In Our Time - The Delphic Oracle

Episode Date: September 30, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Delphic Oracle, the most important source of prophecies in the ancient world. In central Greece, on the flank of Mount Parnassus, lies the ruined city of Delphi. For over a thousand years, between approximately 800 BC and 400 AD, this was the most sacred place in the ancient world. Its chief attraction was the Delphic Oracle, which predicted the future and offered petitioners advice.Travellers journeyed for weeks for a chance to ask the oracle a question. The answers, given by a mysterious priestess called the Pythia, were believed to come straight from the god Apollo. At the height of Greek civilisation the oracle was revered, and its opinion sought in some of the most significant conflicts of the age. Its activities were documented by historians including Xenophon and Plutarch, and it was regularly depicted in Greek tragedy, most famously Sophocles's masterpiece Oedipus the King.With: Paul CartledgeA G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge UniversityEdith HallProfessor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of LondonNick LoweReader in Classical Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, on the flank of Mount Panassas in central Greece, with rocky cliffs above and a peaceful valley below, lies a ruined city. Today, Delphi is a serenely beautiful spot

whose peace is disturbed only by the tourists who pick their way through its remains. But two and a half thousand years ago, this was the most sacred place in the ancient world. Between the 8th century BC and the 4th century AD, travellers flocked to Delphi from hundreds of miles away. Many of them came to consult the Delphic Oracle, the most celebrated and influential source of prophecies in ancient Greece.

The oracle's replies were famously ambiguous, but people trusted it, and it was consulted about some of the most momentous events in Greek history. Its activities are documented by historians, including Herodotus and Plutarch. with me to discuss the Delphic Olico are Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University. Edith Hall, Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London.

And Nicola, reader in classical literature, also at Royal Holloway University of London. Edithall, can you set the scene? Can you tell us about where Delphi is, what it's like, and it was first inhabited? Delphi is indeed in central Greece. There's a story that it was located there, because Zeus set off two eagles to find the middle of the world, and they collided at Delphi. It's an absolutely extraordinarily beautiful place

where the Mount Parmasas comes down in a massive cleft between two incredibly high, steep limestone rocks called the Fidriardis, which means the gleaming ones. They sort of reflect the sunlight, and Apollo, the God, is all about light. And the other story about how it was found is that Apollo himself went wandering all over the Greek world through every mountain until he found the one that was appropriate for him. He chose Delphi.

And it has a Castalian spring, which is very important in the cult, this wonderful bubbling spring in antiquity used to come up from between these two great cliff tops. And you can see when you're actually sitting in the theatre. We'll talk more about the sanctuary in a minute. But you can actually see across the sea to the mountains of Olympus, which is where the great god's use was. Sorry, not Olympus, Arcadia, Olympia, where the great gods is worshipped. So you can actually see other.

points of incredibly important importance in the Greek world. And it is numinous. I am not a religious person. There I feel a presence of something that is sort of metaphysically profound. Do we know when it was first inhabited in any substantial way? There are neolithic pottery and various signs of activity. Nobody really thinks anybody lived there till about 1300 BC. At that point some people think that there was some kind of palace or some kind of of early palatial structure.

Can you give us a rough date when it emerged as an important settlement and what was going on briefly in Greece at the time? The first signs of real importance and international respect, people coming there from a long way away, are in the 8th century BC. This is a time before democracies emerged where you've got massive conflict going on between the classes in different Greek city states.

you've got people struggling between kings and new men who are more tradesmen and mercantile forces, but the democracies haven't yet come up. And Greeks are, with the spread of the Homeric poems, developing to get a cohesive culture. It's supposed to be the time when Homer was available. Yeah, absolutely. Available.

And Greeks are spread across hundreds of islands and coastlines. They're incredibly scattered cartographically, which is why having a centre, this naval of the world as they saw it, was so important to them. They had to have some psychological places where they could unite as a people who spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods. And in fact, if Herodotus says one of the four things that united the Greeks, apart from dissent and language, was our joint rituals,

our joint practices of worship. Can we talk a bit more about that now, Paul Cardledge, about the practices of worship in Greece at that time? Let's take the eighth to the fifth century BC. Sure. But let's start one step back. The Greeks had a word for it. No, they didn't.

