The key figure in the oracular process was the Pythia, the priestess or prophetess. She was an ordinary local woman, not of high birth, and she too served for life. She was past childbearing age when appointed, but on duty she wore the costume of an unmarried girl—a sacred sheep dressed as lamb. She was expected to be chaste.
Apollo was supposed to live at Delphi for nine months of the year, and the oracle appears to have been available for consultation only for one day in each of these months. It is not clear whether the god was willing to open up shop in cases of emergency; when a city-state like Athens needed advice we do not hear of them having to wait for Apollo’s convenience. As to inquirers, priority was given to the city of Delphi and its citizens, to states with “most favored nation” status, and to specially honored individuals. In general, states took preference over individuals.
In front of the temple stood a large altar. Here a preliminary sacrifice was conducted on behalf of all the day’s inquirers. If this went well—that is, the animal reacted to a sprinkling of water by appearing to nod in acceptance of its fate—it was duly slaughtered.
An inquirer was led inside the temple and performed a second sacrifice, depositing the victim or parts of it on a table at the door to the adyton, the sunken room where the omphalos stood and where the Pythia was awaiting him. He was shown into a place from which he could hear but not see her.
The priestess had prepared for the consultation by purifying herself at the Castalian Spring in a ravine (two fountains fed by the spring still flow). At an altar inside the temple she burned laurel leaves and barley meal. Crowned with laurel she sat on a tripod and became possessed by the god. She then delivered her prophecy.
While we know broadly how consultations were managed, there are important aspects of the Delphi process about which we are in the dark. First of all, how was the Pythia’s prophetic trance induced? We can be sure that she did not chew some kind of hallucinogenic leaf. No ancient source mentions this, and if she did do so, she would probably have chosen leaves of bay or laurel, both plants sacred to Apollo. The former would have produced no effect at all, and the latter are poisonous.
The author Plutarch, a local man and a priest of Apollo who knew the oracle from the inside, writes in the first century A.D. of a sweet smell emanating from the Pythia’s consulting room. Was there a vent from which subterranean fumes rose? No trace of it could be found when archaeologists excavated the temple of Apollo in the twentieth century.
However, recent geological research suggests that the temple was built over the confluence of two fault lines and that gases including ethylene, which is both explosive and anesthetic, did come up from them. But the oracle functioned for a thousand years and it is hard to believe that the production of gas did not fluctuate. Even if the gases, when flowing, were of assistance to the Pythia it seems very probable that mostly her trances were self-induced.
The second problem concerns the presentation of the prophecies. Ancient historians such as Herodotus quote well-turned verses, rich in meaning and often carefully ambiguous. It is hardly plausible that the Pythia would have been able to improvise them, so one possibility is that her “ravings” were not altogether articulate and were later translated into poetry by the prophetae or some other persons.
We do not know whether the oracle was notified in advance of questions to be put. If it was, both officials and the Pythia would have had time to consider her response; even if not, the content of inquiries submitted by governments could often be guessed. Thoughtfulness does not necessarily mean that fraud was involved. That said, Apollo could be bribed; on one known occasion, for example, the Athenians paid money to have the Pythia influence the Spartans. But we do not know if the oracle was easily corrupted or if this was a frequent occurrence.
In this context, how “political” was the oracle? States frequently consulted Delphi and it is hard to believe that the officials at the oracle did not take care to monitor contemporary events and perhaps develop views or even policies that colored the prophecies. But we have no hard evidence.
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Croesus, the king of Lydia in western Asia Minor, was wealthy, famous, and counted himself the luckiest of men. But in 547 he was also a worried man. Obscure and frightening changes were upsetting the balance of power in the Middle East. Although Croesus was not a Greek, he made himself into an honorary one. His donations to the god at Delphi were extraordinarily generous. They included the statue of a lion made from refined gold, two huge bowls, one of silver and the other of gold, and a large quantity of gold ingots. He urgently needed guidance from the oracle about his enemies and their prospects of success.
Lydia was a fertile territory. The nearby coastline was occupied by a multiplicity of noisy Ionian Greek city-states. They were the interface between the Hellenic world and the kingdoms of the east. Croesus had uneasy relations with them. He had brought most of them under his control and although they resented this, they recognized that he was a lover of all things Hellenic and provided protection from other potential threats in the region.
The Ionian settlements were originally founded by colonists sent out from mainland Greece. As we have seen, tradition had it that they were refugees from an invasion by newcomers, called Dorians, who arrived towards the end of the second millennium and made their home mainly in the Peloponnese. For many of them their departure point was Athens, which in later centuries claimed to be their mother-city. Ionians such as the Athenians spoke their own dialect of Greek, the other main ones being Dorian, spoken by the Spartans among others, and Aeolian, spoken mainly in Thessaly, Boeotia, and Lesbos.
The Ionians were the forerunners of an extraordinary, mostly peaceful diaspora throughout the Mediterranean between 734 and about 580 B.C. Nowhere in Greece is far from the sea, and mainland states sent out teams of citizens interested in sailing away and starting a new life. They founded city-states on the coasts of Spain and southern France. They even reached Tartessus, the Tarshish of the Bible, a port beyond the Pillars of Hercules (today’s Gibraltar), which became a source for rare metals such as tin, and silver from northwest Spain. They peppered Sicily and southern Italy with new foundations; so substantial was the Hellenic presence that the region was nicknamed Greater Greece.
Athens was unable to produce enough food for its population and depended on Greek settlers in the Black Sea for importing grain from their hinterland (in today’s Ukraine and the Crimea) and sending it on by ship.
Links between the mother-city (the original meaning of “metropolis”) and her colonies were usually warm, but once they had established themselves the offspring were completely independent. Occasionally bad blood flowed: Corinth and its colony, Corcyra (today’s island of Corfu), were on famously unfriendly terms.
Colonies facilitated the development of trade throughout the Mediterranean. They imported goods, such as bronze, silver and gold vessels, olive oil, wine, and textiles, from mainland Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean or manufactured them themselves, and then exchanged them with local communities—from the west, grain and slaves, from Thrace, silver, hides, timber, and slaves, and from the Black Sea, corn, dried fish, and (once more) slaves.
Greeks also set up trading posts, or emporia, which had no civic sponsor and attracted citizens from all kinds of different states: an important example was Naucratis on the Nile Delta.