Pythia

The title of the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, through whom the god was said to answer the questions put to the oracle.

Civilization: Greece
Period: c. 500 BC

Pythia is a title, not a name. It comes from Pytho, the older name of Delphi itself, which Greek tradition tied to the serpent Python that Apollo killed when he claimed the sanctuary. The god's priestess at Delphi was the Pythia, the woman of Pytho, and many women held the office across its long life.

She was a real and local woman. Plutarch, who wrote from inside the Delphic priesthood, says the Pythia of his own day came from one of the soundest households in Delphi and brought no special training to the tripod: what qualified her was an honest life. On the seventh day of the month, nine months a year, she took her seat in the adyton, the sunken inner chamber of the Temple of Apollo, and answered for the god.

A consultation followed a fixed procedure. The Pythia purified herself in the Castalian spring, and before anyone asked anything the priests tested whether the god would answer that day at all. Only then did the petitioners, in a fixed order, put their questions.

The vapour in the ancient accounts was long treated as legend, and excavators in the 1890s found no chasm beneath the temple. In 2001 a geologist, an archaeologist and a chemist reopened the case, showed that the temple sits above crossing geological faults, and proposed that light hydrocarbon gases could once have risen into the chamber. It is a proposal with evidence behind it, not a settled fact.

See the job lived

Greece · c. 500 BC

The Woman Who Spoke for Apollo

One day a month, nine months a year, the Pythia answered from a bronze tripod over a cleft in the rock at Delphi — and kings crossed seas to put a single question to her.

Pythia

See the job lived

The Woman Who Spoke for Apollo

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