They didn't have a word for religion. Our word religion comes, of course, from the Latin. It means a kind of binding awe in the face of the numinous, the supernatural, the supernormal. The Greeks had lots of words for gods because they had lots of different gods and goddesses and superhuman heroes. Theirs was a world full of gods,

and the key thing was not, as we would say, a matter of faith. For them, religion was a matter of what you do. As Edith says, what unites all Greeks is a certain set of common practices, such as consulting oracles, such as building temples, such as holding festivals with processions and games. And Delphi comes to incorporate just about every possible aspect of Greek religious practice. Let's say from the 8th century BC it becomes established as a centre where Greeks come from all over the world

and by that time the Greeks are starting to go as far west as Spain, as far east as what's today Georgia. So I mean this really is a big thing. But what they all have in common is that in some sense they're Greek, not of course Greek, they're Hellenes. And pan-Helenism is a notion that over and above what an Athenian has that separates him from a spark, They all have something that's Greek, that's Hellenic.

And core to that was what we would call religion. But what they call the things of the gods, Taton peon. What did they want the gods to do, Paul? What do they ask the gods to do? And how did they know that gods have done it? Yeah, very good questions both. I mean, gods, we think, or least I think of them more, as powers. And superhuman, larger Greeks, they've been called,

because of course Greeks envisaged gods and goddesses and heroes in human form. They had an anthropomorphic conception of what divinity was. They believed that gods really intervened in their life. It's a much later philosophical notion to question that absolutely standard Greek belief and practice, gods are everywhere. They have to be appeased because they're very powerful, you have to chat them up, you make offerings to them,

You try to avert their anger, that is, by being nice to them, or not doing things that you know are likely to anger them. You want to know what they have in mind for humans. And this comes out, of course, very much in a personalised way in Homer. And Homer is indeed coming to be crystallized as an epic in just about the time when Delphi is beginning to be an international panhellenic sanctuary. Can you give us some idea of the great gods, a few of them, and then how many gods there were? Well, yes, I can't answer the last, but Edith mentioned Olympia, which takes its name from Zeus of Mount Olympus, Mount Olympus being the largest, the tallest mountain over 10,000 feet. Well, Greek stiffered, this is typically Greek, there was an inner core of 12 Olympians,

but not every Greek agreed on who the 12 were. one very interesting goddess, which I think it's odd in a way that she's not part of the canonical 12. Sometimes she features. And she's called Hestiar. She is the goddess of the half. And every home had a half. And it's absolutely central to the ritual of family construction and family development. And yet, sometimes she's in the 12, sometimes she's not.

Zeus is the all-powerful. He overthrew his father, Cronos, in a most unpleasant way, by castrating him. and he rules over Olympus as he rules therefore by extension over the entire phenomenal world. After him, his brothers, Poseidon, and then there's a guy down below Hades, who's not one of the Olympians by definition because he's ruler of the underworld, the unseen world, but nevertheless immensely powerful. Apollo we're going to talk a lot about later and Dionysus. I could go on now.

I've only mentioned... Hang on. Hang on, I've only mentioned the boys so far. They were boys, actually, very boyish. They're very immature in their behaviour very often. But Hera, Zeus's sister, full sister wife, and of course Artemis, Virgin, Athena, the patron goddess, both Athens and Sparta,

another perpetual virgin, much more military than Artemis, and so on and so forth. But around the place, there were lots of little gods, won't there? Good point. And if you lived in a sort of a Wicton of Greece right on the edge of the centre, way, way, way, way, you'd have your own little gods up there, wouldn't you? If you came from, let's say, Serephos, which was a teeny weenie, Gean Island, that's probably the equivalent of Wigton, I'd say.

But anyway, well, what you do is you have local heroes, people who allegedly were born in the very soil or grew up in the area that you're from, and you choose them because you think they're a very present help in trouble. And then there are the universal heroes, the most famous of whom the most important and interesting of whom is Heracles, Hercules in Latin, and then followed closely by Thysius, who is Athens, is superhero. So you're absolutely right. There are all these levels of superhuman powers that Greeks must appease and chat up. How did the Oracle fit into this set up, Paul, briefly, before we move on?

