The Road to Delphi
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By Mary Beard The Independent 2 January 2004
Consulting the ancient Delphic oracle must have been a time-consuming process.
First of all you had to get to Delphi - not the most accessible of places in the Greek world - and you had to be sure to time your visit for the nine months of the year in which the oracle operated. The god Apollo took an annual three-month holiday and in his absence no questions were answered. Even then the priestess, the so-called Pythia, only prophesied once a month; there must have been accommodation to be organised, queues to be jumped and fees to be paid.
But that was nothing compared with the rigmarole of the consultation itself. After a series of preliminary rituals, the enquirer was allowed to put his question to the oracle. The Pythia apparently sat, out of sight, balanced on Apollo's tripod; the prophetic vapours emerged from the ground underneath her, entered her vagina and finally came out of her mouth bearing an answer to the question.
Exactly what form this answer took is now a matter of debate. Some ancient observers claim that it was all mad mumbo-jumbo; others suggest she spoke at least some intelligible phrases. Either way, the definitive response was formulated by the male "prophets" whose job it was to interpret the Pythia's utterance. A cynical analyst would argue that it was really these men who decided what the answer should be.
The process of consultation was not only time-consuming. With the travel costs, fees, backhanders and - we may guess - outright bribes, it must have been extremely expensive. Only the rich or representatives of rich cities could ever have afforded to put their problems to the Pythia. For advice on the future, the rest of the population of the ancient world must have relied on local oracular shrines, or on drawing lots and a colourful company or more or less charlatan astrologers.
Nevertheless, the particular form of the replies often given at Delphi came to define - and still does - the whole idea of "oracular speech". For Delphic reponses were supposed regularly to be transmitted in dangerously ambiguous or riddling words, now taken as characteristic of oracles.
The classic case is the reply given by Delphi to Croesus, the King of Lydia in the sixth century BC. Croesus wanted to know whether he should invade Persia and was told that, if he did, he would destroy a great empire. He mounted his invasion - but the empire he destroyed was not the Persian, but his own.
Half a millennium later, the Roman emperor Nero is said to have fallen victim to a similar oracular misunderstanding. Told by the Pythia to "beware the age of 73", he paid no serious attention to any opposition, believing a long life to be in store. In fact he was overthrown at the age of 30 by a rival who was then aged 73.
In The Road to Delphi, Michael Wood explores the power of this kind of oracular speech from the ancient world to the present day. Why do the riddling tales of Croesus, Nero or Oedipus even now detain us? Why do oracles still matter - validated as they are by gods who certainly don't? Why the perennial fascination with stories of their expected or unexpected fulfilment?
Wood is not so much concerned with the unanswerable question of what ancient oracles said. He focuses instead on how literary narratives have exploited oracular or prophetic responses (from Oedipus through Macbeth to The Matrix) as well as on our own continuing engagement with foretelling the future, whether in horoscopes, the doctor's surgery or economic analysis.
The book is by turns brilliantly acute and self-indulgently rambling. Wood is at his worst when he turns to reflect on Nostradamus and 11 September or on his own penchant for newspaper horoscopes while in the stressful process of buying a house. And he never makes a convincing case for lumping these modern modes of prediction together with the Pythia and other ancient oracles, as if their very different institutional and religious contexts hardly mattered. He is at his best, as you might expect from a Professor of English at Princeton, when he sets out to expose the narrative intricacies of even the simplest story about oracular reponses, and the complicated games that both writers and readers of these stories must play.
He stresses, for example, that oracle stories are always retrospective. More to the point, even in genuine stories, what appears to be the "future" from the point of view of the characters is always in fact the "past" for writer or reader. As we read, it cannot come as a surprise that Croesus turns out to have got the oracle wrong, because we already know the final outcome; as readers, we are always in the position of being one step ahead of the oracular consultant, of "chuckling at his naiveté", and of knowing exactly how the oracle is going to be proved right.
Yet, as Wood observes, we must also be haunted by the sense that, were it not for our privileged position, we too would be likely to have made exactly the same mistake over the oracle's double meaning. "If a reliable authority said your pension funds were safe until Westminster Abbey moved to Wapping . . . you would think you were being told 'forever' in a forceful figure of speech." Why then do we feel as superior as we do about Macbeth's mistake over Birnham Wood and Dunsinane?
The Road to Delphi is a brilliant eye-opener on the puzzling power of the stories of ancient and not-so-ancient oracles and, in general, a reasonably reliable guide to the oracular culture of the Greco-Roman world. Wood does inadvertently turn the fifth-century Roman writer Macrobius into something more like a germ, "Microbius", and he refers to the mythical Roman king Tarquin as an "emperor" - not simply a mistake with the hierarchy of autocracy, but a chronological howler akin to confusing Edward the Confessor with Edward VII.
Only once does this otherwise acute reader fail to read the oracular signs himself. In his notoriously postmodern history of Roman and early Christian religion, A World Full of Gods, Keith Hopkins included a series of spoof letters written as if by his fellow ancient historians, criticising his arguments. Each one mimicked the style of a colleague and was "signed" with their first name.
Wood quotes approvingly some clever remarks about ancient ritual from the letter signed "Mary" and - missing all the authorial clues - generously attributes them to me, instead of to their actual author. It is hardly a mistake on the scale of Croesus's, but it is an unexpected slip from a critic so well attuned to the treacherous ambiguity of oracles.
Mary Beard teaches classics at Cambridge University; her book on 'The Parthenon' is published by Profile
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Motaz Othman, ITM. The 28th PHILOXENIA enjoyed a 43% increase in the number of international trade visitors and 30% increase in the number of international exhibitors from various tourism sectors comp (10/12/2012)
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