportedly said, quote: “The temple, on which so much hope had rested, has been a great deception.” Unquote. 

But the “inspiring vapors” narrative didn’t die so easily. About a century later, in the 1980s and 90s, a geologist named Jelle de Boer teamed up with a Yale-trained archaeologist, John Hale, to investigate the geology of Delphi. And they discovered that there were two major geological faults that crossed under the temple of Apollo. They took the position that fissures in the bedrock would have allowed hydrocarbon gases like ethane and especially ethylene to seep up into the temple and have a consciousness-altering effect. That caused a lot of excitement. A lot of people thought the sources were vindicated. But not everybody. And the debate rages on to this day. 

When I first announced the launch of this podcast on social media, a friend commented, “I can’t wait till you get to the Delphic oracle with all those vapors rising up and inspiring the Pythia.” Well, I hate to be Buzz Killington about this, but I have to say I don’t buy it. And the main reason is that the story doesn’t appear until very late in the historical record. The earliest reference we have is from Diodorus, the author who told the story about the goatherd, and he wrote in the first century BCE. Before him, we have hundreds of years of references to the Delphic oracle and the Pythia without any indication that she was inhaling mind-altering gases. If that had really been going on, I’d expect to hear something about it in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. And Herodotus loved a good story so much, I can’t imagine he could have resisted including it somewhere in his rambling history.  

The word that those late authors use for the vapor is also a little ambiguous. They called it a “pneuma,” which literally translates as “breath.” It’s where we get words like “pneumatic” and “pneumonia.” But breath is often equated with spirit, and “pneuma” can often mean “inspiration.” So maybe stories about the “breath of inspiration” evolved into the idea of gases emanating from the earth. On the other hand, it’s clear that those authors around the turn of the first millennium took the “pneuma” literally as an actual exhalation. In one of Plutarch’s essays, where he says the pneuma varies in strength from one time to another, he actually describes the smell of it. In the translation by Frank Babbitt, quote: 

It is a fact that the room in which they seat those who would consult the god is filled, not frequently or with any regularity, but as it may chance from time to time, with a delightful fragrance coming on a current of air which bears it towards the worshippers, as if its source were in the holy of holies ; and it is like the odor which the most exquisite and costly perfumes send forth. Unquote

Now, I don’t want to go out on a limb here, but I don’t think petrochemical fumes smell like that. Those who think the Pythia was breathing mind-altering fumes point out that ethylene, which has mild psychoactive properties, has a slightly sweet smell. But they’re talking about refined ethylene, not the cocktail of gases that would seep up from bituminous rock. My guess is that on some days the Pythia was using one of those exquisite and costly perfumes. Who knows what was going on? But I have to add that if people outside the adyton could smell that wonderful fragrance, they should have been feeling effects of it too. But we never hear of any other priests or visitors going into a prophetic trance. 

For all those reasons, I’m very skeptical of the idea that the Pythia was high on gases seeping up through the bedrock. But I don’t think it’s absolute nonsense. It’s not a crackpot “ancient aliens” theory. De Boer and Hale did exhaustive research and discovered a lot about the geology of Delphi. So if you like the story and want to hang onto it, don’t let me ruin it for you. You can get ahold of a very readable book called Oracle: Ancient Delphi and the Science Behind its Lost Secrets by William J. Broad. He’s a true believer, and maybe he can help you keep your faith alive. 

Well, however it happened, the Pythia got inspired and gave Apollo’s answers. A lot of oracular responses are preserved in Greek writings, and they come in different forms. Some are simple, one-sentence answers. Quite a few others, especially earlier ones, are in verse form, usually hexameters. Which raises the question, did the Pythia compose those verse answers extemporaneously? Probably not, so there must have been some system where a priest would get her initial response and then rewrite it as poetry. Occasionally a question would get a clear, simple, definitive answer. But very often, and very famously, the answer would be ambiguous. That was one way the oracle could always claim to be right. Apollo will answer your question, but he doesn’t have to be direct about it. If you interpret his answer the wrong way, that’s on you. 

The classic example of that is the story of Croesus, the king of Lydia over in Anatolia. Like so many of the best stories from Greek antiquity, this one comes to us from Herodotus. Croesus was one of the wealthiest men in the world, and his kingdom of Lydia had expanded into an empire that ruled over neighboring territories, including many of the Ionian Greek cities. Well, Croesus became alarmed when the Persian king Cyrus was quickly building his empire and was getting a little too close to Lydian territory. So he needed an oracle to tell him whether he should go to war against Persia. But he wanted to make sure he’d be getting good information, so he put all the greatest oracles to a test. He sent emissaries to Delphi, Dodona, the Zeus Ammon oracle down in Egypt, and several others. And he told his messengers to ask the oracles what the king was doing on a specific day, 100 days after they left Lydia. On the appointed day, Croesus cooked up a stew with the meat of a tortoise and a lamb in a bronze pot. Most of the oracles didn’t have a clue, but from Delphi he got one of those versified answers. As translated by Andrea Purvis, quote:

Into the depth of my senses has come the smell of hard-shelled tortoise

Boiling in bronze with the meat of lamb,

Laid upon bronze below, covered with bronze on top. Unquote.