Since the gods are all powerful and therefore have something to do with, absolutely every aspect of human life in principle. It is likely that whatever you do, either as an individual or a member of a community, a police, a city, will be influenced directly by a divine will. You wish to find out that will so that you don't go against it, anger it, and bring down retribution upon yourself. So you go to find out the will of the gods. Truth is a difficult concept because, of course, truth can be construed.

differently. And so what actually happens is always capable of more than one interpretation. Nick, we're going to talk about Delphia and the god at Adelphi was Apollo. What's the significance of Apollo as a god and then what's his significance being

in Delphi? He's an extremely rich and complex figure. Visually he's the archetypal young male god. He's shown beardless and the mythological traditions associated with him tend to develop that of his identity. He is a god

who is often involved with young females in quite aggressive ways. He's in cult particularly associated with initiation of young men. Mythologically he's a senior ranking member of this great Olympian family. He's the

twin brother of the virgin huntress goddess Artemis, who in many ways is his counterpart. She deals with young women. He deals with young men, they're both associated with archery, with the bow. They're both associated with disease and medicine. It's Apollo who kicks off the Iliad. The first moment in Greek literature is Apollo visiting the Greek army with a plague because of the offence caused to his priest by the commander-in-chief Agamemnon. But in cult, he's particularly associated with

purification and he's one of the two great oracular divinity. the other being Zeus, but Apollo is the more important of the two. And he also has a particular association with the arts, with music, and the oracles of Apollo tend particularly to be these oracles of inspiration. And it's easy to see a connection between the way the talented musician is possessed by the God and what's going on at Oracular shrines like Delphi. Edith told us in very wonderful terms about how Delphi came to be an Oracle and how Apollo came to be associated with it.

Can you just develop that a little bit? How did the folklore around Apollo at Delphi develop? The local traditions are very interesting because Apollo is generally seen as an interloper at Delphi, the god, the sanctuary in myth, although there's no archaeological evidence for this, originally belongs to the goddess of the earth, and a female goddess, obviously,

and what Apollo does is overthrow either earth herself or in some traditions a serpent, the python, who is born of earth, and he takes over the sanctuary for himself. So he slaughtered as the python? He's a serpent killing God, and he takes over the domain by force. And this pushing out of an older order is an idea which is taken up in various ways,

most famously perhaps in Eeschylus is Orostaya, where Apollo becomes the representative of the new rational male order that displaces the older, more primitive female system of the divine universe. Edith Hall, what did Apollo, as it were, give to Delphia? Why was it, the fact that he was there made it so important. described it very well and lovely as it is in the centre of Greece. Oracles are growing something. What did Apollo bring to it, as it were?

It became the most powerful oracle in Greece. Was it Apollo the attraction? I think Apollo is the attraction, though there were rival cult centres. Zeus had a famous one in Dodona in northern Greece, where the prophecies came through the rustling of leaves, which were interpreted. You know, so you can have tea leaves, you can have oak leaves. or you can get a female to sit on a tripod,

which is like a tripod in a physics laboratory, and you get her very theatrically, very dramatically, to emit sounds and utterances. We're talking about Delphina? Yes. There was no rustling of leaves were somewhere else. Sorry, yeah, I'm comparing it. Now, let's get absolutely clear

because it's difficult enough with all these myths flowing around the place. The idea is, and now this is not a myth, this is what happened, as far as we can tell, from good reports, eruditors, plutarch, other persons. Right. FEMA, now just tell us about... Right, go on. Okay.

I think the experience of the person visiting Delphi to get an Oracle. So it's like opening newspaper to find your horoscope or whatever, whilst far more exciting and far more of a touristic sort of experience and a theatrical experience than any of the other oracles.

