Pythia

In Practice

Diodorus Siculus records the office's own myth of how the site was found at all: goats grazing near a chasm in the ground began leaping about strangely and making unfamiliar sounds whenever they approached it, and the goatherd who investigated the chasm himself started foretelling the future, which is why the Delphians continued to favor goats when consulting the oracle long afterward. Strabo describes what the office itself involved once Delphi's prophetic role was established: the site's inner cave narrows to a mouth from which a breath rises that induces divine frenzy, and the woman holding the title mounted a high tripod set over that opening to receive it, delivering answers in both verse and prose. Strabo also gives the name's own origin, deriving Pythia and Pytho from the verb meaning "to inquire of the oracle." Who could hold the title changed over time, and the change itself is recorded as a response to a specific violation rather than an evolving custom. Diodorus explains that originally a young virgin held the office, on the reasoning that virgins' untouched nature suited them to guard the secrecy of what the oracle disclosed, matching the qualities attributed to Artemis. That practice ended after a man named Echecrates the Thessalian, visiting the shrine, became infatuated with the virgin then serving as Pythia, abducted her, and assaulted her. In response, Diodorus reports, the Delphians passed a law that no virgin would prophesy again, and that a woman of at least fifty would hold the office instead, dressed in a virgin's costume as a deliberate reminder of the practice it replaced. The office's answers, whatever their exact mechanism, were treated by contemporaries as verifiably real rather than only a matter of religious tradition. Herodotus records Croesus of Lydia testing several oracles at once by asking, on an agreed day, what he was doing at that exact hour, an act he told no one; the Pythia's answer named a tortoise and a lamb boiled together in a bronze cauldron under a bronze lid, which is exactly what Croesus had arranged to be doing, the only oracle among those tested to answer correctly. Decades later, before Xerxes' invasion, the same office told Athenian envoys their sole safety lay in a "wood-built wall," an answer disputed among the Athenians themselves until Themistocles argued it meant their fleet rather than a literal wall around the Acropolis, and pressed the city to fight at sea rather than abandon it.

Where Accounts Differ

• a title, not a person, and why its rules changed

• This entry covers the Pythia as an office: who could hold the title, how the site was said to have been discovered, and evidence the office's answers were treated as verifiably accurate. The mechanism of prophecy itself, the tripod, the chasm's vapor, and Delphi's mythological transfer from Gaia to Apollo, is covered on the oracle entry rather than repeated here.

Where This Appears

• Character Apollo
• Term Delphi
• Term Oracle
• Mythology Greek Mythology
• Mythology Roman Mythology

Sources