Delphi (5 page)

The importance of divination does not mean, however, that the oracular system was never mocked in Greek culture. The consultation of oracles was lampooned in Greek comedy: in Aristophanes'
Knights
and
Birds
, for example, oracle sellers are figures of fun. The strength of their connection with the divine too could be questioned. Euripides, in a fragment of an otherwise lost play (Frag. 973N), wrote “the best seer is the one who guessed right.” Sometimes too their usefulness could be questioned. Xenophon, in the fourth century
BC
, argued that divination became useful only when human capacity ended.
⁵¹
We shall see in the coming chapters instances wherein even the oracle of Apollo at Delphi was said to have been bribed and to have become biased, or was treated with circumspection by even its most loyal consultants. But all these instances represent an aberration from the norm, an aberration that did not in the long term shake belief in the system as a whole, a system that continued to speak of divination as a useful and real connection to the gods.

It is difficult for us to understand this kind of mindset today. In the 1930s, the anthropologist Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard tried to understand the Greeks' acceptance of oracles by observing the Azande community in Central Africa, who used a form of poison-chicken oracle to resolve disputes and make difficult community, as well as individual, decisions. His research showed that within the framework of a particular culture and life in which everyone agreed that the poison-chicken oracle was a proper and respected way to choose a solution, it was as good a means as any to help run a community.
⁵²
But where does this leave us with the Pythia? On the one hand, we have to imagine ourselves into a society in which oracular connection with the divine was a commonly accepted cultural activity into a world that was believed to be controlled by the gods. Those gods could be for you or against you, and so it made sense to make every effort not only to appease them with offerings, but to use a variety of methods of divination to find out what they had in mind for the future. At the same time, the gathering of tradition about the power and importance of an oracle like the Pythia at Delphi, coupled with the prolonged rituals encountered before the consultation, would have helped to ensure belief in the process and its outcome. This does not mean people had to
know
exactly how the Pythia connected with the god: even Plutarch, himself (as indicated above) a priest at Delphi in the first century
AD
, was content to relate the argument and debate among his friends, who each had their own ideas about how the inspiration took place and why it happened less frequently in their time. Key is that—however it happened—there was a belief in a connection between the divine and human world through the Pythia.

At the same time, a number of other factors must be taken into consideration to understand how the Pythia retained her reputation for over one thousand years. The first is the kind of information sought from the Pythia. The questioning of the Pythia in the sixth century
BC
by King Croesus of Lydia in Asia Minor is often thought, because it is so well known, to be typical of how consultants put their questions to the oracle. But one of the things Herodotus, our major source for this encounter, is likely indicating is that Croesus's encounter with Delphi
shows how little this “non-Greek” understood about Greek culture. As we shall see in later chapters, Croesus's direct question to oracles all around the Mediterranean in order to find out which was the “best” (the “what am I doing at this moment?” question) was, in fact, a very unusual type of question to ask an oracle. Not because it was a test of present knowledge, but because it involved such a direct request for information. Very rarely, it seems, did consultants ask the oracle direct questions about the future (so Croesus's second question about whether he would win the war against King Cyrus of Persia was again an odd form of question).
⁵³
Instead, most questions put to the oracle seem to have been in the form of “would it be better and more profitable for me to do X or Y?” or else, “to which god shall I pray before I do X?”
⁵⁴
This is to say, consultants presented problems to the Pythia in the form of options, or rather sought guidance for how their goals might come about, rather than asking directly what would happen in the future.

Such a process, focused around guidance rather than revelation, underlines the kind of occasions on which people chose to consult the oracle at Delphi, particularly instances in which individuals, or a community, were having trouble reaching a consensus over which of a particular set of potential actions to take. It is this usefulness of an oracle at moments of community indecision that has been, as we shall explore in the following chapters, thought critical in turning the Delphic oracle into such a well-known and important institution in the Greek world in the late eighth and seventh centuries
BC
, the period that bore witness to the tectonic forces of community creation that laid the bedrock for the landscape of the classical world.

Second to be considered is the question of the Pythia's response. Scholars have long remarked on the perfect hexameter verse responses reported in the literary sources as coming straight from the Pythia. There has been substantial doubt cast over her ability to utter directly such poetry, and instead scholars have pointed the finger at her priests as the ones who constructed the responses. At the same time, scholars have pointed to Delphi as a developing “information center,” since it was one of the few places in the ancient world people were going to from all over on
a regular basis, and bringing with them information about their homelands. As a result, a picture has formed of priests who were “plugged in” to the information “hub” at Delphi and thus able to give better-informed guesses about which options were better and outcomes more likely (and have more ability to put those responses into verse). I have some sympathy with elements of this picture: no doubt Delphi was, especially in the sixth through fourth centuries
BC
, something of an information center. We can only imagine the exchange of information going on during the nine days of the year that consultants from all over the Greek world could turn up (not to mention the days either side they had to wait, or at the Pythian games, or while constructing monuments or while visiting the sanctuary to see it in all its splendor), and the degree to which this information fed back into the consultation system. But at the same time, this can only at best explain the success of Delphi once it had become a success. When Delphi's oracle first began to be consulted, there was precious little more information going to Delphi than elsewhere.

