The Oracle at Delphi no Longer Given in Verse (25-29)

Men ought to understand thoroughly, as Sophocles[*] says, that the god is

For wise men author of dark edicts aye,

For dull men a poor teacher, if concise.

The introduction of clearness was attended also by a revolution in belief, which underwent a change along with everything else. And this was the result: in days of old what was not familiar or common, but was expressed altogether indirectly and through circumlocution, the mass of people imputed to an assumed manifestation of divine power, and held it in awe and reverence; but in later times, being well satisfied to apprehend all these various things clearly and easily without the attendant grandiloquence and artificiality, they blamed the poetic language with which the oracles were clothed, not only for obstructing the understanding of these in their true meaning and for combining vagueness and obscurity with the communication, but already they were coming to look with suspicion upon metaphors, riddles, and ambiguous statements, feeling that these were secluded nooks of refuge devised for furtive withdrawal and retreat for him that should err in his prophecy. Moreover, there was the oft-repeated tale that certain men with a gift for poetry were wont to sit about close by the shrine waiting to catch the words spoken, and then weaving about them a fabric of extempore hexameters or other verses or rhythms as containers, so to speak, for the oracles. I forbear to mention how much blame men like Onomacritus,[*] Prodicus, and Cinaethon have brought upon themselves from the oracles by foisting upon them a tragic diction and a grandiloquence of which they had no need, nor have I any kindly feeling toward their changes.

However, the thing that most filled the poetic art with disrepute was the tribe of wandering soothsayers and rogues that practised their charlatanry about the shrines of the Great Mother and of Serapis, making up oracles, some using their own ingenuity, others taking by lot from certain treatises oracles for the benefit of servants and womenfolk, who are most enticed by verse and a poetic vocabulary. This, then, is not the least among the reasons why poetry, by apparently lending herself to the service of tricksters, mountebanks, and false prophets, lost all standing with truth and the tripod.

I should not, therefore, be surprised if there j were times when there was need of double entendre, indirect statement, and vagueness for the people of ancient days. As a matter of fact, this or that man assuredly did not go down to consult the oracle about the purchase of a slave or about business. No, powerful States and kings and despots, who cherished no moderate designs, used to appeal to the god regarding their course of action; and it was not to the advantage of those concerned with the oracle to vex and provoke these men by unfriendliness through their hearing many of the things that they did not wish to hear. For the god does not follow Euripides[*] when he asserts as if he were laying down a law:

None but Phoebus ought

For men to prophesy.

But inasmuch as the god employs mortal men to assist him and declare his will, whom it is his duty to care for and protect, so that they shall not lose their lives at the hands of wicked men while ministering to a god, he is not willing to keep the truth unrevealed, but he caused the manifestation of it to be deflected, like a ray of light, in the medium of poetry, where it submits to many reflections and undergoes subdivisions, and thus he did away with its repellent harshness, There were naturally some things which it was well that despots should fail to understand and enemies should not learn beforehand. About these, therefore, he put a cloak of intimations and ambiguities[*] which concealed the communication so far as others were concerned, but did not escape the persons involved nor mislead those that had need to know and who gave their minds to the matter. Therefore anyone is very foolish who, now that conditions have become different, complains and makes unwarranted indictment if the god feels that he must no longer help us in the same way, but in a different way.

Then, besides, there is nothing in poetry more serviceable to language than that the ideas communicated, by being botind up and interwoven with verse, are better remembered and kept firmly in mind. Men in those days had to have a memory for many things. For many things were communicated to them, such as signs for recognizing places, the times for activities,[*] the shrines of gods across the sea, secret burial-places of heroes, hard to find for men setting forth on a distant voyage from Greece. You all, of course, know about Teucer and Cretines and Gnesiochus and Phalanthus and many other leaders of expeditions[*] who had to discover by means of evidential proofs the suitable place of settlement granted to each. Some of these made a mistake, as did Battus.[*] For he thought that he had been forced to land without gaining possession of the place to which he had been sent. Then he came a second time in sore distress. And the god made answer to him[*]:

If without going you know far better than I, who have gone there,

Africa, mother of flocks, then I greatly admire your wisdom,

and with these words sent him forth again.