I think it just beat the socks off all of them. I really, really do. First, you've had to travel a hard journey to get there to this spectacular place. Then you had to walk up an incredible thing called the sacred way past extraordinary buildings. There were about 20 treasuries where different city-states had given great gifts. Then you have to bathe yourself in the waters of the Castellian spring as the priestess herself had. Then you had to go into the Temple of Apollo and

down somehow. They used verbs with down. There's some sort of cave or subterranean chamber or cellar where you had to go. And you were faced with the princess of Apollo sitting atop this massive tripod. Can we just hold the thought? We'll keep that story because I want to just go back a little bit. It's too, I mean, it's too rich to spoil,

so we stay there. And Paul, can we just say, what was Delphi likely at the height of its influence? We're talking about the 5th century. It has begun to sketch it in. We know that there were great statues. There are hundreds of statues, much, much later looted by Nero.

So just give us an idea how this place grew around the idea of its being an or Well, yes, the oracle is at the centre, but the centre is approached through a sacred way. So the key thing is the separation of sacred, or we should say really more sacred space, from non-sacred or secular space. And at the centre, at the centre of the nest is the Queen Bee, and this is the Pithier. But Delphi is in another sense a gigantic war memorial. And it's full of offerings. it's, to our way, thinking, extraordinary by one Greek city, which has defeated another,

not necessarily defeated a non-Greek power, though it's an all-Greek sanctuary, so you'd think all Greeks would emphasise what they had in common. Actually, sometimes they were much happier emphasizing their defeat of other Greeks. It is, on the other hand, the place where, in 479, after the famous resistance and defeat of the Persian invasion, where they put up the serpent column, and it's not coincidental, that it's a serpent column. In other words, three bronze coils with snake heads at the top

on a massive gold tripod. Again, tripod, you see, it's absolutely Delphic symbolism. But lots and lots of these memorials are war memorials of nasty kind against other Greeks. So it's very populated, it's very densely populated. And as you get closer and closer, as you get up to the temple, then you get a sense both of elevation and of centrality. I think the actual topography is absolutely key to the numinous experience.

So it's quite a big city by Greek standards at the time. I'm just trying to get a real griff on it before we move on. I'm now going to confuse you further. There is the sanctuary which is Panhellenic, which is run by an association known technically as an Amphictyoni of several Greek communities and cities. There is a city of Delphi, which is small. And there's a connection between them that if you wish to consult,

the Delphic Oracle, if you wish to consult the Pithier, you need a Delphic citizen, a citizen of the local city of Delphi to, as it were, hold your hand, to act as your sponsor because you can't approach directly. It seems that

there were very few days in the entire year on which you, either an individual or a community, might actually consult the Piviria, and that, of course, if some people think it's as few as nine... Nine. Yeah. So in other words, nine months, when Apollo reigns and we should perhaps add in now that there are three other months when Dionysus rains.

So you see nine days? One day a month. Seventh of the month. Yeah. And nine months. Which is Apollo's day always in every Greek city. For example, it's when the Spartans had their assemblies and they held them on Apollo's day, the seventh day of the month. I'm so you're right.

So it is a very rarefied experience. Can we just develop this, Nick? Now, we got this place and it's growing, got the idea of people putting warm memorials, great sculpt is there. He's becoming a busy, rich centre, which might be its undoing in the very end. That's to come. Can you tell us who looked after it? Any idea

how it was organised? What records have we got? Well, as Paul says, it was run by this independent panel which was a composite of people from different Greek cities called the Amphictany. So it's politically independent of individual Greek states. And that's a very important fact

about its political history. It was even capable of making war in its own right. But the sanctuary itself has its own distinctive staff. The the Oracle itself, we've already

alluded several times to the key figure of the Pivia, who is the priestess of Apollo, who is the one who actually delivers the Oracle. We're reserving that for Edith. I know, yes, no, that's, she's very much Edith's girl. But the Pidthia has a staff

around her, including these enigmatic figures called prophetai, who are the English word prophet, speakers forth or something like that. And they have some role not only in shaping or interpreting her utterances, but also in guiding the consultant to the Oracle in the first place. We also had a very reliable first-hand kind of this, because the historian Plutarch was a citizen of Delphi, and he was an official at the place for a while, wasn't he? What does he say? What does he give us? Well, Plutuck, of course, is writing at the end of the first century AD.

