Dolphin Watching in Ancient Greece – Introduction

The best description I’ve heard of the oracle of Delphi was by a Channel Five continuity announcer: “…and now a programme about the original agony aunt.” An oracle is where you would take a problem to a god, or possibly a ghost. Hopefully you would leave with an answer.

The priestess of the oracle of Apollo probably didn’t look like this in reality, but the painting of her on pottery was flattering, so it’s in the spirit of Delphi. Photo by Lise Gagne of istockphoto

Delphi was the home of the most famous oracle of antiquity. It was an oracle of Apollo, the god of wisdom. Here he would dispense his wisdom through his priestess the Pythia. The Pythia was a pure woman, so you may have an image in your head like something above. In fact if a woman was to stay pure in the Greek world then there was probably a good reason that no man would want her, so looks may not have been top of the list of requirements on the job application.

The oracle of Delphi became famous because it had a reputation for accuracy. Herodotus tells a story about Croesus, the King of Lydia:

…the growing greatness of the Persians caused Crœsus to cease from his mourning, and led him to a care of cutting short the power of the Persians, if by any means he might, while yet it was in growth and before they should have become great.

So having formed this design he began forthwith to make trial of the Oracles, both those of the Hellenes and that in Libya, sending messengers some to one place and some to another, some to go to Delphi, others to Abai of the Phokians, and others to Dodona; and some were sent to the shrine of Amphiaraos and to that of Trophonios, others to Branchidai in the land of Miletos: these are the Oracles of the Hellenes to which Crœsus sent messengers to seek divination; and others he sent to the shrine of Ammon in Libya to inquire there. Now he was sending the messengers abroad to the end that he might try the Oracles and find out what knowledge they had, so that if they should be found to have knowledge of the truth, he might send and ask them secondly whether he should attempt to march against the Persians.

47. And to the Lydians whom he sent to make trial of the Oracles he gave charge as follows,–that from the day on which they set out from Sardis they should reckon up the number of the days following and on the hundredth day they should consult the Oracles, asking what Crœsus the son of Alyattes king of the Lydians chanced then to be doing: and whatever the Oracles severally should prophesy, this they should cause to be written down and bear it back to him. Now what the other Oracles prophesied is not by any reported, but at Delphi, so soon as the Lydians entered the sanctuary of the temple to consult the god and asked that which they were commanded to ask, the Pythian prophetess spoke thus in hexameter measure:

“But the number of sand I know, and the measure of drops in the ocean;The dumb man I understand, and I hear the speech of the speechless:And there hath come to my soul the smell of a strong-shelled tortoiseBoiling in caldron of bronze, and the flesh of a lamb mingled with it;Under it bronze is laid, it hath bronze as a clothing upon it.”

48. When the Pythian prophetess had uttered this oracle, the Lydians caused the prophecy to be written down, and went away at once to Sardis. And when the rest also who had been sent round were there arrived with the answers of the Oracles, then Crœsus unfolded the writings one by one and looked upon them: and at first none of them pleased him, but when he heard that from Delphi, forthwith he did worship to the god and accepted the answer, judging that the Oracle at Delphi was the only true one, because it had found out what he himself had done. For when he had sent to the several Oracles his messengers to consult the gods, keeping well in mind the appointed day he contrived the following device,–he thought of something which it would be impossible to discover or to conceive of, and cutting up a tortoise and a lamb he boiled them together himself in a caldron of bronze, laying a cover of bronze over them.

49. This then was the answer given to Crœsus from Delphi; and as regards the answer of Amphiaraos, I cannot tell what he replied to the Lydians after they had done the things customary in his temple, for there is no record of this any more than of the others, except only that Crœsus thought that he also possessed a true Oracle.

Herodotus I.46-49

But while the oracle was good there was a catch. First you had to get to the right place. Delphi wasn’t the most convenient location in Greece. It was inland and 2000 feet up a mountainside. There was also another problem, you had to be there at the right time.

Originally the god was only in Delphi on one day of the year, the seventh day of Bysios, which was his birthday. We know roughly when this was. Cross-dating with the Athenian calendar makes it a time roughly equivalent to February. We can confirm this is roughly the right time of year from a notes written by Plutarch, who was a priest at the temple:

[Bysios] … many think, is the month of “fysios” (Growth); for it begins the spring and during it many plants “fyetai” (spring up) and come into bloom.”

The Delphic calendar, like other Greek calendars of the time was based on astronomical observations. A month was the period between one New Moon and the next. This causes a bit of a problem for time-keeping. On average a month would be 29 and a half days. No problem there, you make some months 29 days long and others 30. However if you have twelve months in a year then you only have 354 days. Compared to the sun that’s eleven days too short. In about twenty years your midwinter months would be in early summer. If you have thirteen months in a year then you have a year that’s 383 days long. That’s even further out of step with the Sun. You can just lever in the missing days, because a month has to start with a new moon. So what happens is you insert a whole month every two or three years. This might seem a little cludgy. Some Greeks agreed. Herodotus noted:

But as to those matters which concern men, the priests agreed with one another in saying that the Egyptians were the first of all men on earth to find out the course of the year, having divided the seasons into twelve parts to make up the whole; and this they said they found out from the stars: and they reckon to this extent more wisely than the Hellenes, as it seems to me, inasmuch as the Hellenes throw in an intercalated month every other year, to make the seasons right, whereas the Egyptians, reckoning the twelve months at thirty days each, bring in also every year five days beyond the number, and thus the circle of their seasons is completed and comes round to the same point whence it set out.

Herodotus II.4

It’s not just cludgy – it’s difficult. Can you spot the New Moon in the photo below? I can assure you it’s there.

Where’s the New Moon?

Ok, the photo below shows it was there but I waited for a cloud to cover it.

There’s the New Moon!

So you have a system which might not work because of bad weather, needs someone to persuade an official who may have bad eyesight and needs fixing on a regular basis. And the Greek know the system is bad so why did they use it?

Politics.

The Greek calendar is a political wonder. There’s plenty of uncertainty built into the calendar that people can argue about, and they will want to argue about it. Aristophanes shows one reason why the start of the month was important in his play Clouds:

Strepsiades: Now tell me this, pray; if I were to purchase a Thessalian witch, and draw down the moon by night, and then shut it up, as if it were a mirror, in a round crest-case, and then carefully keep it-

Socrates. What good, pray, would this do you?

Strepsiades: What? If the moon were to rise no longer anywhere, I should not pay the interest.

Socrates. Why so, pray?

Strepsiades: Because the money is lent out by the month.

Ritual, law, religion and finances were all entangled together in one big social soup. Someone who controlled the calendar could wield a massive amount of power. The calendar was particularly close to religion as it indicated when certain rituals should be performed. Each city had its own flavour of religion which would have differed to their neighbours as a means of emphasising their independence. Having calender which didn’t quite mesh with the neighbours would also have been an excellent way of maintaining difference. It’s not that the Greeks couldn’t have a unified accurate calendar, simply that they weren’t interested in being accurate and certainly not in being unified.

Normally this was no problem. People didn’t take part in rituals in other cities, so they didn’t really need to know what month somewhere else claimed it was. However it is a problem when you do want to take part in a pan-hellenic event, like the Olympics or consult the oracle at Delphi. So how do you tell when the right time to consult the oracle is if you cannot use a calendar?

That’s the problem. —–