The silence of the oracles: Plutarch and the end of ancient prophecy

Between the first century BC and the fourth century AD many of the great Greek oracles slowly faded. The phenomenon did not escape the ancients, who tried to explain it with religious, philosophical and historical arguments. Their reflections allow us to follow the decline of an institution a thousand years old, which did not vanish suddenly but went through phases of crisis, partial revival and finally definitive closure.

Cicero's questions

Cicero, in On Divination, written around 44 BC, already wondered why Delphic oracles were no longer uttered as in former times. The character of his brother Quintus argued that the force of the earth that inspired the Pythia might have been exhausted over time, as happens to rivers that dry up. Cicero replied with irony, finding that explanation unconvincing.

More than a century later, Juvenal could write in a satire that the oracles of Delphi were silent. The line should not be taken literally, because the sanctuary continued to function, but it records a widespread perception of decline. In the Roman world, moreover, other forms of divination, from astrology to auspices, now attracted the attention of elites and rulers.

Plutarch's dialogue

The fullest reflection is found in Plutarch's dialogue On the Obsolescence of Oracles, composed around AD 100. One speaker observes that Boeotia, once full of prophetic shrines, now keeps only one, that of Trophonius at Lebadea. At Delphi, where two Pythias once served with a third in reserve, one is now enough, and the whole of Greece, depopulated, could not supply more than three thousand hoplites.

The explanations offered are varied: the fall in population, the failing of the inspiring breath, the role of daemons, beings intermediate between gods and humans who, according to some speakers, presided over oracles and could depart or die. Plutarch, a priest of Apollo, does not share all these views, but sets them out freely.

The death of great Pan

The same dialogue contains the most famous story connected with this theme. In the reign of Tiberius, an Egyptian pilot named Thamus, sailing near the Echinades islands, supposedly heard a mysterious voice ordering him to announce, on reaching Palodes, that great Pan was dead. When he cried it out, a lament of many voices rose from the shore.

Christian writers, beginning with Eusebius, read the episode as the sign of the end of the old gods at the time of Christ. Plutarch, of course, did not give it this meaning, and presented it as a story reported by a witness, without claiming to explain it. In the dialogue, the episode serves rather to support the idea that daemons too were mortal.

From Julian to Theodosius

In the fourth century the emperor Julian tried to restore the traditional cults. Byzantine sources, whose reliability is debated, attribute to his physician Oribasius a last reply of the Pythia, announcing the fall of the splendid dwelling and the silence of the spring. Many scholars consider this text a later composition, but its melancholy has contributed to its fame.

The end came with the laws of Theodosius I, which in 391 and 392 banned sacrifices and attendance at temples. The oracular sanctuaries, deprived of their cult, were abandoned or transformed. The silence of the oracles, which Plutarch had observed with a philosopher's curiosity, thus became final, and the sanctuaries passed into the care of travellers and, much later, of archaeologists.