And he's an intellectual, he's a platonic philosopher. So he's interested not only in the history of the sanctuary, but also in the theory of what the oracle's doing. And he writes quite a lot about the oracle from a kind of historical theoretical point of view. He's interested in questions of how it's changed over time. and why in some ways it seems to be less colourful and taken less seriously in his own time than it seems to have been in the past.

But he's also interested in what is actually going on in the oracle. And one fascinating line of thought which he explores is that the god is communicating through this human vessel by means of a kind of intermediary power, whom he calls Diamones, This turned out to be a bit of a red rag to Christian authors, but I think we'll come back to that towards the end. Now, so you've got through and you've come from far away.

No, what do you bring to it? It's got rich because people have brought things to. You've got to bring something. You've got to bring an offering. I mean, I don't want to be reductive about this at all, but it's almost like a fee. Absolutely. Otherwise you don't get to speak.

Absolutely. And then we're going to come to the tripod. But let's just talk about how you got there. Absolutely. Absolutely, and in fact we hear very few minor ordinary people ever getting to go to the Delphic Oracle. This is something that heads of state consulted. It's something that rich people, you had to give gifts. You almost certainly could queue jump if you gave bigger gifts.

You've got to get your local representative to get you up the pecking order. And that's how it built up its own sense of prestige. It was so difficult to get access to it. I didn't realize it was only nine days a year. So it was so difficult to get it. And that's how it became so incredibly rich. And one of the theories of how it worked, sociologically speaking, is that it actually was a sort of banking,

it was the ancient central bank of Greece that managed value to be transferred between different city-states. Because of that, the incredible richness of the treasuries. I mean, actually had treasuries there that every city-state built. Phenomenal, fabulous. And that's why they kept getting raided and why Nero went there and tried to take all the statues. but in fact you could only get 500 of the 4,000 that were there at the time.

I mean, we have one play which is actually set at Delphi by Euripides, and it's called the Ion, and in fact the Pithia is a character in the play. But the opening chorus is a tourist tourist girl's from Athens singing. Good heavens, look at that beautiful statue. Good heavens! They're walking up the Safe Kid Way, looking at all the beautiful artworks. It was the sort of place you really, really wanted to go to. Now let's talk about the Pithia.

She's the priestess. She is who and how does she work? Okay. It is unusual for an oracle to have, for a male god to have a female speaking. There's something very, very special about this. She is probably selected from a local family to focus or Chrysler or Delphi around that whole area. She has two of these prophet guys and five Hossioi who are called the Holy Men. So it's set up as a very theatrical experience when you arrive. you meet the five holy men and you meet the two prophets. You go down into the temple,

down the steps into the cave or... The no-go area. It's called the Aduton. You go down into this place and you get... You put your question, right? And there's a particular formulae for how you put it. You could either ask an either-or question. Shall I give to Athena a big gold statue or a big marble statue?

Or it can be, I want to have a child, what do I need to do to have a child? And you get your answer. Now the trouble with the answer, I really desperately myself, wanted to be the priestess, gives it directly to you consulting it, in the metre of the hexameter,

this with this great six-beat rhythm at home of Eric Hepix in. I think that at times there were very talented priestesses who could, in fact, extemporise in hexameters. They probably seen the questions earlier anyway. But an awful lot of male scholars have always insisted, including Plutarch, that what actually happens, of course,

is that she emits inarticulate feminine grunts, which the prophets then interpret. But she's receiving breath from Apollo, isn't she? She is. She's sitting on top of this tripod. There's some sort of incense or something burning beneath her. That tripod, a lot of the ancient sources say was over a volcanic chasm or cleft in the earth,

though unfortunately, at the rock is limestone. It's not volcanic. We've got great problems with this. And the gas goes up into her body and comes out through her mouth in the form of Apollo's utterances. And some sources claim this was quite a sort of sexual thing that it was actually Apollo inserting his breath into her vagina. The ancient Greeks weirdly thought that a tube connected a woman's vagina to her mouth

so that he could breathe basically up her vagina and it comes out of her mouth as his word. Her body is a tube. It's a giant vehicle. for the expression of Apollo's spirit. Now, Paul, yes, please come in. I'm just going to ask, do you have any sympathy for the view that there was some gas, methylene or ethylene?

