The Delphic Oracle

Croesus asks a question no priest can guess

Croesus of Lydia does not trust reputation. He sends messengers to several oracles and orders each group, on the hundredth day after leaving Sardis, to ask what their king is doing at that instant. The test turns consultation into a contest: an oracle must identify an action chosen precisely because nobody elsewhere could know it.

At Delphi, the answer comes from the Pythia. The Ephorate of Antiquities of Phocis places her in an underground space below the temple cella, accessible only to priests. Above stood Apollo’s statue and the omphalos; the vestibule carried maxims including “Know thyself” and “Avoid excess.” The secure architectural outline does not recover every step of consultation, but it locates the voice beneath the god’s house.

The test

Croesus of Lydia did not take the oracle on trust. Herodotus says he sent Lydians out to the shrines with instructions to count the days from their leaving Sardis and, on the hundredth, to ask what Croesus son of Alyattes was doing at that moment, write the answer down and bring it back. What the other oracles said, Herodotus adds, nobody relates. At Delphi the Pythia began before the question was finished:

I know the number of the grains of sand and the extent of the sea, And understand the mute and hear the voiceless. The smell has come to my senses of a strong-shelled tortoise Boiling in a cauldron together with a lamb’s flesh, Under which is bronze and over which is bronze.

That was what Croesus was doing, and he had chosen it because he thought nobody could guess it.

The answer he acted on

Having tested them, Croesus sent to Delphi and to Abae with a real question: whether he should send an army against the Persians, and whether he should add an army of allies to his own. Herodotus records that the judgment given by both oracles was the same. If he sent an army against the Persians he would destroy a great empire. They advised him also to discover the mightiest of the Greeks and make them his friends.

The defence

Sardis fell, Croesus was taken, and Herodotus lets the oracle answer the charge. Croesus is wrong to complain, the god says. Loxias declared that if he led an army against the Persians he would destroy a great empire, and if he had wanted to plan well he ought to have sent again and asked whether the god meant his own empire or Cyrus’s. He did not understand what was spoken and he did not make further inquiry, and the fault is his. The answer then claims credit: Loxias wanted the evil lot of Sardis to fall in the lifetime of Croesus’s sons rather than his own, could not deflect the Fates, and got what he could out of them, which was a delay of three years. He also saved Croesus from burning. There had been an earlier response about a mule, and Croesus had not understood that one either: the mule was Cyrus, born of two parents not of the same people, the mother the better and the father the inferior.

Herodotus does not let the story prove that every Delphic answer was a riddle or that priests routinely manipulated clients. He preserves one consultation as a sequence of test, answer, decision and retrospective defence. Its consequence is visible in the question Croesus failed to ask. Beneath Apollo’s temple, the Pythia named a great empire; outside it, a king chose which empire she meant and marched until his own was gone.