Delphi

Summary

Delphi is the sanctuary of Apollo on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in central Greece, called by its older name Pytho, and the most famous oracle of the Greeks: a woman called the Pythia sat on a tripod over a cleft in the ground and spoke the god's answer to whoever asked. The Iliad already knows it as a place of treasure: Achilles says nothing is worth a man's life, not even all that the stone threshold of the archer Apollo encloses in rocky Pytho.

The fullest account of its founding is the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Apollo travels through the land looking for a place to build a temple that will be an oracle for men. He reaches the spring of Telphusa and begins to build, and the nymph, afraid the temple will take her glory, turns him away with a trick: horses and mules crowd to my water, she says, and your temple will have no peace; build at Crisa below Parnassus. He goes there and lays the foundations, and Trophonius and Agamedes lay a threshold of stone on them. Near the place was a sweet-flowing spring where a great she-dragon lived, destroying people and their flocks. She was the one who had reared Typhaon, the son Hera bore in anger when Zeus brought forth Athena from his head; his story is told under Typhon. Apollo shoots her with an arrow; she writhes and breathes out her life in blood, and he says: now rot here on the earth that feeds men. The sun rots her, "wherefore the place is now called Pytho, and men call the lord Apollo by another name, Pythian, because on that spot the power of piercing Helios made the monster rot away." Then he returns to Telphusa and buries her spring under rocks.

Pausanias says that before Apollo the oracle belonged to Earth, Gaia, with the nymph Daphnis as her prophetess; Earth gave her share to Themis and Themis gave it to Apollo; the first prophetess of Apollo was Phemonoe, the first to sing in hexameter verse; and the oldest temple there was made of laurel branches. Strabo describes how the oracle worked: a deep cave with a narrow mouth from which rose a breath that inspired frenzy, and over the mouth a high tripod on which the Pythia sat, received the breath and spoke in verse and prose, while poets of the temple put the prose into verse. He says people called Delphi the navel of the earth, telling that Zeus set free two eagles from east and west which met there, and that in the temple stood a navel-shaped stone draped with fillets, bearing likenesses of the two birds.

Its most famous questioner was Croesus, king of Lydia. Before going to war with the Persians he tested the oracles: he sent messengers to Delphi, to Dodona, to Ammon in Libya and others, and told them to ask on the hundredth day what Croesus was doing at that moment. Before the messengers had finished, the Pythia answered: "I know the number of the grains of sand and the extent of the sea, and understand the mute and hear the voiceless. The smell has come to my senses of a strong-shelled tortoise boiling in a cauldron together with a lamb's flesh, under which is bronze and over which is bronze." Croesus had cut up a tortoise and a lamb and boiled them in a bronze cauldron with a bronze lid. He sent a great store of gold to Delphi and asked whether he should march against the Persians, and was told that if he did he would destroy a great empire. He asked whether his reign would last, and was told to flee when a mule became king of the Medes. He marched, and the empire destroyed was his own.

The idea all of this turns on is that the answer comes up out of the earth and needs someone to understand it. The sanctuary is built where a power of the earth was killed and left to rot; the hidden is read from a breath rising out of a cleft beneath the temple and spoken by a woman whose tongue is not her own. The answer is true, but it does not spare the asker a second question: the god knows what is in the cauldron, and tells Croesus words that cut both ways, and when he falls the Pythia says the fault is his for not asking whose empire would be destroyed. The story belongs to oracles and divination among the peoples, where the hidden is sought before action and paid for with gifts.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Πυθώ, Pythō, and the Pythia, Πυθία, Pythia, once the two Greek endings are removed, leave pyth-, which is Arabic baththa: Arabic b is Greek p, and th is θ, as the Juthoor table gives it. In Lane, baththa al-khabar is to spread news, baththa al-sirr and abaththahu to reveal a secret, abthathtuhu mā fī nafsī to show someone what is in one's mind, bathbatha al-turāb to raise the earth and uncover what was beneath it, and bathbatha al-amr to inquire into an affair, scrutinize it and seek information about it. The root holds the question and the answer together, which is what Strabo says when he derives both names from the verb for consulting an oracle. On this reading Pytho is the place where one asks about what is hidden and it is disclosed, uncovered from a cleft in the earth on a woman's tongue. Δελφοί, Delphoi, we read as dalafa: to advance, to draw near; dalafa ilayhi, he came close to him. Under the same root Lane gives al-dulfīn, the dolphin, the sea creature that saves the drowning, and in the hymn Apollo boards the Cretans' ship in the form of a dolphin, drives it to his sanctuary and names his altar Delphinius. It is a reading proposed on the method, and its limits are set out under the linguistic root.

Linguistic Root

Pytho and baththa

LSJ gives Πυθώ as the region in which the city of Delphi lay, and says that in the legend it is derived from the rotting of the serpent, as in the hymn. Strabo says the Pythia and the city were named from the verb πυθέσθαι, to consult the oracle, even though the first vowel of the name is long. So the Greeks give two derivations, from rotting and from asking. The Arabic reading follows the second: Pytho is the place of question and answer, and the Pythia's answer is a bathth, a disclosure of what was hidden. Monier-Williams, under Sanskrit budh, to wake, perceive, know, sets beside it Greek πυθ- in πυνθάνομαι and notes that this Greek p stands for φ, so the root originally began with b followed by th, the two letters of baththa. The other Greek verb, πύθω, to rot, is a different root, on which the hymn puns.

