Python

The dragon by the spring

The oldest surviving telling comes from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, one of a set of early Greek poems in praise of a god. In it, the god Apollo comes to Crisa, below Mount Parnassus, and builds his new temple there.

Near the temple, beside a spring, lives a female dragon. She is a destructive creature who harms people and their flocks. The poem gives her no parents. She is also a foster-mother. The goddess Hera has given her a child to raise: Typhaon, the dangerous child Hera produces without the god Zeus, after she challenges him.

Apollo kills the dragon with an arrow. She falls beside the spring. Apollo stands over her and says that the earth will make her rot where she lies. The hymn turns that death into a name. The place is called Pytho, it says, because the sun makes the dragon rot there. Apollo takes the title Pythian for the same reason.

What the hymn leaves out

The poem never calls the dragon Python. It also does not say that she guards an older oracle, a place where a god answers questions. The hymn is concerned with Apollo settling in this land. The spring, the dead body and the story of the name Pytho all belong to his arrival.

Apollodorus, an ancient writer whose Library retells the Greek myths, tells a shorter story with a different shape. When Apollo arrives at Delphi, the goddess Themis is already giving oracles there. A serpent called Python guards the oracle and keeps Apollo away from the chasm. Apollo kills Python and takes the oracle for himself. He then founds the Pythian Games, a festival at Delphi.

Two accounts side by side

In Apollodorus, the grammar of the text makes Python male, and he has a set duty. He guards a place of prophecy that already exists. The dragon of the hymn lives beside a holy place that has yet to be built. The presence of Themis also changes what Apollo gains. In the hymn, he sets up his own temple and then looks for priests to serve it. In Apollodorus, he takes over an oracle that already speaks.

The two sources agree on the main events. Apollo reaches Delphi, kills a serpent and becomes Pythian. They differ on details that cannot be joined without losing what each text says. The earliest account gives an unnamed she-dragon and draws the title from her rotting body. Apollodorus adds the name Python, the older oracle and the Pythian Games. The familiar figure of Python comes from the later account. The hymn keeps a dragon who does not yet have that name.

Which spring the hymn means

The hymn places the dragon by a spring near Apollo’s temple at Delphi, but it does not call that water Castalia. It also tells a separate story about another spring, Telphousa. The nymph of that spring, a female spirit of the water, turns Apollo away before he chooses Delphi. Later he covers her water with stones. Neither passage allows every spring in the poem to be treated as one.

Castalia has its own ancient record, below the cliffs called the Phaedriades. The playwright Euripides makes it the water in which the servants of Apollo’s temple wash before they enter the sanctuary, the holy ground of the god. The travel writer Pausanias discusses its water and its disputed name. The dragon’s unnamed spring and the Castalian spring lie in the same area of Delphi. The hymn does not say they are the same. Their link is one of place, and the text gives no second name for either.

The temple that stands today

The death of the serpent explains how Apollo came to hold Delphi. It does not date the ruins now on the site. Three temples were built one after another in the historical sanctuary. An earthquake destroyed the second. The columns standing today belong to the third, completed in 334 to 333 BC by the architects Spintharus, Xenodorus and Agathon.

Inside that later building, the Pythia, the priestess of the oracle, gave her answers in an underground room beneath the cella, the temple’s inner chamber. So the temple kept the role that Apollodorus places behind Python’s guard. But it was built many centuries after the time the texts give for Apollo’s arrival. Python belongs to the story of how the god took the sanctuary. The columns belong to its later history, which can be measured and dated.