The Ambiguity of Oracles

The reputation of some oracular sanctuaries endured for a thousand years, and this demonstrates that the Greeks believed in oracles and warning signs. Many inscriptions record acts done ‘‘in accordance with the will of an oracle,’’ confirming the literary tradition,and examples of people disobeying oracles they have been given are exceptional.The skeptical Thucydides and in his wake Polybius never doubted the authority of the Delphic oracle,even if he emphasizes the frequent manipulations of the prophecies given, and the consequences of this on the course of events.Plato, as a good pupil of Socrates, was of the same view, and very few and far between were those who denied the principle of divination, such as Xenophanes and then the Epicureans. In the Peace of Nicias of 421, the first clause of the treaty specified free access to Delphi for the opponents. Three substantial and related problems confronted the Greeks : the ambiguity of oracles, charlatanism and the forgery of oracular responses.The ambiguity of oracles derived from two things: the mode of revelation itself and errors made in the process of prediction. The cry of an owl, heard on the left, a dream, or the words of the Pythia at Delphi are naturally vague and always leave room for doubt and interpretation.The medium too,a finite human being, was an inadequate instrument for authentic revelation.As for erroneous predictions, unless one actually believes in Apollo, one must admit a real percentage of error. But the Greeks could not consider their gods liars. The reconciliation of this contradiction entailed accepting the possibility of human error in the decoding of oracles: the responses of the gods, truthfully spoken, were accordingly considered ambiguous, ‘‘oblique.’’ Sophocles’ Oedipus does not understand the oracles and becomes embroiled in misfortune. Herodotus’ Croesus (1.46–91) is told by the Pythia that if he takes up war against Persia he will destroy a great empire. In his defeat he destroys his own kingdom.

Human error was the only possible explanation from the moment that belief in divination became fixed in Greek patterns of thought and was justified by tradition, which the Greeks seldom deviated from.Accordingly, ambiguity soon became established as the hallmark of oracles in literature, even though epigraphic cases are quite rare.On top of error came charlatanism. Prediction was trustworthy, but some predictions were more trustworthy than others. First in rank came the infallible oracles,whose power was guaranteed by their antiquity: Delphi, Dodona, Olympia, Siwah, then Claros and Didyma, amongst others. Faith in oracles was confirmed by the legendary  punishment inflicted upon Croesus, who tested them to ensure their truthfulness.Also reliable were the oracles that offered a personal contact, an ‘‘autopsy,’’ with the divinity, a characteristic that was an ancient one, but one that became essential in the hellenistic period.By contrast, at the bottom end of the divination scale languished itinerant diviners, interpreters of oracle collections gathered under the name of the great seers of the past, such as Musaeus, Orpheus, or Bakis, the content of which evolved to meet the needs of each age.Aristophanes,Euripides, and Sophocles, as well as Thucydides, Plato, and the Cynic Diogenes, not to mention Artemidorus, the expert in the interpretation of dreams, all alike reviled them, which is proof enough of their success with the masses. Since they needed to
live by their craft, they often found themselves with conflicting interests.Between these two extremes fell amyriad of local divinatory institutions Boeotia alone had more than ten of them as well as publicly recognized diviners in the service of the city or of armies,rituals were essential prior to combat. The city of Athens awarded a crown to the diviner Cleobulus, the uncle of Aeschines, for his services during the campaign against Chilon.When he was on campaign Xenophon, a witness representative of many learned Greeks,accepted the significance of signs, whatever they were, without raising an eyebrow and often sacrificed to obtain omens (but he also denounced a diviner who acted to his own advantage

From the time of Homer Greek thought was divided between unshakeable faith in divination and developing skepticism. In criticizing Calchas and Helenus, who should have seen things that they had not, and in rejecting certain types of divination, the messenger of Euripides’ Helen is representative of a trend (his ideas recur at Thucydides 8.1, where the crowd reproach the diviners for their misleading advice after the Sicilian disaster):‘‘Reason,’’ he concludes, ‘‘is a better diviner, as is soundness of judgment.’’Euripides is difficult to use, because the prophecies that are most heavily criticized in his works come to pass against all expectation. But the lively debates that divided the Greek elites emerge clearly from an inscription dedicated to the dead of the battle of Coronea, shortly after 446 BC: the Athenian general appears to have acted in spite of an unfavorable sign, thereby demonstrating the authenticity of oracles, for all that some held them in disdain.This curious mixture of unshakeable faith and skepticism could often be found within the same individual. Once the principle of divination had been accepted,one tried to limit the possibilities of abuse or error. As with Croesus in the legend,the Greeks posed their questions in such a form as to reduce ambiguous factors to the minimum. Xenophon asked at Delphi not whether he should join Cyrus’expedition, but to which gods he should sacrifice to make a success of it .The Corcyreans asked at Dodona what gods they should worship in order to maintain harmony.The response to this kind of question is never false. The prophet-interpreters could perhaps shape the god’s responses, but the consultants acted in the same way, by presenting their question in the form of an indirect inquiry: ‘‘Cleoutas asks Zeus and Dione if it is profitable
and advantageous for him to rear sheep’’

