on by the priest Chryses as ‘‘Smintheus’’ (mouse-god). If you are suffering from a
plague, you need divine assistance and, though others provided oracles – notably
Zeus at Dodona, or the hero Trophonius at Lebadeia (Boeotia) – Apollo is normally
responsible for oracles and prophets. Apollo Pythios is the god of answers to ques-
tions (pyth-, to question), especially at his Delphic cult site with its priestess, the
Pythia, and its legend of a snake called Python slain by Apollo. This is the mythical
creature from which our word ‘‘python’’ comes, a word first applied to Indian boa
constrictors in the 1830s. So you know, when you find a statue of Apollo Pythios at
Athens or an altar at Olympia or a temple, regrettably in ruins, in northern Arcadia,
that this Delphic Apollo is the Apollo we are talking about (Pausanias 1.19.1, 5.15.4,
8.15.5), and we can see that this variety of Apollo is specially influential. He possesses
prophetesses, or causes them to go into a trance, as in the case of Sibyls and the
Pythia, who is in effect the Delphic version of a Sibyl. Every Greek state and
individual recognized the special power of the oracle at Delphi, though its historical
performance was not always very satisfactory – as Croesus king of Lydia discovered
to his cost when he was defeated by King Cyrus of Persia (Herodotus 1, esp. 91)
and as the Athenians discovered when they sought advice during the invasion of
Xerxes (Herodotus 7.142–4). The oracular function is a unique way of crossing
the divide between man and god and makes Apollo very special amongst the gods.
And so the final silence of his oracle was thought to denote the death of paganism
itself, when the last pagan emperor, Julian (AD 361–3) sent his friend Oreibasius
to consult it:
Tell the Emperor: the crafted hall has fallen to the ground;
Phoebus no longer has his hut, nor his prophetic laurel,
nor the chattering spring – the chattering water too is quenched.
(John Damascene,The Passion of the Great Martyr Artemios
35 ¼Greek Anthology, appendix, Oracles, 122)Delphi was a special holy place of Apollo, to which Greeks might turn as something
between pilgrims and tourists, as for instance do the Chorus of Euripides’Ion,
another story of a major son of Apollo, the founder of the Ionian Greeks. But Delphi
was not the only place specially sacred to Apollo: nothing, after all, was more special
than the island of Delos, cult centre of the Ionians, where he and his sister Artemis
were born to Leto ‘‘gripping the slender palm tree with her hands’’ (Theognis 6).
Oracles issue a sort of higher regulation, or sense of order or law, for men. The
word for law in Greek isnomos, which happens also to be a word referring to melody,
and to pasturing. By a strange sort of punning, whether it is historical accident or
deeper reality, various quite different functions of Apollo are brought together under
his epithet Nomios: god of the oracle and of regulation and good order, god of music
and of culture – the companions of the Muses, and in places a god of flocks, as when
in mythology he tended the flocks of King Admetus (Farnell 1896–1909:4.123). As
we look more deeply into his music we will, however, recognize that his instrument,
the lyre (which is not without its resemblance to his bow), represents in itself a
demonstration of order. This leads also to the mystic science of the interrelation
between music and mathematics, a special study of Pythagoras (ca. 540 BC) and his
50 Ken Dowden