Delphi and the Pythia: how Apollo's oracle spoke
A history of the Delphic oracle and the Pythia: the myth of Python, the omphalos, the tripod, the days of consultation and what ancient sources say.
At the foot of the Phaedriades, the sheer cliffs of Mount Parnassus, stood the most frequently consulted sanctuary of the Greek world. For more than a thousand years cities, kings and private citizens climbed to Delphi to question Apollo through his priestess, the Pythia. Ancient sources, from Herodotus to Plutarch, allow us to reconstruct with fair precision who this woman was, where she sat and how consultations took place, while leaving open some questions that still divide scholars today.
From the myth of Python to the temple of Apollo
According to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the god came to Delphi and killed with his arrows a monstrous serpent that plagued the region; the name Pytho was said to derive from the Greek verb meaning “to rot”, referring to the monster's body. Aeschylus, in the prologue of the Eumenides, offers a different genealogy: before Apollo the oracle belonged to Gaia, then to Themis and finally to Phoebe, who gave it to her grandson. These stories may reflect the memory of older cults, but they remain mythical traditions, not chronicles.
At the centre of the sanctuary stood the omphalos, the stone that marked the navel of the world. The myth tells that Zeus released two eagles from opposite ends of the earth and that they met precisely above Delphi. The temple whose ruins can be seen today is the one rebuilt in the fourth century BC after the earthquake of 373 BC; an earlier building had burned in 548 BC and had been rebuilt with the help of the Athenian family of the Alcmaeonids.
Who the Pythia was
The Pythia was a woman of Delphi, chosen from the local population and bound to chastity during her service. Diodorus Siculus reports that originally young virgins were chosen, but that after one of them was abducted it was decided that the prophetess should be over fifty, while still wearing a girl's clothing. Plutarch, who served as a priest at Delphi between the first and second centuries AD, recalls that in periods of heavy demand two Pythias served, with a third held in reserve.
Alongside her worked the priests and the so-called prophets, who received the questions and gave shape to the replies. Some of the oracles handed down to us are in hexameters, but Plutarch, in his dialogue on the oracles of the Pythia, observes that in his day answers were given mostly in prose, and discusses at length the reasons for this change.
The day of consultation
Originally, according to Plutarch, the oracle spoke only once a year, on the seventh day of the month of Bysios, held to be Apollo's birthday. Later the sessions became monthly, still on the seventh day, and were suspended in the winter months, when the god was believed to be absent. Those consulting paid a fee, offered a sacred cake called pelanos and sacrificed an animal. Some cities and benefactors enjoyed promanteia, the right of precedence in the queue of petitioners.
The Pythia sat on a tripod in the adyton, the innermost part of the temple, closed to most visitors. The sources associate her with the laurel sacred to Apollo and with the Castalian spring, where people purified themselves before entering. Strabo speaks of a breath, a pneuma, rising from a cleft in the ground and inspiring the prophetess. Whether this exhalation ever existed, and what its nature was, is still debated among geologists and archaeologists.
Delphi's prestige did not depend only on the accuracy of its answers, often deliberately ambiguous, but on its role as a neutral, Panhellenic place. There the founding of colonies was decided, explanations for plagues and famines were sought, and legitimacy was requested for laws and wars. The figure of the Pythia, an ordinary woman turned into the voice of the god, remains one of the most enduring images of antiquity.