Lane's entry holds two more senses that fit the story: bathbatha al-amr, to inquire into an affair, scrutinize it and seek information about it, which is the very sense of πυθέσθαι; and bathth, intense grief which one makes known to a friend. The asker lays open his care and asks, and the oracle lays open the answer.

Delphi and dalafa

LSJ gives Δελφοί as the city and its people and lists other forms, among them Aeolic Βέλφοι and Boeotian Βελφός; it gives δελφύς as womb and δελφίς as dolphin, with a form βελφίν. We read Delphi from dalafa: d is d, l is l, and Greek ph is f. In Lane, dalafa is said of an old man walking gently with short steps, dalafat al-katība ilā al-katība of a troop advancing on another, and dalafa ilayhi is to draw near to someone. Under the same root is al-dulfīn, which Lane calls a beast of the sea that saves him who is drowning. On this reading Delphi is the place people advance toward from every land, which is what the hymn says when Apollo promises that men of the Peloponnese, of Europe and of the islands will bring him offerings seeking oracles, and it meets the dolphin that led the Cretans to his sanctuary. The limit of the reading is that the first letter is not fixed in Greek, being b in Aeolic and Boeotian, so nothing can rest on the d alone, and Arabic dulfīn may have been taken from Greek.

Key Mythic Narratives

The dolphin and the Cretans

Once the dragoness is dead the sanctuary needs servants. Apollo sees a ship from Cnossus, the city of Minos, manned by men sailing for trade; he leaps aboard in the form of a great dolphin and shakes the ship until the crew sit silent with fear, and a south wind drives it to Crisa. Then he appears to them as a young man and tells them to build an altar on the shore and pray to him as Apollo Delphinius, because he sprang upon their ship in the form of a dolphin; they go up with him singing Ie Paean, "Hail, Healer", and become the priests of his sanctuary, offering his sacrifices and announcing what he speaks from his laurel tree. Their story is also told on the Apollo page.

The Pythia's last answer to Croesus

When Sardis fell and Croesus was saved from the pyre, he asked Cyrus leave to send his chains to Delphi, to be laid on the doorstep of the temple, and to ask whether it was the god's way to deceive those who served him well. The Pythia answered: no one may escape his lot, not even a god. Croesus has paid for the sin of his ancestor of the fifth generation, who killed his master and took his royal state. Loxias, that is Apollo, wished the evil of Sardis to fall in the lifetime of Croesus' sons and not his own, but could not turn aside the Moirai; yet he delayed the fall by three years and saved Croesus from burning. As for the oracle, Croesus should have asked whose empire would be destroyed; and the mule was Cyrus, son of a Median mother of the royal house and a Persian father beneath her. Croesus confessed that the fault was his.

Croesus's offerings

Croesus offered the Delphian god three thousand beasts, burned gilded couches and purple garments, cast a hundred and seventeen ingots of gold, made a lion of refined gold and sent two great bowls of gold and silver; Herodotus says the silver bowl was used for mixing wine at the Delphic feast of the Divine Appearance. The Delphians gave him the first right of consulting the oracle, exemption from charges and the chief seats at festivals.

Symbolic Reading

The Greek rereading essay in this project reads Delphi as a centre for observing the sky: the site was chosen for its position, and what the prophetess said was astronomical observation and knowledge of the climate given the form of prophecy, while the vapour rising from the ground was real gas, which the essay says geologists have confirmed, that brought the prophetess into ecstasy. It reads the killing of the serpent as taming the site: the serpent is the raw force of the earth, its gases and earthquakes, and killing it is building the temple over it and putting that force to the service of knowledge. The ancient texts carry the first two elements in their own words: a breath rising from a cave in Strabo, and a dragoness left to rot on the spot where the temple is built in the hymn.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Croesus consulted the oracle at Delphi and the oracle of Ammon at Siwa together, to test which told the truth, and Herodotus gives the account of the priestesses of Dodona that two black doves flew from Egyptian Thebes, one ordering an oracle of Zeus at Dodona and the other an oracle of Ammon in Libya. At Delphi a woman speaks; at Siwa a boat carried by the priests moves at the god's will.

When the project's Babylonian essay compares the dragon of Marduk, the mušḫuššu, it sets beside it the Greek Python, "the great serpent", with the Canaanite Lotan, the Egyptian Apophis, the Norse Jörmungandr and the Indian Vṛtra. In the hymn the young god kills the serpent and then founds his sanctuary, as the victor sets up his order in the chaoskampf.

Hubal stood inside the Kaʿba with seven divining arrows before him, by which people cast lots before a journey or a marriage, as told on the Apollo page: at Mecca the answer was an arrow drawn out, at Delphi a word spoken, and both customs belong to oracles and divination.

Cadmus asked the Delphic oracle about his sister Europa and was told to follow a cow and found a city where it lay down, and so he founded Greek Thebes. At Delphi a festival recalled Dionysus going down to bring his mother up, and the Etruscans knew it, as the Fufluns page tells.