Croesus was delighted that he’d found an oracle he could trust, and being the super-rich king he was, he showered Delphi with spectacular gifts. Among other things, he sent 117 gold ingots, a lion statue made of pure gold, and two gigantic bowls, one of silver and the other of gold, that the Delphians set up on either side of the entrance to the temple. That’s just a small sampling of a long list of gifts. So, after the Lydians had dedicated all their offerings, they asked the oracle if Croesus should go to war against Cyrus of Persia. And the oracle replied, “If Croesus makes war on the Persians, he will destroy a great empire.” Croesus said, “Sweet, I can’t lose!” So he got his army together, brought in allies, crossed the river Halys into Persian territory… and got his royal butt handed to him. So Persia took over Lydia. Very fortunately for Croesus, his life was spared — that’s a story for another episode — but he was allowed to send messengers back to Delphi to complain about how the oracle had deceived him. The answer, of course, was that the oracle had spoken the truth. Croesus had destroyed a great empire — his own. It was his own fault that he hadn’t come back to ask which empire he’d bring down.  

So that was the kind of game that Delphi could play. There are other famous examples of riddling Delphic answers, and we’ll get to some of those in future episodes. But some of those well-known examples are unusual in the directness of the questions. An author named Michael Scott — not the Scranton branch manager at Dunder Mifflin, but a classicist at the University of Warwick — points out in his book Delphi that when Greeks consulted the oracle, questions were more often framed as alternatives like, “Would it be better for me to do X or Y?” Or often, “What gods should I pray to before I do X?” In other words, individuals or states were often looking for guidance rather than concrete answers. So, for example, if discussions in a city’s council couldn’t come to a decision, the Delphic oracle could provide a springboard for further discussion. 

 Now, I’ve talked about the Pythia and other priests, but who was in charge of the Delphic oracle?  That’s where things get a bit messy. Because Delphi was not a powerful city. It was a small, out-of-the-way town that happened to have the most important oracular shrine in Greece. So, of course, the bigger players would want to influence it as much as they could. And at certain points in history, tensions would erupt in so-called “Sacred Wars” over control of the sanctuary. The first of those was the most consequential, and unfortunately, what little information we have about it is at least half legendary, with a lot of romanticized elements added to the historical kernel. But the basic story is that in the early 6th century BCE a nearby town called Crisa some way down the mountain was extorting money from people on their way to consult the oracle and even making raids on Delphi itself. 

 Delphi wasn’t strong enough to defend itself, but there was a religious organization of Greek tribal groups called the Amphictyony that rallied to defend it. The word just means “dwellers around,” and it was evidently a very ancient alliance. You can think of it as a league of Greeks from different regions, organized by tribes rather than by city-states — although some of the major cities came to be de facto leaders in their tribal groups, for example, Sparta for the Dorians and Athens for the Ionians. So in the First Sacred War, this Amphictyony, under orders from the oracle, made war on Crisa. According to legend, the war lasted as long as the Trojan War, in other words ten years, and ultimately Crisa was completely obliterated.

 The Amphictyony was never entirely centered on Delphi, but after the First Sacred War it became more heavily involved with it. It instituted the Pythian Games, for example, one of those panhellenic festivals along the lines of the Olympics. So, to get back to the question of who ran Delphi, in theory the Amphictyonic Council was in charge. But in practice, it only met twice a year and probably only involved itself in the biggest decisions. The Delphians, that is, the inhabitants of the town of Delphi, were probably most involved in the day-to-day operations.

 Now, Delphi was already an important and prestigious religious destination before the First Sacred War. But the sixth century BCE was when it transformed into an extraordinarily rich, magnificent complex. At this time, cities in and out of Greece started spending enormous sums of money to have a presence there. We’ve already seen how King Croesus decked the place out with gold and silver. When you entered the sanctuary, you’d walk up a long path called the Sacred Way to Apollo’s temple. And on either side, you’d pass by monuments set up by different donors. Some cities, like Athens, Corinth, and quite a few others, built small buildings called treasuries along the Sacred Way to hold their dedications. The Athenian treasury has been reconstructed, and it helps give an idea of what it would have been like to pass by all those structures on your way to the temple. 

