The Delphic Oracle

Where the Pythia spoke

The oracle at Delphi was a shrine of the god Apollo, where people brought questions for the god to answer. The answers came from a priestess called the Pythia. She spoke from an underground space below the cella, the inner room, of the temple. Only priests could enter it. Above stood Apollo’s statue and the sacred stone called the omphalos. The entrance hall carried sayings, including “Know thyself” and “Avoid excess.” This outline of the building is secure. It does not recover every step of a consultation, but it places the voice beneath the god’s house.

Croesus tests the oracles

The historian Herodotus gives the fullest account of the oracle in use. Croesus, king of Lydia, did not take the oracles on trust. He sent Lydians out to several shrines. They were to count the days from leaving Sardis. On the hundredth day they were to ask what Croesus son of Alyattes was doing at that moment, write the answer down and bring it back. The test turned a consultation into a contest. An oracle had to name an action chosen precisely because nobody elsewhere could know it.

Herodotus adds that nobody relates what the other oracles said. 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. He had chosen it because he thought nobody could guess it.

The answer and the fall

Having tested them, Croesus sent to Delphi and to the oracle at Abae with a real question. Should he send an army against the Persians? And should he add an army of allies to his own? Herodotus records that both oracles gave the same judgment. If he sent an army against the Persians, he would destroy a great empire. They also advised him to find the mightiest of the Greeks and make them his friends.

Sardis fell and Croesus was taken. He complained, and Herodotus lets the oracle answer the charge. Croesus is wrong to complain, the god says. Loxias, as Apollo is called here, had declared that if Croesus led an army against the Persians he would destroy a great empire. If Croesus had wanted to plan well, he should have sent again. He should have asked whether the god meant his own empire or that of Cyrus, the Persian king. He did not understand what was said, and he did not ask again, so the fault is his.

Three years and a mule

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. He could not turn aside the Fates, the powers that decide what must happen. So he 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 answer 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 use the story to prove that every answer from Delphi was a riddle, or that priests routinely tricked the people who asked. He keeps one consultation as a sequence: a test, an answer, a decision and a defence after the event. Its result shows 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.