More fundamental in understanding the Pythia's success from the outset is the in-built ambiguity of her responses, in part as a direct result of the nature of the questions asked. As we saw above, questions normally came in the form of “is it better and more profitable that I do X or Y” or “which gods should I pray to before I do X.” As a result, if the Pythia replied “do X” or “it is better and more profitable to do X,” and X proved disastrous, people would still never know how bad option Y might have been in comparison. As well, even if the oracle replied telling you to pray to a particular god, this indicated only a prerequisite action to ensure a chance of success; it did not guarantee a good result: praying to a god came with the understanding that there was no guarantee the god would listen in return. The comparative form of the question, and the unequal nature of the relationship between human and divine, ensured that it was impossible for the oracle to be categorically wrong in its response.

Sometimes that ambiguity seems to have been taken a step further in the form of a more complex answer, which in turn demanded a process of further interpretation from the consultant. King Croesus's inappropriate question about waging war, for example, received a very ambiguous
Delphic answer: “Croesus, having crossed the river Halys, will destroy a great empire.” The response doesn't make clear whether it will be Croesus's empire or that of his enemies. In Herodotus's narrative, Croesus took it to mean his enemies', but it turned out to be his own (Croesus lost his kingdom as a result of losing the battle). Once again, the oracle, thanks to the ambiguity of the response could not be argued to have been wrong: it was Croesus who had chosen to misinterpret the Pythia's response.
⁵⁵

Plutarch, in the first century
AD
, commented on this well-known ambiguity in oracular responses of the past, noting that, in his day, responses tended to be more direct, but that in olden times, ambiguous replies were necessary because they protected the Pythia from the powerful people who came to consult her: “Apollo, though not prepared to conceal the truth, manifests it in roundabout ways: by clothing it in poetic form he rids it of what is harsh or offensive, as one does with brilliant light by reflecting it and thus splitting it into several rays.”
⁵⁶
Not for nothing was the god Apollo often known as Apollo Loxias, Apollo “the ambiguous one.”

Moreover, and crucially, an ambiguous response demanded further debate and deliberation from the consultant and his city. What often began as an issue the community could not decide on, was referred to the Delphic oracle for further enlightenment, and was thus often sent back to the community for continued deliberation about the problem, but with the fresh information/indication and momentum toward making a decision in the form of the god's response. As classicist Sarah I. Johnston puts it, consulting the oracle at Delphi “extends [consultants'] agency; it puts new reins in their hands.”
⁵⁷
Consulting the Pythia thus did not always provide a quick answer to a straightforward question, but rather paved the path for a process of deliberation that allowed the community to come to its own decision.
⁵⁸
Indeed the very process of deciding to consult Delphi, sending representatives to ask the question, waiting for one of the rare consultation days and potentially more than one if it was a very busy time, and then returning with a response that became part of a further debate meant a decision to consult Delphi substantially slowed down the decision process and gave the community much longer to mull over the issue.

All this means that we need to understand the Pythia at Delphi not as providing a “fortune-telling service,” but rather as a “sense-making mechanism” for the individuals, cities, and communities of ancient Greece. Or as Heraclitus said in the quote that opens this chapter, “the oracle neither conceals, nor reveals, but indicates.” Delphi was, as one businessman once remarked to me, something of an ancient management consultant. It was an adviser, albeit one with powerful authority.
⁵⁹
In a world that never seriously doubted the power and omnipresence of the gods, a complex and widespread system for consultation on what the gods had in store made perfect sense. Within that network of different levels and types of consultation, the Pythian priestess at Delphi had emerged, by the end of seventh century
BC
, preeminent, and would continue to be consulted right through until the fourth century
AD
. What a consultation at Delphi offered was a chance to air a difficult decision in fresh light, receive extra (divine-inspired) information and direction, which, while itself necessitating further discussion, brought with it powerful authority and thus a significant push toward consensus in regard to community decisions, and contentment that one was following the will of the gods in individual decisions. At the same time, the processes by which the Pythia was consulted—the form of the questions and the form of her responses—insulated the oracle at Delphi so that even Croesus's exasperated attempts to show the oracle as having lied to him failed to dent its reputation. It gave Delphi a Teflon coating, a resistance to failure that, while challenged on particular occasions, would ensure that the oracle survived for over a millennium.

But, how, when, and why did it all begin? Just how did the city and sanctuary of Delphi, with its oracle at its center, emerge to such preeminence by the end of the seventh century
BC
? What can we know about the earliest development of this institution and its surrounding community that would come to be known as the center of the ancient world, and how did the ancients themselves seek to explain the importance and origins of Delphi and its oracle? These questions are the focus of the next two chapters.

“The names have strength, the shadows have authority.”

—George Daux, one of the early Delphic scholars
(quoted in Mulliez 2007, p. 156)

2

BEGINNINGS

How, when, why did it all begin?

At some time between the late seventh and mid-sixth century
BC
, the earliest origins of Delphi were explained in the form of the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo
. This hymn, which forms part of a larger collection of hymns—attributed at different times to the authorship of Homer, Hesiod, Cynatheus of Chios and, as a result normally left anonymous—praising the different Olympian gods, charts Apollo's life from his birth on the island of Delos through to his search for a suitable place to set up his oracle:

And thence you went speeding swiftly to the mountain ridge, and came to Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus, a foothill turned towards the west: a cliff hangs over it from above, and a hollow, rugged glade runs under. There the lord Pheobus Apollo resolved to make his lovely temple, and thus he said “In this place I am minded to build a glorious temple to be an oracle for men, and here they will always bring perfect offerings, both they who dwell in rich Peloponnesus and the men of Europe and from all the wave-washed
isles, coming to question me. And I will deliver to them all counsel that cannot fail, answering them in my rich temple.”
¹