Finally, Apollo was pre-eminently a god of the arts and the higher intellectual life, the leader of the Muses, the deity to whom the stateliest forms of music and song were consecrated. In pre- Homeric days the Pean was already his special hymn of praise. In its earliest period the Pythian festival was a musical, not an athletic, contest ; it came to include a competition of poets, and even of painters, thus fulfilling some of the functions of a Royal Academy of Arts. It is, in fact, the dis- tinction of the Greek as compared with other high religions of the world that it conceived of the Divinity as revealed in the achievements of art and human science no less fully than in the moral life of the household and the State.
It remains to give a very brief outline of the Oracular worship of Delphi; for this presents the salient features of the god in the strongest light ; and the Delphic tripod was the chief source of his power, and one of the few bonds of religious union in the Hellenic world. The god had seized upon Delphi or Pytho before the period of the Homeric poems, that is to say, before the Greek colonization of Asia Minor.
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We may ask how Apollo became pre-eminently the prophetic god, while the power of divination was always inherent and often active in every deity and many a departed hero. His special dis- tinction in this sphere was probably not due to any fundamental fact in his original character. The prestige of Delphi was probably the cause rather than the effect of the oracular prestige of Apollo; what it was that won for Delphi this unique position is a question that cannot now be raised.
We are certain, at any rate, that it was from the Delphic rock that the fame of the prophetic god spread far and wide over the Hellenic and non-
ellenic world ; and affiliated shrines were planted in Greece consecrated to Apollo Pythzeus.
The sanctity of the temple was safeguarded by the Amphictyonic Council, whose constitution re- flects the pre-Homeric age of Greece, and whose members bound themselves by a solemn oath to defend the shrine, and never to destroy or allow the destruction of an Amphictyonic State. It was not the fault of the religion that the oath was shamefully broken, and that this ideal of a higher national union remained barren.
The manner of divination at Delphi is interest- ing, and in one respect peculiar. The ‘mantic’ art in Greece has been defined as twofold; one kind being ecstatic, enthusiastic, insane, the other sane and rational. The diviner of the former type is possessed by the spirit of the god who enters into him or her through the sacramental eating or drinking of a substance in which the spirit of the god was supposed to reside; so pos- sessed, the human frame becomes an organ of the voice of God, and the human lips are moved in madness with utterances that the skilled can in- terpret. Of the latter type is soothsaying from birds and other animals, inspection of entrails, the drawing of lots, which may be corn-stalks or notched pieces of wood. The soothsayer in this case is sane enough, and may be said to practise rationally an art or science that is merely based on a false hypothesis. To these we may add a third: prophecy by means of dreams that were supposed to well up from the earth and the earth-spirit into the sleeper’s brain. The second type is regarded as specially Apolline, ecstatic enthusiasm being considered to be alien to the character of the sane god. All three were once practised at Delphi—the third when the Oracle was under the dominion of the earth-goddess, the two former after Apollo’s arrival. But the only divination that was in real vogue there in the historic period was of the ecstatic, enthusiastic, epileptic type. The Pythoness drinks the water of the holy stream, chews the sacred laurel -leaf, mounts the tripod above the chasm whence the mephitic vapours rose, and then speaks words of frenzy which the“Ocvor, the five priests of the noblest Delphic blood, holding office for life, who sit near her listening, interpret according to some system of their own. This oracular mad- ness has been supposed to be un-Apolline, and due to the strong influence of the Bacchie cult at Delphi. The theory is plausible, but not con- vincing. The priestess of the Argive shrine of the Pythian Apollo, a very early offshoot of Delphi, was also ‘possessed by the god,’ though the pos- session was wrought by a draught of the blood of the sacred lamb that was offered to him in the night. What strikes us as really un-Apolline is inspiration by means of the subterranean vapour : this may be a heritage from the pre-Apolline and ‘Chthonian’ period of the Oracle, for the subter- raaienas world and its agencies are wholly alien to him.
The Pythoness was merely a virtuous woman, often of humble origin, a mere tool in the hands of
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the ‘Holy Ones.’ The history of the Oracle is really the history of the generations of those”Ogvo, the record, if we could gather it, of their varying attitude towards the national ethics, politics, an religion ; and a complete list of the oracles would ive us a marvellous insight into the average mind of Hellas. For these priests must be taken as reflecting the better average character of the nation, not as inspired teachers with a definite mission and advanced dogma. But their power was really great, and their exercise of it and their claims remind us dimly of the Papal power in the Middle Ages. In one respect their work was evil, and through conservative instinct they lagged behind the growing morality of their age ; many a legend and record attest that, so far from softening the harsher traits in Greek religion, they encouraged and insisted on the maintenance of human sacri- fice. The savage rite gradually passed away in spite of Delphi.