Plutarch on the Pythian Priestess

Plutarch · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 57 pages

Two of Plutarch's dialogues on oracles, from Plutarch's Morals translated by John Philips, in the edition corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin with an introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1878, Vol. III, pages 69–103. The Greek title of the second is given as Περι των Εκλελοιποτων Χρηστηριων, in Latin De Defectu Oraculorum, glossed as “About the Obsolescence of Oracles.” The frontispiece is by Nik Ainley. Three further Plutarch pieces sit elsewhere in the library's Down to Earth series, drawn from the same Goodwin edition.

The file holds two related questions, the second beginning at page 23. The first asks why the Pythian priestess ceased to deliver her oracles in verse — a change in form rather than in substance, and one that troubled Plutarch's contemporaries because it seemed to mark a decline in the god's presence. The second asks the larger question of why the old oracles ceased to give answers at all. Both are cast as conversations rather than treatises, and the dialogue opens in a way that shows how the argument will proceed: Basilocles complains that Philinus has spun out the evening showing strangers the consecrated rarities, and Philinus answers that they walked slowly because of the disputes that sprang up and grew about them as they went, like the armed men from the dragon's teeth of Cadmus. The speakers of the second dialogue are named at the head — Philinus, Diogenianus, Theo, Serapio and Bœthus, with interpreters — and the discussion moves between the natural explanations offered for the change and the theological ones, without the author settling the matter by decree.

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