No, you've got methane ethanol, no, you've got no... Recent archaeological work. No, just before we move on, quite a few listeners will be thinking, well, this is extremely... Well, not extremely. This was believed in by the greatest intellectuals of the time, some of the greatest intellectuals of the last two and a half thousand. So let's start that.

But it does seem open to fakery. Right. Well, there are notorious cases of bribery of the priests, not of the pithia, but of the male priests, so that we actually have cases of people being convicted by the local authority, the religious authority that oversaw the sanctuary, of bribery, which is a capital offence.

If the people don't go off into exile, they would be executed. So it is known. that there are procured oracles. In other words, oracles which are not automatic, they're not necessarily genuine. But on the other hand, the general thought was that even if the message is ambiguous, even if it's ambiguous,

the God knew what the right interpretation was. And it's the human that gets it wrong. And it's not that the God is deliberately trying to trick you. The God is not, in other words, wicked, but humans are. And we know that. Can we, without going into the famous things we shall come to of, but kings, can you give us an example of how ambiguous it could be? And it's over to the humans to work it out.

And the fact is that the oracle is always right. So if they get it's wrong, they're wrong. Well, it's hard for me to give an example other than a very famous big one because, as Edith says, There's lots, probably the majority actually of consultations, were by individuals of the nature, how should I get good children? If I marry X, will my children be my own and not some other man's?

So the answer will be yes or no. And there are lots of those. And later on there is another kind of oracle, which functions at Delphi as elsewhere, a lot oracle, so you have yes, no, lots. And you pull out a lot, and the answer is yes or no. One Athenian criminal who was exiled on pain of death, I mean, he was under capital punishment,

went to the Oracle to ask if it was safe to go back yet. Is this end of stashed? Yeah, okay. Safe to go back yet. Yeah. And the Oracle said, yes, it's, you will find good law in Athens. So he goes back to Athens and, of course, is executed. So, exactly.

The ambiguity. That's the sort of thing. They were carefully worded so that they could always be right. But did he say, oh, I just think. Did he say, is it safe to go? go back or did you say, well, when I receive legal, pardon? Is it better or best? They used the odds of the

peripheries. Another man was told to be beware of Pelagos, which is the ancient Greek, for the sea. So he spent his entire life inland. It would go nowhere near the sea, and as then of course, killed by a man whose name was Pelagos. So, I mean, you could always find a way that

it was right after the fact, I think retrospective. And Heraclitus, and we talk about intellectuals, but the greatest brains of all time, you know, he's one of the greatest pre-Socratic philosophers, said the Delphic Oracle neither tells the truth nor conceals it, it merely hints at it. Give signs. Before we go on to specific, which I think are really entertaining, just finally, can we nail the fact that this was accepted by people like Erichlitus, Socrates and so on?

This was seriously accepted. Absolutely. One of the things that we haven't quite touched on is that there's a whole hierarchy of ways of ascertaining the God's will. A lot of them involving human specialists. You can read entrails, you can observe the flight of birds, there were people peddling Nostradama-style collections of verse oracles and interpreting them for you. There were all kinds of ways in which you could find out the God's will.

But what was special about Delphi was the God himself spoke. And that gave it a cachet and a status that all the other local oracles, all the other itinerant oracles, on all the amateur modes of divination that simply didn't have. Let's get some examples now. Paul, can you give us, I think Cresus might be a good one. Can you start with an example of what he asked,

what he got and why it was down to the interpretation? We or some of us still say rich as Cresis, in other words, this is extremely wealthy guy who, in fact, benefited Delphi by giving it money to build statues and so on. He was a Lydia. He's not a Greek. And before he consulted on what he really wanted to consult,

he actually tested not just one, not just two, but something like six or seven oracles in the Greek world. So that's a good indication that there are many, many oracles, and he chose six or seven to consult. But, of course, you shouldn't test oracles. I mean, that is by definition a barbaric. It's a failure. It's the wrong motivation.

