Ancient Greek religion was, in a fundamental way, a religion of the story. Consider, for example, the significance of the famous narratives about the gods and goddesses told by Homer and Hesiod for later Greek perceptions of divinity; or the multiple roles that individual gods, such as Apollo and Athena, play in ancient Greek tragedy; or, indeed, the ongoing place of the divine throughout that form of storytelling that constitutes the historiographic tradition from Herodotus onwards. Even an apparently ‘enlightened’ author such as Thucydides still had a lot to say about the divine, despite his well-documented efforts to edit the supernatural out of human history as much as possible. And we have not even touched upon several types of representations of the Greek gods and goddesses (e.g. in the form of funerary reliefs, as statues or on pots) which feature their very own modes of storytelling. These examples illustrate a remarkable propensity of ancient Greek views about the supernatural to draw on different kinds of narratives to evolve: storytelling is indeed central to the way ideas about the gods circulated in ancient Greece.

Yet, despite the centrality of narrative to ancient Greek views about the supernatural, it is surprising to find that this aspect of ancient Greek religion has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. There are many reasons for this. There is still, for example, a marked tendency in classical scholarship to ‘mine’ literary texts for information on ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices. More frequently than not, this involves divorcing the religious content from its narrative form, with the ultimate goal of describing a reality beyond the text. Some scholars have also trodden a different path and investigated the religious views of individual authors such as Herodotus, Xenophon or Plato – or, indeed, of entire genres, such as ancient Greek oratory, tragedy or historiography. Yet what has largely remained subject to debate is if and how such ‘intellectualist’ or ‘literary’ religions are part of ‘lived’ religious beliefs and practices.

Moreover, to investigate the religious views in and of these authors and genres is not the same as enquiring into the principles and practices by which these views are presented to us through narrative.

Introduction

So far we have focused mainly on the features of oracle stories told in Classical times. In particular we considered how the oracular discourse evolved throughout the different genres of Greek thought and literature. We found that oracle stories, no matter whether told in historiography, Greek tragedy or, indeed, philosophy, feature similar themes and story patterns illustrating a number of recurrent views about the nature of the gods and their availability to human knowledge. In all instances we found that these stories – albeit in different ways – negotiate historical, literary and philosophico-religious dimensions. We will return to this point in the conclusion to this book where we consider the ‘poetics’ of the oracular discourse in more detail.

The next two chapters focus on two later tellings of oracle stories in the literature of Roman Greece. They not only highlight the astonishing continuity of oracle stories over time but also complicate the picture in that they illustrate an aspect of Delphic oracle stories which has so far not featured prominently in this study: the way in which these stories also draw on other representations of divinity. Both chapters consider Delphic oracle stories, which feature statues in addition to oracular utterances; both chapters investigate the interplay between oracles and statues as different forms of divine representation.

Chapter 5 explores material representations of divinity by focusing on the circulation of objects in ancient Greek culture more generally. It enquires into how religious storytelling draws on the principles and practices of how the materiality of objects was conceived in ancient Greece and explores how the oracular interferes with this materiality.

Objects and Identities

When he was a young boy of just nine years of age, Theagenes of Thasos, on his way back from school, happened to walk past a divine statue cast in bronze, on display in the agora. Because he liked it, he shouldered it and carried it home. At first, the people of Thasos were not impressed by this remarkable display of physical strength. Had it not been for the intervention of a well-respected elder citizen they would have put the boy to death for this sacrilegious act. Instead Theagenes was told to return the statue to its original location, which he did, again showing off a degree of physical strength and endurance, extraordinary for an adult, not to mention a child.

Introduction

The basic facts of the case are well established: in 399 BCE Socrates, then in his seventieth year and arguably Athens’ most (in)famous philosopher, was accused of impiety (asebeia) as well as of corrupting the youth. He was tried in front of a citizen jury of 501 judges, found guilty and sentenced to capital punishment. He was executed by hemlock in the presence of some of his closest friends and admirers. With his death Athens lost an illustrious public figure and an intellectual who, for decades, had been a feature of public life in the city.

Plato and Xenophon, both students and admirers of Socrates, tell the story of his trial. Their respective Apologies are accounts of Socrates’ defence at court – if one may want to call it that. As some scholars (and indeed Xenophon himself) have pointed out, Socrates’ address to the citizen jury borders at times on the offensive and frivolous, in many ways confirming the prejudice held against him. Overall his speech at court seems to have antagonised rather than appeased the jury, with the result that a majority of jurors (albeit a relatively slim one) found him guilty as charged and an even greater number of jury members subsequently condemned him to death.

