priestesses
read the future in the rustling of the leaves and in the creaking of the
branches, in the bubbling of a spring and in the sounds made by brazen
cymbals hung near the sacred shrine. Herodotus visited this oracle, and
gives the names of the three priestesses who officiated in his time.
These priestesses--Promenia, Timarete, Nicandra--related to him a very
interesting story concerning the origin of the oracle. They traced its
sacred legends back to the worship in the famous temple of Thebes in
Egypt. Two doves, they said, flew away one day from the city of Thebes
and took their flight into distant lands. One alighted in Libya, on the
spot where the oracle of Jupiter Ammon was later established; while the
other, crossing the sea, flew as far as Dodona, where, perching on an
oak, in human voice she commanded those that heard her to establish
there an oracle of Zeus. For this reason the priestesses were known as
Peliades, or doves. When, however, Herodotus inquired of the priests in
Thebes about the tradition, they told a different story: that two
priestesses of their temple had once been carried off from Egypt by the
Phoenicians and sold into slavery, and that one of these priestesses
finally established herself at Dodona. So, whether dove or priestess,
the tradition of the Egyptian origin of the oracle seemed confirmed.

Apollo, however, rather than Zeus, was the god of prophecy, and it was
generally in connection with his shrines that oracles were spoken.
Usually, fountains whose water was supposed to influence the workings of
the mind, or caverns whence escaped a gas producing delirium or
hallucination, were regarded as places where the divinity was present.
Hence there existed numerous oracles of Apollo in Greece proper and in
Asia Minor. The most celebrated of the latter was the oracle of the
Didymaean Apollo at Branchidae, near Miletus, where a priestess uttered
prophecies, seated on a wheel-shaped disk, after she had bathed the hem
of her robe and her feet in the sacred spring and had breathed the
vapors arising from it.

The most illustrious of all the oracles of ancient Hellas was at Delphi,
which is situated, like a vast amphitheatre, above the beautiful plain
of Cirrha in Phocis, with the double summits of Parnassus forming the
background. Delphi became the centre of the Hellenic religion, and the
fame of its oracle extended as far as to Lydia in the east, and to Rome
and the Etruscans in the west. At