Delphi

Delphi, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, was the most famous oracle of ancient Greece and the sanctuary of Apollo, who killed a great dragon there and made the place his own. Greeks from every city sent questions to the priestess who spoke for him, and many myths describe the answers she gave.

The Navel of the Earth

The Greeks considered Delphi the centre of the world. Strabo reports a myth told by Pindar: Zeus set free two eagles (some said crows), one flying from the west and the other from the east, and they met at Delphi; in Strabo’s day a navel-stone draped with fillets stood in the temple, with likenesses of the two birds on it (Strabo 9.3.6). Pindar himself pictures the Pythia seated “beside the golden eagles of Zeus” (Pythian 4.4). Pausanias saw the stone called the omphalos, or navel, made of white marble, and the Delphians told him it was the centre of all the earth (10.16.3).

Who Owned the Oracle

Apollo was not the first to hold the oracle. In the prologue of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the priestess gives the order of succession: first Earth (Gaea), the earliest prophet; then Themis, who took her mother’s seat; then the Titan Phoebe, who took it peacefully and gave it to Phoebus Apollo as a birthday gift. Apollo came from Delos, and Zeus inspired him with the gift of prophecy, so that he became the fourth prophet to sit on the seat. Loxias, as Apollo is also called, speaks for his father Zeus (Eumenides 1–19).

Pausanias records other traditions. In the earliest times, he says, the oracular seat belonged to Earth, who appointed the mountain nymph Daphnis as her prophetess (10.5.5), and he quotes an old verse in which Earth gives her oracle together with Pyrcon, the servant of Poseidon the Earth-shaker (10.5.6).

Apollo and the Dragon

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo tells how the young god looked for a place to build an oracle. At the spring of Telphusa he marked out foundations, but the nymph objected that horses and mules watering at her spring would disturb his temple, and she sent him to Crisa below the slopes of Parnassus. There Apollo laid out the foundations, and Trophonius and Agamedes set the first stone footing (Hymn 3.247–299).

Near the temple was a spring guarded by a huge she-dragon that had harmed men and their flocks. Apollo killed her with his bow, and left her to rot in the sun; because of this the place was called Pytho and the god Pythian (Hymn 3.300–374). Later writers call the creature Python. Callimachus derives the cry “hie Paieon” from this fight: as Apollo went down to Pytho a dread snake met him, he shot arrow after arrow, and the Delphians cried “Hie, hie, Paieon, shoot an arrow!” (Hymn 2.97–104); in his Hymn to Delos the still unborn Apollo says that the great serpent is not yet dead but “wreathes snowy Parnassus with his nine coils” (Hymn 4.90–93). Apollonius has Orpheus sing how Apollo, still young and beardless, slew the monster Delphyne with his bow beneath the rocky ridge of Parnassus (Argonautica 2.705–707). Hyginus makes Python a son of Earth who gave oracles on Parnassus before Apollo and pursued the pregnant Leto; four days after his birth Apollo killed him with his arrows, put his bones in the tripod and founded funeral games for him, the Pythian Games (Fabulae 140). Ovid likewise says Apollo founded the Pythian Games to keep the memory of the killing alive (Metamorphoses 1.438–451). Pausanias adds that some poets said the dragon was posted by Earth to guard the oracle, and that others held that the victim was a violent man, the son of Crius, who plundered the sanctuary (10.6.6).

The hymn then tells how Apollo, in the shape of a dolphin, led a ship of Cretans to Crisa and made them his priests at Pytho.

The Pythia

The priestess who spoke for Apollo was called the Pythia. Pausanias reports that the most common view named Phemonoe as the first prophetess of Apollo, and that she was the first to sing in hexameter verse; he had also heard that shepherds who came upon the spot were inspired by a vapour and prophesied (10.5.7). Pausanias records that the Seven Sages came to Delphi and dedicated to Apollo the maxims “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess” (10.24.1).

Famous Consultations

• Oedipus. Taunted that he was not the son of his supposed parents, Oedipus went to Delphi to ask who his parents were. The god told him not to return to his native land, because he would kill his father and lie with his mother. He left Corinth, and on the road through Phocis he killed Laius (Apollodorus 3.5.7).
• Orestes. After killing his mother Clytemnestra, Orestes was pursued by the Erinyes and took refuge in Apollo’s inner shrine at Delphi. The Pythia finds him there as a suppliant at the navel-stone, sword in hand, with the Erinyes asleep around him, and Apollo promises to protect him and sends him to Athens for judgment (Aeschylus, Eumenides 34–93).
• Aegeus. The childless king of Athens consulted the oracle about having children and received the riddling answer that he should not loosen the wineskin’s mouth until he reached Athens, which led to the birth of Theseus (Apollodorus 3.15.6–7).

The Pythian Games

Pausanias says that the oldest contest at Delphi, in the tradition, was the singing of a hymn to the god, first won by Chrysothemis of Crete (10.7.2). The games were reorganised in the third year of the forty-eighth Olympiad, when the Amphictyons added contests in flute-playing and singing to the flute and, for the first time, prizes for athletes, in the same events as at Olympia except the four-horse chariot (10.7.4–5). Pausanias dates this by the Olympiads, which were already being counted: the Pythian Games were a separate festival of Apollo, not a forerunner of the Olympic Games. The mythical account, in Hyginus and Ovid, makes them funeral games or memorial games for the slain Python (see above).

See Also: Apollo, Gaea, Themis, Python, Zeus, Oedipus, Orestes, Aegeus