Both sides, unawares, refined a system of consultation that justified the truthfulness of oracles whilst allaying people’s anxiety. Thus, the responses to a question of the type according to which one wishes ‘‘to know whether one should cultivate the land’’ will be 100 percent valid, because one will never know what the course of action dismissed by the Pythia would have brought. The response to a question of the sort ‘‘whether one will marry’’ is more critical. But across the board erroneous responses could not be expected to have exceeded 50 percent.The oracles accordingly responded in satisfactory fashion to at least 75 percent of questions with ‘‘whether.’’ In other cases, where the oracle responded, for example, with a riddle, the answer was deduced by the consultant himself, with a risk that any error could imputed to him. Next, the consultant often triangulated his inquiry to glean further indications and to form a more credible convergence: a dream could be confirmed by another dream, a prodigy by the examination of a victim’s entrails, or by a coincidence.And at the heart of mantic rituals, several divinatory sacrifices sanctioned the god’s good disposition towards the petitioner. Numerous instances, legendary and historical, display the confirmation of one oracle by another: thus in 388 BC King Agesipolis, having obtained a favorable oracle at
Olympia, protected himself by obtaining an analogous response from Delphi before invading the Argolid

This mixture of credulity and reason brings us to the counterfeiting or falsification of oracles. An improbable number of historical events were predicted by oracles that are today cataloged in literary sources: unless we believe in the percipience of the Greek gods, an enormous majority were responses forged after the fact, or post eventum, as we say. It must be stated frankly that these texts are bogus, and constitute one of the problems the historian must deal with.This does not mean that these texts are without interest. Quite the reverse. The Greeks, first of all, regarded them as authentic, and they therefore exerted a historical impact. Further, these post eventum oracles tell us about the patterns of thought of the period that invented and disseminated them. Whether they were put into circulation by the sanctuaries themselves, or with their approval, or simply without them being able to do anything about them, these bogus oracles were not so much designed to deceive as to demonstrate the supreme oracular power of the gods. To this extent, the 500 or so Delphic responses cataloged are less valuable for their historicity than for the image they present, reinforcing the idea that the Greeks wanted to project of their principal oracle.One often reads in modern scholarship that the Pythia colluded with the powers of the day: we will return to this claim.In an oral society, bogus oracles could immediately present themselves as authentic soon after the event, and it is not necessary to see in them the result of interested calculation. They should rather be compared with myths that offer infinite possibilities of adaptation to the social needs of the moment. Thucydides shows this phenomenon at work during the plague of 430 BC: ‘‘people naturally turned to their memories, recalling the verse that the oldest people said had been recited previously: ‘A Dorian war will be seen to arrive, and with it the plague.’ In fact, there was disagreement.The word that featured in the verse, it was contended, had not been loimos [plague] but limos [famine]. However, the view that naturally prevailed was that the word had been ‘‘plague.’’ People thus conditioned their memories in accordance with what happened; and if, I imagine, another Dorian war presents itself after this one and there is a famine in it, it is naturally under this form
that they will make the quotation’’

Artemis the Virgin Goddess of Hunting

Artemis is the sister of Apollo. This bond in mythic genealogy results from their association in cult. Here we can observe the special role of Delos, where both were born to Leto, as we have seen, and where both had a temple in the same precinct, as did Zeus and Hera at Olympia. This contrasts markedly with Delphi, which is exclusively Apollo’s site (except that Dionysus shares it during the winter months).In the mythology, Artemis is a huntress, accompanied by the nymphs. Hunting is, however, in reality a man’s pursuit and a dangerous one, pursued in wild and uninhabited places. Myth tells of boar hunts, notably that of Meleager, and warriors in Homer and in the Mycenaean age could wear a boar’s tusk helmet. Odysseus had a wound from a boar hunt in which he had engaged at adolescence whilst under the tutelage of his maternal grandfather, and in historical times no Macedonian noble might become a man until he had slain his first boar. Why then is a virgin goddess hunting in the wilds with nubile (but untouchable) teenage goddesses? And why is it that the nubile maiden Iphigeneia must be sacrificed to her at Aulis, or swapped for a deer, and why is it that Callisto in Arcadia must be turned into a bear? The myths bring together themes of importance for the dynamics of a successful society. It is only through confrontation with the wild, if usually in myth rather than cult, and through a dangerous but protected transition, where their normal roles are inverted, that girls can become tamed in subjection to men through the institution of marriage.

