Dodona, the speaking oak of Zeus in Epirus

Among the mountains of Epirus, in a valley at the foot of Mount Tomaros, stood the sanctuary that Herodotus considered the oldest oracle in Greece. At Dodona it was not a prophetess seated on a tripod who spoke, but a tree: an oak sacred to Zeus, whose leaves and rustling were interpreted as signs of the divine will. Alongside Zeus was worshipped Dione, regarded in this place as his consort.

The oak in the Homeric poems

Dodona already appears in the Iliad. In the sixteenth book Achilles, before sending Patroclus into battle, calls on Zeus “of Dodona, Pelasgian”, lord of wintry Dodona, and recalls his interpreters, the Selloi, who sleep on the ground and have unwashed feet. These austere, almost primitive features already struck ancient commentators, who saw in them the sign of a very archaic cult.

In the Odyssey, by contrast, Odysseus tells in one of his invented stories that he went to Dodona to hear the will of Zeus from the oak with its lofty foliage. The poet takes for granted that his audience knows the oracular tree and its fame, a sign that the sanctuary was already known far beyond Epirus.

The doves and the priestesses

In Herodotus' time the oracular service was entrusted to women. The historian says he spoke with three priestesses of Dodona, Promeneia, Timarete and Nicandra, who told him a legendary origin for the sanctuary: two black doves had flown from Egyptian Thebes, one to Libya and the other to Dodona, where, perching on an oak, it commanded in a human voice that an oracle of Zeus be founded there.

Herodotus, with his usual critical spirit, also reports the version of the Egyptian priests, according to which two women of the temple had been carried off by Phoenicians and sold in Libya and in Greece. The doves would then be a way of describing foreign women whose language could not be understood. Fittingly, the priestesses of Dodona were called peleiades, that is, “doves”.

Questions scratched on lead

The most vivid testimony of the oracle comes from excavation. Thousands of small lead tablets have been found at Dodona, on which worshippers scratched their questions, often in unsteady handwriting and in the most varied dialects. People ask whether they should marry, whether a child is truly their own, whether it is worth undertaking a sea voyage or changing trade. Some tablets instead record questions put by whole communities.

These tablets reveal an oracle visited above all by ordinary people, concerned with daily life rather than high politics. Of the answers, probably brief and given orally, very little has come down to us: only in rare cases does a tablet also preserve a hint of the reply. The very ordinariness of the questions makes these documents precious to historians, who find in them fears and hopes otherwise unknown.

The bronzes of Dodona and the end of the sanctuary

Also famous were the bronze vessels that resounded for a long time when struck. A gift from the Corcyraeans showed a boy striking a bronze vessel with a whip, and the “bronze of Dodona” became proverbial for people who never stop talking. In the time of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, the sanctuary was enlarged with a monumental theatre. The Aetolians sacked it in 219 BC and the Romans devastated it in 167 BC.

Dodona survived for centuries more, but without its former splendour. Today the restored theatre and the foundations of the temples allow us to imagine the precinct of the oak, while the lead tablets, kept largely in the Archaeological Museum of Ioannina, give back the voices of those who, more than two thousand years ago, entrusted their worries to a tree.