So Herodotus readers would know his listeners, would know this is going to end badly. So having decided, he set the oracles an extraordinary test and it was to do with boiling tortoises in water with lamb and so on in a cauldron. And Delphi and one other, by the way, it's often forgotten, but two oracles got it right. Delphi was chosen. So he tested the oracle?

First. He then put his question, which is, what should I do vis-a-vis this wretched Cyrus and Persia, the great Persian Empire that's really. rising up on my east, which was the biggest thing in the Middle East, in fact, one of the biggest things in the Middle East ever, the rise of the Persian Empire. And Cresus is right next to it. And the message that he gets from Delfi famously is that if he crosses a particular river, which happens to be the boundary, his eastern boundary, which is bordering onto the Persian empire, you will destroy a great empire. If you cross the river Hallis, you will destroy a great

empire. What Cresus does is take the fight to... Cyrus. Instead of waiting for Cyrus and defending Sardis, which is his capital, which is very well fortified, he actually attacked. You know, it's rather like a pathetic animal attacking a lion rather than waiting and defending. So, of course, he got utterly smashed and Cyrus moves imperiously west. So that is an example of an

oracle which is ambiguous because it's not stated whose empire is going to be destroyed, and it's an example of somebody getting it completely wrong, just assuming that it meant he would destroy Cyrus's empire when the alternative was actually far more plausible. A milliband will not win this competition. I don't know where that came from. Right.

Anyway, right. Let's feel, I think. Let's talk about, give another example with Xenophon, Nicola. Well, there's a story. The stories of Cresus, of course, could easily be made up generations after the event, and many of the stories of great ambiguous oracles in tragedy, of course, are complete works of fiction. But one that is documented by its own consultant is the extraordinary story told by the historian Xenophon,

who, as a young man in Athens in 401 BC, had received this invitation to embed with a Greek mercenary army that was being raised by the younger brother of the Persian king with the ostensible aim of putting down some unruly tribesmen in southern Turkey. And he consulted as an old mentor, Socrates, about what he should do over this. And Socrates said, well, why don't you consult the Delphic Oracle? So Zendphan goes off to Delphi. He's a wealthy individual. He can afford the fee.

And he asks the Oracle a fairly standard form of Delphic question, which is to what God should I sacrifice in order to prosper in the undertaking that I'm contemplating. and he gets his answer and he goes back to Socrates and tells him that's all fine. And Socrates says, well, did it ever occur to you to ask the God whether you should go on this expedition in the first place?

And effectively what Xenophon had done was to make up his own mind that he wanted to do this. And he phrases his question to the Oracle in such a way that the Oracle simply confirms the decision he's already made. And Socrates, as advice, Interestingly, considering that two years later he was going to be tried and executed for destabilising traditional religion,

was that now that you've got this answer for the God, you absolutely have to go. And of course this was the famous expedition of the 10,000. They get to southern Turkey, and it turns out that their actual mission is to overthrow the Persian Empire, the mightiest empire in the known world, and install this princeling on the throne. It all goes horribly wrong. The Greek army is left leaderless. stranded hundreds of miles inside intensely hostile territory. And Xenophon tells the astonishing story of how he himself,

after all their generals have been ambushed and executed, takes command of the army and leads them these hundreds of miles north to the Greek cities of the Black Sea and safety. Now, if we'd been Apollo and we'd been asked the right question, it would be interesting to know what kind of answer we would have given. But the important thing is that Socrates told him off. Yes, Socrates was... This is in so many other ways, really quite a conservative religious figure.

But he just, let's get to the point. He told him he'd ask the wrong question. Yes. One of the things Greeks were always doing, because they knew that the oracle was unpredictable, was they would frame their question in such a way that the options it presented you with were constrained in the way that you wanted them to be constrained.

They were savvy people. Edith, I'm a bit, I'm a bit of a bit. I've got the milliband will lose this because that's bound to be true and an oracle said it but which, yeah, so I was a bit slow there, right, okay, let's let's, I'm immersed in two and a half thousand years ago.