A similar logic pervades the mythology of the Amazons, where the transitional independence of young women is marked even more strongly by their impossible characterization as warriors. Artemis, then, is the goddess of the transition, a transition in which men have no part – as is shown by the myth of Actaeon, torn apart by his own hounds as a result of witnessing Artemis and the nymphs, a forbidden mystery. She completes this transition as Artemis Locheia, to whom women may appeal and childbirth and in whose shrine they may gratefully hang up clothing as a thank-offering, their transition to womanhood complete. Artemis is accordingly the goddess at Brauron, a moist, marshy place at the coastal fringes of Attica where Athenian girls’ rites are practiced. The place itself has a ‘‘marginal’’ feel, an almost eerie combination of fertility and remoteness. At Patrae too, the priestess of the major cult of Artemis Triclaria was a girl, who retained that priesthood until she married (Pausanias 7.19). Here there were grim tales that the most attractive boy and girl had been sacrificed to Artemis annually, owing to an adolescent pair, Melanippus and Comaetho, prematurely having had sex in the shrine. At Halae in Attica the cult of Artemis Tauropolos saw a mock-human sacrifice every year, associated with how – at least in Euripides’ Iphigeneia amongst the Tauri – Orestes had almost been sacrificed by Artemis’ priestess, his sister Iphigeneia. Everywhere we see the goddess angered, often in the wild or in connection with an animal (a deer or a bear), and often demanding human sacrifices that somehow never seem actually to have happened at any point where there is historical evidence. What matters is the image and the ideology, in which the god consists, winding in and out of Greek mythology and crossing cult sites, some active (Brauron), some lost in the mists of time (Aulis).

Related to these phenomena are the cults we find at the mouth of the Alpheius, a river whose plan to take her virginity had been foiled by a girls’ ritual in which Artemis and the nymphs all smeared their faces with mud during an all-night festival.Here the river flows grandly on from Olympia and reaches the final stages of its path to the sea: At its mouth, around 80 stades [12.5 km] from Olympia, is the grove of Artemis Alpheionia or Alpheiousa [i.e., Artemis of the Alpheius] – it is said both ways. There is a grand festival to this goddess at Olympia annually, just as there is to Elaphia [Artemis of Deer] and Daphnia [Artemis of Laurel]. The whole land is full of Artemisia [i.e., Artemisions, shrines of Artemis], Aphrodisia, and Nymphaia – amidst groves that are for the most part full of flowers due to the abundance of water.

And there are many Hermaia on the roads and Poseidia on the headlands.In the shrine of [Artemis] Alpheionia there are paintings by Cleanthes and Aregon – by the former a Capture of Troy and a Birth of Athene, by the latter an Artemis Borne Aloft on a Griffin. (Strabo C343) I have quoted this passage, remarkably lyrical for the geographer Strabo (64 BC– ca. AD 25), at some length for the wonderful sense that it gives of the place of the gods in the imagination, lives, and environment of the Greeks, a place that cannot be conjured up by statements that Artemis is goddess of the hunt.Less lyrical, however, is the cult of Artemis Laphria (perhaps, the ‘‘Devouring’’) at Patrae. There we find a stupendous procession culminating in the arrival of a maiden
priestess riding in a float drawn by deer! The altar, of tinder-dry wood, has already been prepared. And the next day: They throw, living, onto the altar edible birds and likewise all the victims, and in addition wild boars and deer and gazelles. Some even bring the cubs of wolves and of bears, others full-grown beasts. And they place upon the altar the fruit of cultivated trees. Then they light the wood. At this point I have even seen, say, a bear or some other animal, either forced outwards by the first onrush of the fire, or even escaping through brute strength. Those who threw them on bring them back again to the fire. And they recount that no one has ever been injured by the animals. (Pausanias 7.18.12–13)

Out beyond this, Artemis may turn into a major goddess of the city, as in effect she is in Patrae and in Aetolian Calydon, the scene of Meleager’s boar hunt and the origin of the cult of Artemis Laphria. Her domination of a city is, however, more frequent in Asia Minor, and this is what is represented by the cult at Ephesus (above). This, then, is an area phenomenon.

The Nature of the Greek Gods

Amongst the many creations of Greek culture, the Olympian gods have a particular interest. As with anything in the ancient world, we have various types of information about them. Some comes from archaeology, some from texts, some concerns history, some concerns thought. But whereas the great sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi was,and is, real, and we discover about the same sanctuary from our various sources of information, it is different with the individual gods. The ancient gods are not real – at least, that is the general supposition – and what our evidence leads us to is pictures that peoples created in their minds and shared in their imaginations. The gods are in fact the most powerful work of art created by the Greeks. And they live in different,but intersecting, dimensions, which combine to create the illusion of a single personality.