 Of course, all that money that came pouring into Delphi wasn’t just out of religious devotion to Apollo. If you had Delphi in your corner, you had that much more clout in the Greek world. So, as the oracle’s influence grew, there was a lot of jockeying among the major powers to win its favor. I’m not going to get too deep into the political machinations now, because they’ll come out in upcoming episodes. But I’ll just briefly mention one major example. In 548 BCE, a fire swept through the sanctuary and took out the existing temple of Apollo. A noble Athenian family, the Alcmaeonids, got the contract to rebuild it. And when they did, they went above and beyond, building the façade in fine Parian marble instead of the limestone that was specified in the contract. That bought them a lot of political capital, which helped them against their enemies in Athens and also boosted the whole city’s standing.

 But even aside from gaining the oracle’s favor, putting up a monument at Delphi could make a statement about your city’s wealth and power. It was a way of sending a message to the rest of Greece, and sometimes to other specific cities. There were times when competitive dedications amounted to propaganda wars with Delphi as the battlefield. For example, just inside the entrance to the sanctuary, the Athenians had a prominent statue group commemorating their first great victory over the Persians in the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. At the end of that century, the long, drawn-out Peloponnesian War ended with a decisive victory of Sparta over Athens. Sparta rubbed Athens’s nose in it by building a much bigger statue group even closer to the entrance, and on the other side of the path they built a monumental stoa, in other words a big, colonnaded portico, where the Spartans displayed offerings to commemorate their victory. Fast-forward about three decades, and Sparta, the Goliath of Greek military powers, finally gets knocked down by Thebes and its allies. One of those allies, Argos, now puts up a semicircular statue group right next to the Spartan stoa, cutting off access to it from that side. And the Arcadians celebrate the foundation of their new confederacy by putting a line of statues right in front of the stoa, partially blocking the view of it, with an inscription that reads, “For victory over the Spartans.” 

 So, at its height, you can imagine Delphi as an incredibly rich sanctuary, gleaming with gold, silver, bronze and marble all along the Sacred Way. Most of those dedications are gone now. Over the centuries, things happen. That gold lion that Croesus dedicated was half melted in that great fire I mentioned. It continued to be displayed, in the Treasury of the Corinthians, but in the middle of the fourth century BCE, there was another one of those sacred wars, and the Phocians, who were occupying Delphi, were hard up for money to pay for their operations, so they melted down what was left of it, along with a great many other treasures. 

 As history rolled on, Delphi had its ups and downs. The Roman emperor Nero poured a lot of money into the sanctuary and even competed in the Pythian games, but he also took 500 statues from Delphi to decorate the Golden House, his private residence in Rome. Later, the emperor Constantine took one of the most famous dedications, a bronze column made up of intertwined serpents that the Greeks set up after their final victory over the Persians, with inscriptions naming all the cities that had taken part in the war. Constantine had it set up in the hippodrome in his capital at Constantinople, and miraculously, it still survives. You can see it if you visit Istanbul today. But Constantine was the emperor who famously converted to Christianity, and as the new religion took hold in the empire, the writing was on the wall for pagan sanctuaries like Delphi. Finally, in the late fourth century CE, the anti-pagan emperor Theodosius I shut it down for good. After that, there wasn’t a lot of respect for ancient pagan structures, so even after the really valuable stuff was gone, the temples and other buildings were raided for building materials. Not only the stone, but also the metal clamps that held the buildings together. 

 And yet, not everything was lost. A few ancient treasures, like the bronze charioteer and the Sphinx of Naxos, survived, and they’re now on display in the Delphi Archaeological Museum. And even though most of the buildings have largely disappeared, the foundations and some other remnants are still there. Enough of the architecture survives that with a little imagination you can get some sense of what it must have been like to walk up the Sacred Way, past monuments from all over the Greek world, to the Temple of Apollo, then up to the stadium where the Pythian games were held, and finally up to the ancient theater, which offers a panoramic view of the whole site. The Greek National Tourist Organization has not sponsored this episode, so this is just my honest opinion: if you visit Greece and want to feel a connection with the classical Greek world, Delphi is one of the best places to do it.

 I’ve come to the end of this episode, and I’ve even gone on quite a bit longer than I intended, but there’s still so much I haven’t touched on. Like the fact that many other gods besides Apollo were honored at Delphi. Dionysus was especially important there, and he was even thought to be in charge during the winter months when Apollo was away. Athena also had an important sanctuary. I haven’t mentioned the Corycian Cave, just up the mountain from Delphi, which had its own religious significance. But I have to stop somewhere. If you want to dig deeper, I’ve included reading suggestions in the show notes and on my Substack page. As always, if you have comments, questions, or corrections, I’d love to hear from you at scott@epicgreekhistory.com or on Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.