CHAPTER 1

Authorities

Delos ubi nunc, Phoebe, tua est, ubi Delphica Pytho?Tibullus, Elegies II.3, l. 27

With the revival of pagan antiquity came a revival of interest in itsreligions. The humanist movement, in full swing at the outset of the sixteenthcentury, put itself to setting out and interpreting the classical andpatristic sources on the many aspects of these religions, among whichthe oracles of ancient Greece held a prominent place. By this process theoracles became an object of historical knowledge: in context, individualsources could contribute to the rounded picture of an institution with itsown cultural contours.

With the reading of the Church Fathers, however, the pagan oraclescould also be incorporated into the narrative of Christianity, a narrativein which they stood as symbolic antagonists. Two things above allmarked out the oracles to the humanist scholar. First, as was obviousfrom Cicero and the Greek historians, their answers had been ambiguousand deceitful. 'Among the ancients', one writer noted, 'nothing wasmore trite than the ambiguity of the oracles'. It was not for nothing thatApollo had been called 'Loxias', the crooked one. To a mind impressedwith the virtue of clarity in language, this was a grave fault, and stoodin diametric contrast to the perspicuity of Christian prophecy. Since thenineteenth century, the famous riddling oracles have been largely rejectedas literary or mythical, in favour of more prosaic instances. Before this,only a few had looked past the traditional examples. Sir Thomas Browne,carefully examining a range of oracles from Herodotus, acknowledgedthe variety of Delphic utterance:

Sometimes with that obscurity as argued a fearfull prophecy; sometimesso plainly as might confirm a spirit of difficulty; sometimes morally,deterring from vice and villany; another time vitiously, and in thespirit of bloud and cruelty.

For most, however, oracular ambiguity was assumed. The second factabout the oracles, of still greater significance, was their cessation—anidea spanning pagan as well as Christian literature of antiquity. The humanistsknew, of course, that the cessation of the oracles had occurredwith the miraculous dawn of their own faith. The false, obscure, and immoralhad given way to the true. It was an excellent image for the poet,popular well into the seventeenth century, and again among the Romanticsof a later age. Painters had long depicted the Nativity in the ruins ofa pagan temple, but verse, an oral medium, favoured the silencing of thePythia, herself a poet—even the inventor of poetry. Students of Englishliterature best know the motif from Milton:

The Oracles are dumm,No voice or hideous hummRuns through the arched roof in words deceiving.

It was already present, however, in a snatch of lines from Joannes BaptistaMantuanus:

The gods, who, deprived of majesty,Now yielded their altars to our own rites,And, bearing Christ's yoke on their unwilling necks,No longer gave oracles openly.

Beyond these two points—deceptive ambiguity and cessation—layspecialist knowledge and theology. As the full richness of ancient sources,and especially the Greek, came into view, the oracles could be situatedwith more precision in developing genres of learned endeavour: history,religious ethnography, demonology, scholastic philosophy, and so on.Scholars could begin to debate exactly how the oracles had worked, or ifthey had worked at all. But for this to occur, the sources had to be identified,edited, translated, published. This chapter deals with those sources,and with their transmission from antiquity to early modern thought; thefoundations will thus be laid for the more sophisticated discussions of thenext two hundred years.

If an early modern reader wanted to know about the pagan oracles,he could pick up a book like Conrad Gesner's enormous encyclopaediaof commonplaces, the Pandectae, and rummage around for its sectionon that topic. There the sources on the oracles were laid out neatly, andthe reader was directed in turn to the earlier miscellanies of the Italianhumanists, especially those of Alessandro Alessandri and Caelius Rhodiginus.With these the range of available material had become standard,and they continued to be cited until the eighteenth century.

In conversation, Alessandro and Rhodiginus would have disagreedabout little relating to Delphi and the other oracles, but in print theypresented different aspects of the subject. Alessandro was more interestedin pagan lore, neutral with respect to Christianity, while Rhodiginusincluded patristic material and drew parallels with the religiousphenomena of his day. In each case, the debts are not always clear, andmediaeval tradition is occasionally substituted for reliable classical data,which itself was often already commonplace in antiquity. Thus, whenAlessandro describes Delphi as totius orbis umbilicus, he could have hadit from anywhere, while his claims that Parnassus was in Boeotia, andthat its two peaks were dedicated to Dionysius and Apollo, are incorrectand suppositious respectively. His sources, however, must have includedHerodotus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Pausanias, Plutarch, and Justinus.Rhodiginus drew openly on Plutarch, Cicero, and Diodorus Siculus, buthis key source, Eusebius, is unnamed.

Both compilers chose a moment to break off from paraphrasing theirpagan sources and sound instead a note of Christian censure. Of Delphi,Alessandro comments:

When wicked religion, by which men's own vanity ruined them, hadbeen instilled, important men, eminent in dignity, frequently came herefor counsel from all over the world, and these oracles were held to betrue and by far the most famous of all.

Alessandro's reader would...