Ancient Oracles: Delphi, Dodona, and the Art of Prophecy
She sat above a crack in the earth, on a three-legged bronze stool — the sacred tripod — in a small chamber deep within the innermost sanctuary of the temple. She had fasted. She had bathed in the waters of the Castalia spring. She had chewed laurel leaves. She breathed the vapors that rose from the fissure below her. Her eyes may have rolled back. She may have convulsed. When she spoke, a priest stood beside her, ready to write down what she said — because what she said, in a voice that was not quite her own, was the word of the god. She was the Pythia — the Oracle of Delphi — and for nearly a thousand years, from approximately the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE, she was the most consulted, most trusted, and most politically significant prophetic voice in the Western world. Kings and generals, city-states and private citizens, traveled from across the Mediterranean — from Greece, from Asia Minor, from Egypt, from Rome — to Delphi, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, to hear w...