Delphi: The Oracle, the Pythia and the Navel of the World

The quick answer

What the ancient writers describe

No ancient author describes a consultation from start to finish. What we have are pieces, written over several centuries, and they fit together surprisingly well. The geographer Strabo, writing around the turn of the era, describes the seat of the oracle as "a cave that is hollowed out deep down in the earth, with a rather narrow mouth." Over the mouth stands a high tripod, and from the cave rises "breath that inspires a divine frenzy." The priestess receives the breath and speaks.

Diodorus Siculus, in the first century BCE, tells how the place was found. Goats grazing near a chasm began leaping about and making strange sounds; the goatherd went to look and had the same experience. So many people then leapt into the chasm in their frenzy and disappeared that the locals appointed a single prophetess and built her a seat with three supports, "and hence was called a tripod." In early times, Diodorus says, young virgins gave the oracles. After a Thessalian named Echecrates abducted one of them, the rule changed: a woman of fifty would speak, dressed in the costume of a virgin.

Pausanias, the travel writer who toured Greece in the second century CE, adds the water. The spring Kassotis, he writes, "sinks under the ground, and inspires the women in the shrine of the god." According to Greece's Ministry of Culture, the room where the Pythia spoke lay beneath the main hall of the temple, and only priests could enter it. Consultations, ancient sources say, were held on the seventh day of each month, except during the three winter months. One of those priests was Plutarch, the philosopher and biographer, who served the sanctuary from around 95 CE and wrote several essays about the oracle from the inside.

The navel of the world

Strabo also records why Delphi was called the center of the world. Zeus set two eagles free, "one coming from the west and the other from the east," and they met at Delphi. "People called it the navel of the earth." The navel was a physical object, too: Greece's Ministry of Culture places the omphalos stone inside the temple, beside the statue of the god.

Apollo was not the first owner. In Aeschylus's Eumenides, the Pythia opens the play by giving "the place of highest honor among the gods to the first prophet, Earth." The Homeric Hymn to Apollo tells how the god took the place by force: he came "to Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus," laid out his foundations, and with his bow killed "the bloated, great she-dragon" by the spring. Because the monster rotted there in the sun, the hymn says, "the place is now called Pytho," and Apollo "Pythian," the root of the priestess's title. In the same hymn Apollo takes the shape of a dolphin, leaps onto a Cretan ship and makes its crew his first priests, who are to pray to him as "Apollo Delphinius." Whether the name Delphi really comes from the Greek word for dolphin, the hymn does not decide. It simply ties the two together.

Croesus and the myth of the riddling oracle

The story everyone knows comes from Herodotus. King Croesus of Lydia wanted to know which oracle he could trust, so he set a test. His messengers were to ask every oracle, on the hundredth day after leaving Sardis, what he was doing at that moment. He had cut up a tortoise and a lamb and boiled them together in a bronze cauldron. Only Delphi got it right. So Croesus asked Delphi about a war on Persia, and the answer came back that if he marched against the Persians "he should destroy a great empire." He marched, and the empire that fell was his own.

That single episode created the modern idea of the "Delphic," deliberately double-edged answer. The historian of religion Joseph Fontenrose sorted every recorded response attributed to the oracle into historical, quasi-historical, legendary and fictional ones in his 1978 study for the University of California Press. His conclusion runs against the popular picture: the Pythia gave clear, coherent answers directly to the people who asked. The riddles Delphi is famous for are, in his reading, mostly later embellishment. Herodotus himself wrote about a century after Croesus fell.

The fault lines: an American team reopens the case

Plutarch is the witness everyone cites. In his essay on the decline of the oracles he writes that the room where consultants wait is sometimes, though not often, "filled with such a fragrant odor and scent, that no perfumes in the world can exceed it," and that it seems to rise from the sanctuary. In the same text he tells of a Pythia forced to prophesy against bad omens. She "went down into the hole against her will," her voice was hoarse, she ran "with dreadful screeches towards the door," and "she lived but few days after."

The French excavators who cleared the site in the 1890s found no chasm. Adolphe Paul Oppé, an English classicist who had worked with them, called the gas accounts "pure unmitigated fantasy." In 1950 the French archaeologist Pierre Amandry added that such gases could only come from volcanic activity, and Delphi has none. For half a century the question looked closed.

It was reopened from an unexpected direction. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, a geologist at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, had assessed a possible nuclear plant site on the Gulf of Corinth for the Greek government in 1981, about 40 km south of Delphi, and kept running into the region's faults. In 1995 he met the archaeologist John Hale of the University of Louisville at a Roman villa dig in Portugal. With the Florida State geochemist Jeffrey Chanton and the Kentucky toxicologist Henry Spiller, they built the case, and in August 2001 the journal Geology published it. Two faults cross beneath the temple: the east-west Delphi fault and the north-south Kerna fault. The limestone below holds hydrocarbon layers. Chanton found methane and ethane in travertine and spring water, and ethylene in the water as well. Ethylene was once used as an anesthetic and smells sweet, like Plutarch's perfume.

In 2006 a team led by Giuseppe Etiope of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology answered in the same journal. "We excluded ethylene as a candidate because it is impossible to have in nature ethylene concentrations so high," Etiope said. His group found methane in the springs and proposed that a stronger past release of methane, with some carbon dioxide, starved the poorly ventilated chamber of oxygen. De Boer replied that oxygen deprivation would smell foul, not sweet, and that the ancient writers reported no stream of deaths: the Pythias "seem to have lived a long and healthy life." The question is not settled.

Three temples, one earthquake, one great dig

Legend counts four temples before history begins: one of laurel branches, one of wax and feathers, one of bronze, and finally one of stone. Greece's Ministry of Culture treats only the stone one as real; it was destroyed around the middle of the sixth century BCE. Its successor was paid for by Greek cities under the supervision of the Athenian Alcmeonid family, finished in 510 BCE, and stood until the earthquake of 373 BCE.

The rebuilding took decades. Work stopped in 356 BCE when war came to the sanctuary, resumed around 343/342, and the temple was finished in 334/333 BCE, with its pediment sculptures done in 327. The architects were Spintharus, Xenodorus and Agathon. The emperor Domitian restored it in 84 CE, a fire damaged it in the third century, and Julian partly restored it in 363. After Theodosius I banned pagan cults in 391 and 392, it was apparently abandoned.

A village, Kastri, grew over the ruins, and an earthquake wrecked much of it in 1870. In 1892 the French School at Athens began the "Great Excavation": houses were expropriated and demolished, and a small railway hauled the debris away. Over more than a decade, under Théophile Homolle, the dig uncovered the Sacred Way, the Treasury of the Athenians, the bronze Charioteer and the stadium. The museum opened in 1903, and UNESCO listed the site in 1987.

Delphi as a sacred site today

What makes Delphi a sacred site for many visitors is not a measurement. It is written on the temple. Pausanias records that the Greek sages dedicated their maxims to Apollo in the forecourt: Thales of Miletus, Bias of Priene, Pittacus of Mitylene, Cleobulus of Lindus, Solon of Athens, Chilon of Sparta and Myson of Chenae. The Ministry of Culture lists the maxims and a single letter, E, on the walls of the vestibule.

In lived practice today, many visitors carry that same order up the hill: a question written down beforehand, the slow walk up the Sacred Way, and only then any expectation of an answer. It is a modern form, but it follows the sequence the site itself laid out. If you work with oracles at home, the ancient knucklebone oracle is Delphi's humbler cousin.

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