Oracle of Delphi: Ethylene Fumes, Oleander Smoke and the Croesus Riddle

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Delphi, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, was to the Greeks the navel of the world: Zeus released two eagles from opposite ends of the earth and marked their meeting point with the omphalos stone. The site, once called Pytho after the rotting serpent Python, began as a shrine to Gaia before Apollo seized it, and Aeschylus wrote openly of the god as an invader. The Pythia, a local peasant woman of blameless life, sat on a tripod in the adyton and prophesied only nine months a year, while priests turned her words into ambiguous hexameter, as King Croesus learned when the great empire he destroyed proved to be his own.

Plutarch, himself a priest at Delphi, described sweet-smelling vapors, and in the late 1990s geologists found two fault lines crossing beneath the Temple of Apollo that could release ethylene and ethane. A rival toxicological theory points to oleander leaves mistaken for laurel. Tithes of war spoils filled treasuries along the Sacred Way under the Amphictyonic Council, until Gauls, Sulla, Nero and Constantine stripped the site and Theodosius I shut the oracle in 381 AD. In 1893 French archaeologists relocated the village of Kastri, built over the ruins, to dig it out.

• Apollo was said to arrive disguised as a dolphin and press Cretan sailors into service as his priests.
• The Athenian Treasury commemorated Marathon in 490 BC, and the Siphnians paid for theirs with a tithe from silver mines later flooded by the sea.
• Pythian Games competitors in music and poetry went before the athletes, and winners received only a crown of laurel.
• The temple carried the maxims know thyself and nothing in excess, beside a mysterious letter E that Plutarch wrote essays trying to explain.
• The bronze serpent column Constantine took to Constantinople still stands in Istanbul.