4. From the time of the Peloponnesian War the ora- cles ceased to exert any considerable influence over the more intelligent Greeks. They were still consulted, and •were treated with external respect. They might be employed for the furtherance of political and religious aims, and to operate on the multitude ; but there could be little genuine faith in them when the temples to which they were attached were unscrupulously plun- dered for the maintenance of domestic wars. Moreover, oracle was weighed against oracle ; contradictory replies were expected from rival establishments; and the un- satisfactory reply of one divinity was set aside for the more encouraging response of another. This discord in heaven was turned into ridicule by Aristophanes.
The decay of reputation naturally promoted and at- tended the decline of oracles. The diminution of re- spect commenced early, as even before the Persian wars the Pythoness was alleged to have been corrupted by the Alcmreonidse. But popular superstitions expire slowly, especially when supported by organized institutions, and by a special class interested in their maintenance. The image -makers and carvers and jewellers and silver- smiths and priests, who live by the temple, will long succeed in making the multitude cry out, " Great is Di- ana of the Ephesians." The Epicureans, in the Mace- donian period, might laugh at the Delphic responses, and jeer at Apollo, the god of poetry, for composing verses far inferior to those of Homer, whom he was be- lieved to have inspired. Indeed, the halting metres and loose composition of the oracles were among the ear- liest causes of the contempt into which they fell, and gave as little evidence of supernatural agency as do the seances of modern spiritualists. Still, however, oracular instructions continued to be vented and vended, and were received with wondering faith by the multitude, however suspicious they might be in the estimation of the wise.
It is not easy to determine precisely the period of the actual cessation of oracles. .Such uncertainty is inevi- table, as they were only gradually extinguished. An old and popular tradition is that they were silenced at once by tlie Advent ; and this opinion was employed in a very serious maimer by Milton in his juvenile Hymn on the Nativity. The same statement is made in the solemn prose of Isaac Barrow in his eighteenth Se?-mon on the Creed : "At the appearance of .Icsus and his doc- trine, his (Satan's) altars were deserted, his temples fell down, his oracles were dumb, his arts were supplanted, all his worship and kingdom were quite subverted." This story of the cessation seems to have been started by'Eusebius in the 4th century, and perhaps to have
been adopted in a more unrestricted form than was de- signed by hira. It is apparently connected with the fable of the death of the god Pan, and with the myth of Thammuz, which was commented on by the rabbi Maimonides. No weight, however, can be attached to the representation. The oracles had been decaying for centuries before the Christian rera, as they prolonged their existence in a more and more languishing condi- tion for centuries after it. Cicero remarks that the Delphic shrine was no longer veracious, and declares that as long ago as the times of Pj-rrhus Apollo had ceased to make verses {Be I)iv. I, xix, 37 ; III, Ivi, 176). Juvenal (^Sat, vi, 555-6) notes the silence of the oracle of Delphi :
"Qnouiam Delphis oracnla cessant, Et genus huraanum damuat caligo futuri."
But Juvenal's allusion is to the temporary suppression of the oracle by Nero. It was restored by Hadrian, and consulted for two hundred years more. Plutarch, in a special inquiry into the failure of oracles (De Defeciu Oracidoruni) does not deny their contemporaneous ex- istence. He says that the oracles of Boeotia were silent. He W'Ould not have particularized Boeotia if they had been extinct everywhere else. Indeed, the emperor Trajan, the contemporarA' and supposed patron of Plu- tarch, consulted the oracle at Heliopolis previous to the Parthian expedition, with little faith apparently; but he could not have consulted it at all if the oracles had become entirely mute. The story is a curious one, and exhibits the half-believing incredulity of times when old faith has withered into feeble superstition. Trajan sent his inquiry by letter to Heliopolis. The god direct- ed the reply to be made by a sealed letter. When open- ed, it was found blank. Trajan's inquiry had been a blank epistle. Pausanias, in the third or fourth quarter of the 2d century, mentions that the oracle of Amphi- lochus at Mallus, in Cilicia, was then in the highest re- pute. Its superiority could not have been asserted if there had been no others with which to compare it; yet its solitary existence would disprove the absolute extinction of oracular communications. Lucian also, in several of his spicy brochures, mentions oracles still con- sulted. Even after Christianity had become the religion of the empire, the belief in oracles still survived, and was not allowed to hunger altogether without gratifica- tion. The evidence is furnished by an incident record- ed by Sozomen {Hist. Eccles. v, 20). The Cissar Gallus, in the latter part of the reign of Constantius, succeeded in crushing out the oracle of Apollo at Daphne, near Antioch, bv transporting thither the relics of St, Baby- las. When Julian the Apostate endeavored to revive the oracle, he was informed by it that it was silenced by the dead bodies which closed its mouth. The final ex- tirpation of oracles and oracular cells may with great probability be ascribed to the measures of Theodosius the Great, which deprived the temples of their endow- ments, and \vithdrew from the Pagan priesthood, pro- phetic and unprophetic, their means of subsistence. Their mouths \vere closed at last, not by dead bodies, but by the want of anything to put into them. See Bayle^ Diet. Hist, et Critique (Index, s. v. Oracles) ; Van Dale, Disputationes (1683) ; Moebius, Tract. Philologico- Thenlog. (1685); Fontenelle, Traite IHstorique des Dieuxet des Demons du Paf/anisme (Delft, 1606) ; Baltus, Reponse a VHistoire des Oracles of Fontenelle (1709) ; Hullraann, Wiirdirptng des Delphischen Orakels (Bonn, 1837) ; Klausen. in Ersch u. GruhdT'a Encyklopddie,s,\: Orakel; Mitford, IHstorij of Greece; Grote, History of Greece, pt, ii, ch, ii. (G. F. H.)