Two, two, two, two, and that's right, all right. Two thousand years ago is where I am at the moment. I'm hanging on there for another few minutes. How does, the Oracle enters into Greek literature, powerfully, doesn't it? Can you take us there? Well, it's already in Homer.

We're told that Agamon consulted the oracle as to whether or not he should attack Troy, launch the Trojan war. So it's already there in the Homeric tradition. There are three Greek tragedies that deal very, very intensely with the Delphic Oracle and with the priestess, as one I've already mentioned, the ion. One of the most extraordinary scenes is actually in Ischalus's Agamemnon, where Cassandra, who is in some ways the prototype of the Pythia. I mean, she is the virgin who emits premonement.

prophecies that are actually true. Nobody actually believes her. They're incredibly enigmatic. She's clairvoyant. She can see Agamemnon being murdered backstage when no one else can. She uses this strange, strange poetic languages and goes off into a trance-like state. I mean, she does. Which the priestess was all supposed to be in, what is she? But she's not taking any drugs. You know, this idea that she's taking narcotics is essentially is not the case.

She's not sitting over any, you know, gases or chasms or anything like that. She is possessed by the god. and she comes out with this extraordinary sequence of prophecies. They're all true, but she uses an Racular language just like the Pythia, like keep the bull from his cow, keep the bull from his mate, right? That would be exactly the sort of thing that the Pythia might actually say. And she ends up in physical collapse. She's exhausted.

You know, she actually goes off on a sort of, a lot of people you think it was like shamanism, some sort of real possession and then collapses. And so we've got this, actual scene of this young virgin girl doing exactly who Apollo loves? I would love to have got Thamesstoccalism, but we can't. Paul, can you tell us how he came to an end,

how it died out of the oracle? Well, it's very blunt Christianity arose slowly, and by the end of the 4th century it had become the official religion of the entire Roman Empire and the old Greek world was the eastern half of the new Roman Empire. And Theodosius, the first simply outlawed, the Delphic Oracle, as he outlawed any manifestations of non-monotheistic religion, any pagan worship. But there is an early moment at which Christianity is rising.

We're in the middle of the same fourth century. And there is on the throne, Julianos, or Julian, as we call him, who was actually a pagan, a committed, theoretical polytheist. And he tried desperately for two years to, as it were, reverse the tide of monotheism. by reinstating and reinvigorating the old pagan cults. And of course, Delphi was absolutely central to his project. So he sends a message to Delphi. You know, what's going on, guys?

And he gets a terribly sorry message to the effect that the inspiration from Apollo through the pithier to human beings has dried up. And it's something like the waters. It's Apollo's living in a hut now. And the waters are dried up and you can no longer speak. Yes, I mean, that's pretty... The Oracle actually predicts its own demise. Its last prophecy that we know is...

30 years later, it's formally legally outlawed by an edict, an imperial edict. Very quickly, do you think this was possession, it had some kind of psychic authenticity, or do you think it was Mamba Jamba? Oh, goodness, Mamba's a horrible word, horrible phrase. It was as genuine as can be, but not all hithiers would have been equally positioned, on every occasion.

And so it's very easy, and we're in danger, aren't we, of sort of adopting a Christianising rhetoric, if we call it mumbo-jumbo, because it really mattered to the Greeks for a thousand years. It was a very potent force. Good. I think that it varied. Well, it did run for more than a thousand years, and that's an incredibly long time.

You think back to 900 AD to now, you know, in terms of different things that could happen within it. I think that I see it as a form of deliberation. It's just another factor you take into account. It's a process of making decisions and as such can actually be very constructive because it's focused attention. Yes, if you live in a polytheistic world,

the world that's absolutely full of these powers and you take them as a reality and this is one of the direct ways of accessing them. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Edith Hall, Nicloo and Paul Cartledge. Next week we'll be talking about the Spanish Amada 1588, Francis Drake, English seamanship, The Weather, Tilbury, Good Queen Bess, and Old Fashion Glory, thanks for listening.

If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.