Lysander also failed to recognize the hill Orchalides (the other name of which is Alopecus) and the river Hoplites[*] and

Also the serpent, the Earth-born, behind him stealthily creeping,

and was vanquished in battle, and fell in that very place by the hand of Neoehorus, a man of Haliartus, who carried a shield which had as its emblem a snake. Numerous other instances of this sort among the people of olden time, difficult to retain and remember, it is not necessary to rehearse to you who know them.

For my part, I am well content with the settled conditions prevailing at present, and I find them very welcome, and the questions which men now put to the god are concerned with these conditions. There is, in fact, profound peace and tranquillity; war has ceased, there are no wanderings of peoples, no civil strifes, no despotisms, nor other maladies and ills in Greece requiring many unusual remedial forces. Where there is nothing complicated or secret or terrible, but the interrogations are on slight and commonplace matters, like the hypothetical questions in school: if one ought to marry, or to start on a voyage, or to make a loan; and the most important consultations on the part of States concern the yield from crops, the increase of herds, and public health — to clothe such things in verse, to devise circumlocutions, and to foist strange words upon inquiries that call for a simple short answer is the thing done by an ambitious pedant embellishing an oracle to enhance his repute. But the prophetic priestess has herself also nobility of character, and whenever she descends into that place and finds herself in the presence of the god, she cares more for fulfilling her function than for that kind of repute or for men’s praise or blame.

We also, perhaps, ought to have this frame of mind. But as it is, we act as if we were anxious and fearful lest the place here lose the repute of its three thousand years, and some few persons should cease to come here, contemning the oracle as if it were the lecturing of some popular speaker; and we offer a plea in defence and invent reasons and arguments for matters which we do not understand, and which it is not fitting that we should understand. We try to appease and win over the man who complains, instead of bidding him take his leave for all time,

Since for himself first of all it will prove to be more distressing,[*]

if the opinion which he holds about the god is such that he can accept and admire the maxims[*] of the Wise Men inscribed here, Know thyself and Avoid extremes, because of their conciseness especially, since this very conciseness contains in small compass a compact and firmlyforged sentiment, and yet he can impeach the oracles because they give nearly all their communications in brief, simple, and straightforward language. Now such sayings as these of the Wise Men are in the same case with streams forced into a narrow channel, for they do not keep the transparency or translucence of the sentiment, but if you will investigate what has been written and said about them by men desirous of learning fully the why and wherefore of each, you will not easily find more extensive writings on any other subject. And as for the language of the prophetic priestess, just as the mathematicians call the shortest of lines between two points a straight line, so her language makes no bend nor curve nor doubling nor equivocation, but is straight in relation to the truth; yet, in relation to men’s confidence in it, it is insecure and subject to scrutiny, but as yet it has afforded no proof of its being wrong. On the contrary, it has filled the oracular shrine with votive offerings and gifts from barbarians and Greeks, and has adorned it with beautiful buildings and embellishments provided by the Amphictyonic Council. You yourselves, of course, see many additions in the form of buildings not here before and many restored that were dilapidated and in ruins. As beside flourishing trees others spring up, so also does Pylaea[*] grow in vigour along with Delphi and derives its sustenance from the same source; because of the affluence here it is acquiring a pattern and form and an adornment of shrines and meeting-places and supplies of water such as it has not acquired in the last thousand years.

They that lived in the neighbourhood of Galaxium in Boeotia became aware of the manifest presence of the god by reason of the copious and overabundant flow of milk[*]:

From all the flocks and all the kine

Like purest water from the springs

Milk in abundance welling down

Made music in the milking-pails.

And all the folk in eager haste

Filled every household vessel full;

Wineskin and jar were put to use,

Each wooden pail and earthen tun.

But for us the god grants clearer, stronger, and plainer evidence than this by bringing about after a drought, so to speak, of earlier desolation and poverty, affluence, splendour, and honour. It is true that I feel kindly toward myself in so far as my zeal or services may have furthered these matters with the co-operation of Polycrates and Petraeus[*]; and I feel kindly toward the man who has been the leader in our administration and has planned and carried out practically all that has been done.[*] But it is not possible that a change of such sort and of such magnitude could ever have been brought about in a short time through human diligence if a god were not present here to lend divine inspiration to his oracle.