Claros, the oracle of Clarian Apollo: Manto, Mopsus and Germanicus

On the coast of Ionia, not far from ancient Colophon and the modern Turkish city of Izmir, the sanctuary of Clarian Apollo was for centuries one of the major prophetic centres of Asia Minor. In the Roman period its fame rivalled that of Delphi, and the Greek cities of the East regularly sent official delegations there. Unlike at Delphi, however, at Claros the god did not speak through a woman, but through a priest who went down beneath the earth.

Manto and the contest of seers

Tradition links the founding of the sanctuary to Manto, daughter of the Theban seer Tiresias. After the capture of Thebes by the Epigoni, Manto is said to have been sent to Apollo as part of the spoils and from there to have reached Ionia, where she bore Mopsus, himself a great seer. Pausanias reports a version of this story in his book on Achaea, linking it to the very origins of the city of Colophon and to the first Greek settlers of the region.

Strabo preserves an even more famous tale. After the Trojan War, the seer Calchas came to Claros and challenged Mopsus to a contest of divination. According to one version, Calchas asked how many figs a tree bore, and Mopsus guessed the exact number; defeated, Calchas died of grief. The story, already attributed to a Hesiodic poem, expresses the superiority acknowledged to the oracle of Claros.

The cave and the spring

Tacitus, in the Annals, gives the most precise description of a consultation. In AD 18 Germanicus, nephew and adopted son of Tiberius, stopped at Claros during his journey to the East. The historian explains that it was not a woman who prophesied there, as at Delphi, but a priest chosen from certain families, mostly from Miletus. He asked only the number and names of those consulting, then went down into a cave and drank the water of a secret spring.

According to Tacitus, that priest, often ignorant of letters and of metre, replied in verse to the thoughts each person had in mind. To Germanicus he foretold, in ambiguous form as was the custom of oracles, an early death. Germanicus did indeed die in Syria the following year. French excavations in the twentieth century confirmed the existence of underground corridors and rooms beneath the temple, covered by stone vaults.

Choirs and delegations

The inscriptions found at Claros reveal a less familiar side of the oracle. Cities of Asia Minor, of the islands and even of distant regions sent official delegations, often accompanied by choirs of boys who sang hymns to Apollo. Their names, carved on the columns and steps of the sanctuary, allow us to follow year by year the network of relations that made Claros an international religious centre.

In the second century AD, during the severe epidemic that struck the empire under Marcus Aurelius, several cities turned to Claros and had the replies they received inscribed, prescribing sacrifices and statues of Apollo to be set at their gates. The inscriptions do not show that the remedies worked: they document rather the trust that communities placed in the god.

Claros shows that ancient divination was not declining everywhere in the early imperial age. While Plutarch lamented the silence of so many Greek oracles, in Ionia the sanctuary of Clarian Apollo enjoyed a season of great prestige, lasting into late antiquity and documented above all by its stones rather than by the accounts of historians.