The primary dimension is that of cult (religious practice). Greeks prayed, sacrificed,poured libations, held festivals, demarcated places which would be precincts, built altars and temples, gave gifts and built ‘‘treasuries’’ to hold them all. In doing all this they represented themselves as performing acts to, for, or at least with an audience of, gods. It is far from unusual to have many gods (‘‘polytheism’’) or to think of them somehow as persons. But by the standards of other nations, Greek gods were exceptionally anthropomorphic – they were ‘‘shaped like people.’’ The focus of Greek worship tended not to be mighty stones or trees (‘‘aniconic,’’ non-representational, objects of worship), though they admired those too, but stone or wood shaped into statues of personal gods. Each god was an individual person and each was thought of as having their particular identity.Different Greek cities or ethne¯ (peoples who were not yet urbanized) worshiped broadly similar gods to each other. But the system was far from uniform and the Zeus

imagined in one place might be rather different from the Zeus imagined in another.Indeed, in a single place you might worship a variety of Zeuses, distinguished by their epithets – so Zeus ‘‘Meilichios,’’ Zeus the dangerous but hopefully ‘‘gentle,’’ is a different business from Zeus ‘‘Olympios,’’ the Zeus who is king of the gods on Mount Olympus. Each Olympian god is particularized by epithets, which are a bit of  compromise: they maintain a single identity (of Zeus), but diffract it into a rich spectrum of locations, functions, and traditions.

The second dimension is that of mythology. Myths might be local and might present for instance a supposed reason for a current religious practice, when they are described as ‘‘aetiological.’’ This would not be an actual, historical reason, because myths are no more true than gods are real. They are a way of thinking about the world around us and the people in it. It is in the nature of the worship of the Greek gods to generate myths,and it is in the nature of poets, the entertainers of Greek culture, to collect them and
synthesize them into a compromise set of stories that develop shared ideas of what the gods are like and how they behave. The principal Greek myths are widely known in ancient Greece and find their place in epics, lyric poetry, drama, and all manner of cultural production. They are everywhere in Greek art too.
The third dimension is that of thought about gods and the divine, ‘‘theology.’’ But Greece did not have official theologians: what it had was poets, philosophers, and anyone else who was prepared to think. Here finally we may worry about how the universe is run and speculate on the justice or the goodness of the gods. It is at this point that personal gods have their weakest grip and abstraction sets in most easily.So, to take the major cult site of Zeus in the Peloponnese, the huge temple of Zeus at Olympia (built for cult, decorated with  myth) provokes reflection on his power (theology). The ceremonies and celebrations enact that power with grandeur and significance, and in so doing focus something of Greek identity onto this site. This happens explicitly once every four years and implicitly, through memory and monuments, at all times in between, as this is always the place that carries the history of the ritual and its apparently limitless future. The huge altar of ashes grows with this year’s offerings; and the animals sacrificed in large number to the god, awesomely struck down and wailed over, give their lifeblood not to us but (back) to the god. This is the ‘‘same’’ Zeus whom Homer celebrates in the Iliad, mighty, remote, never actually walking the earth, distributing human happiness and misery, deciding the end of everything, including us. But he also behaves in ways that are harder to understand: he is said to have flung the god Hephaestus from heaven to land on Lemnos where the worship of the god of fire can take place; he argues with his wife (for why else should their marriage need to be renewed annually?); he is seduced by her on Mount Ida, in a scene presented rather daringly or wickedly by the poet. 

At Olympia we will also look forward to the traditional ritual song celebrating his thunderbolt, and we will think, as we look to the sky in prayer, about that great being whose justice is so hard to grasp, as Aeschylus showed us in his last plays – the Agamemnon and the Prometheus Bound (if it is by him). And as we look at the temple’s sculptures, we see a mythology surrounding Zeus – a pediment showing the chariot race of Pelops for the hand of Hippodameia, a pediment displaying Zeus’s son Apollo bringing order to Centaurs and Lapiths, and the metopes displaying the work of another of his sons,Heracles, founder of the Olympic Games, namely his twelve labors to civilize the world and overcome the adversity that Zeus’s wife Hera had put in his path. Zeus himself once again is mysteriously absent from these scenes, but we may reflect upon
his world order and then enter the temple to see what came to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the huge enthroned Zeus by Pheidias, a statue which changed the path of Greek art.Greek gods may not be neatly packaged, but that helps them to provoke thought as we bring together ideas from all the different places where we encounter them –participating in cult, watching cult, seeing the myth depicted, hearing it acted out,listening to it sung. You could only emerge humbled from the experience of Zeus.