The legendary Delphic Oracle simply ceased to prophecy

This edited article about Greek mythology first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 522 published on 15 January 1972.

If any one man in history were to be named the most bloodthirsty of all time, it would surely be Nero, the tyrant Emperor of Rome, whose lust for cruelty and evil knew no bounds. Roman citizens by the thousands died at his merest whim. Among them was his own mother, Agrippina.

It is said that, in 67 A.D., Nero decided to take a holiday in Greece, where he visited the famous Delphic Oracle at the sacred shrine of Apollo. No sooner had he entered than the old priestess there pointed at him accusingly, her voice rising to a shriek.

“You dare to come here?” she screamed. “You outrage the god you seek. Go away, killer of your mother! And if it was prophecy you sought, the number seventy-three marks the hour of your downfall!”

Nero’s fury overflowed. The priestess was buried alive for daring to speak to him in such a manner, and her temple attendants were murdered. The Emperor swept out, deriding the words he had heard.

As he was only thirty at the time, he was unworried by the thought that some calamity might overtake him in his seventy-third year. That was well into the future. If anything, the prophecy was reassuring to him.

But the following year Nero was dead, forced to commit suicide – and in his place came Galba, the next emperor.

The age of Galba was seventy-three. That was the number that had marked the downfall of history’s cruellest tyrant. So in a roundabout way it was proved that the Delphic Oracle had made yet another accurate prophecy.

Delphi was the most sacred place in Greece. Towering above it was Mount Parnassus in all its grandeur. Below, dark green olive groves surrounded the cliff on which the city stood.

In the days when Greece was great, monuments and treasures lined the Sacred Way which led to Apollo’s temple, all placed there to please the god and praise him for all his greatness or wisdom – and particularly to thank him for favourable prophecies.

The main attraction at Delphi for centuries was its Oracle, which looked into the future of anyone who sought its advice.

Wearing the wooden headbands of supplicants, people would travel from far and wide, make sacrifices and perform certain rituals before submitting written questions to priests of the temple, who in turn would present the queries to the Oracle itself.

No one knows when the Delphic Oracle came into being, but it was at the height of its powers in the 6th century B.C. and was said to have existed for centuries before that, even before the introduction of Apollo-worship.

Behind a huge golden statue of Apollo stood the entrance to a cave, inside which the god was said to speak through the medium of his chosen priestess, the Pythia who was a woman of about 50. This cave had been discovered by chance by a goatherd and his goats, after which they all had been suddenly seized by fits. It was later discovered that certain strange-smelling vapours which came up through a crack inside the cave had the effect of putting people into trances, during which they uttered mysterious words.

Hearing of this, priests interpreted it as a sign that Apollo had chosen the cave as the instrument for passing on his wisdom in the form of a human speech.

About once a month, the Pythia bathed ritually in a stream before descending into the cave where she drank from another stream, smelled the vapours, and seated herself on a tripod to await communication from the god. As she spoke, her priests wrote down her words, and then handed them to the person seeking advice.

But there was one little snag about the utterances of the Delphic Oracle. All were delivered in the form of riddles. They could always be interpreted in one of several ways, as many people, Nero included, learned to their cost.

Many stories have been told of the prophecies and the ambiguous way in which they were delivered, but probably the most famous was that concerning the legendary Croesus, last king of Lydia, one of the wealthiest men in history.

Offering sacrifices on a colossal scale to the Oracle in the 6th century B.C. he asked his question: Should he attack Persia?

“After crossing the River Halys,” replied the Oracle, “Croesus will destroy a great empire.” So, confident of victory, his armies swept across the river into Persia and were soundly defeated by those of Cyrus the Great. Certainly a great empire was destroyed in that clash, but it was his own. Like many hopeful petitioners, Croesus had seen only the interpretation that favoured him.

Just as veiled a prophecy was that given to Aristodemus, a leader of the Messenians, who asked what he must do if he was to defeat the Spartans in battle. The reply of the Delphic Oracle was that he must sacrifice a young unmarried Messenian girl whereupon Aristodemus sacrificed his own daughter. Crushed in the war that followed, he learned to his horror that his daughter had secretly married someone she loved but of whom her father did not approve.

Many Greek historians and philosophers – and later, Roman ones – have written about the Delphic Oracle and all vouch, in different tales, for its existence and the accuracy of its phophecies. It foresaw wars, natural disasters and the strangest personal histories and none of its prophecies is known to have been unfulfilled.

It has been suggested by some that it allowed itself to be used on occasions; that is, giving advice that came not from the mouths of its prophets but from other sources. The belief is that it would use its awesome reputation to put forward the advice of some of Greece’s finest philosophers and urge courses of action that were for the general good.

Very often, when the times were especially violent, it would recommend an end to bloodshed; it warned against unnecessary cruelty and told the Greeks that they must not let themselves fall prey to superstition.

For centuries the Delphic Oracle dominated Greek life and all Greeks believed it would exist for eternity. But not the Oracle itself. Like all prophets, it foresaw its own end, though the actual day was as ever shrouded in mystery – “on some long-destined day shall Delphi’s beauty shrivel, burn away; shall Delphi’s fame from earth expire at that bright building of celestial fire.”

No one seems to know when that was. The Oracle was still consulted while Rome ruled the world, but for how long there is no certainty. Like the great Greek empire, the Delphic Oracle seems just to have faded into obscurity.