‘In ancient times … hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people … the Druids. No one knows who they were … or what they were doing. But their legacy remains … hewn into the living rock … of Stonehenge.’
The unforgettable opening of Spinal Tap’s song ‘Stonehenge’ was much in my head as I read this scholarly history of Delphi. We use the word ‘delphic’ to mean riddling, ambiguous, difficult to parse. It applies just as much to the history of Ancient Greece’s most sacred site as it does to the pronouncements of its oracle.
No one knows who they were … or what they were doing. Almost all the sources for what went on in the sanctuary — how the oracle was consulted, how it was inspired, what it said, who ran it — were compiled centuries after the fact, often with ideological axes to grind, and they contradict each other.
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