Plato's account is much more detailed than Xenophon's, stretching over thirty-five pages in the OCT edition (Xenophon's, by contrast, covers a mere eight and a half OCT pages). Plato was himself present at the trial and so able to give a first-hand account of the proceedings. Yet his Apology is by no means a verbatim report of Socrates’ words spoken at court. His text ultimately offers a narration of Socrates’ address in light of his subsequent conviction and Plato's very own personal interest in presenting his teacher in a positive light. So while large parts of Plato's Apology look like a forensic speech, the dialogue offers perhaps above all an account of Socratic ethics from Plato's point of view.

In his appearance at court, Plato's Socrates variously refers to an oracle he allegedly received at Delphi many years earlier. Apparently his friend Chaerephon had once consulted the Pythia with the question whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The oracle, which Socrates summarises for us only indirectly, without quoting it verbatim, had allegedly responded that nobody was wiser.

Introduction

In book 6 of Herodotus’ Histories, the Spartan king Leotychides tells the following story to the Athenians. Three generations ago, there was a Spartan by the name of Glaucus, who had a reputation all over the Greek world for being a particularly honest man. A stranger from Miletus once visited this Glaucus. The stranger called upon Glaucus’ honesty and handed over half his money for safekeeping. He also gave him some tallies and instructed him to release the funds only to whoever was able to produce the corresponding halves. Years passed. One day the sons of the Milesian stranger turned up at Sparta, showed the tokens and demanded the return of the money. Glaucus, however, denied any knowledge of the matter and sent the Milesians back home empty-handed. After their departure, he immediately set out for Delphi to ask the oracle whether he could keep the money, whereupon the Pythia allegedly gave the following response:

When Glaucus heard this dreadful response, he immediately regretted his question and asked the Pythia for forgiveness. Yet the priestess responded that to ask something like this actually amounted to doing it. Glaucus sent for the Milesians and returned the funds, to no avail: the oracle's dreadful prediction still came true. And Leotychides takes great care to make sure that the point of the story is not lost on his Athenian audience: ‘And now, gentlemen, I come to the real point of my story. Today Glaucus has not a single living descendant; not a family in Sparta bears his name; it has been totally rooted out (ἐκτέτριπταί τε πρόρριζος).

Introduction

This appendix to the study of Delphic oracle stories is focused on a different kind of text, featuring yet a different kind of storytelling from the one under investigation in the main chapters of the book: Plutarch's dialogue The E at Delphi. In this dialogue Plutarch (c. 50–120 CE), who was himself a priest at Delphi, recounts a conversation he had many years earlier when he was still a young man about the meaning of an ominous letter E that could be found at the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. The text is part of the so-called Moralia, a collection of seventy-one essays and dialogues, written by Plutarch himself, all similar in style and register but extraordinarily diverse in content, touching upon themes as different as On How to Listen to a Lecture or How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend. Three of these texts, including our treatise, constitute the so-called Pythian dialogues. Set at Delphi, these dialogues investigate questions pertaining to oracular divination, including the reasons for the decline of oracles in Plutarch's time (Obsolescence of Oracles) or the question why oracles were apparently spoken in a much more prosaic fashion in Plutarch's time than in older times (Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse).

In this instance, the participants in the dialogue (most notably Ammonius, Lamprias, Plutarch, Theon, Eustrophus, Nicander) enquire into the meaning of the epsilon which had allegedly been on display at Delphi since time immemorial. The legendary Seven Sages of Greece allegedly dedicated the original wooden version of the E sometime in the distant past. By Plutarch's time it had been ‘upgraded’ twice: the wooden epsilon was first replaced by a bronze version dedicated by the Athenians, and later by a gold version of the same letter, dedicated by Livia, the wife of the Roman emperor Augustus.

Classical scholars have variously sought to determine the location of the letter, based on references to the sign in a number of literary sources, the archaeological evidence and its depiction on Roman coins (see fig. 1). Unfortunately, however, this has invariably proved difficult. According to Plutarch's treatise, the epsilon was on display somewhere towards the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, together with a number of other Delphic maxims, most notably perhaps the famous ‘know thyself’ (gnōthi seauton).

Introduction

This chapter starts from a somewhat eccentric source: an excerpt from Semus’ lost History of Delos, dating perhaps from the late third century BCE. It is preserved in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, a loosely conceived collection of learned tales and fragments of earlier authors dating from the third century CE. It tells a rather odd story of laughter – lost, then regained – which may leave the modern reader slightly puzzled (not just left out on the joke). After all, the story features the rather disturbing image of a human protagonist laughing about a divine representation and – as so often in Delphic oracle stories – what is at stake in the peculiar string of events is by no means immediately obvious.

By relating the series of incidents featured in the story to the ‘surrounding world of significance’, and by drawing various lines between the text and its cultural, historical and, indeed, cognitive context, the joke at the core of this story will become clear. More importantly, perhaps, Greek ways of thinking about the gods become intelligible, a ‘theology’ of ancient Greek religion that we already encountered in a different form in the previous chapter. So, let us start at the beginning: with the story itself.

Parmeniscus’ Journey