read abroad, or gathered
together. At this Oenomanus loses all patience with the Delphian God:
"This contest," exclaims he, "between father and daughter, is very
becoming the deities! It is excellent that there should be contrary
inclinations and interests in heaven! Poor wizzard, thou art ignorant
who the children are that shall see Salamis perish; whether Greeks or
Persians. It is certain they must either be one or the other; but thou
needest not have told so openly that thou knowest not what. Thou
concealest the time of the battle under these fine poetical expressions
'_either when Ceres is spread abroad, or gathered together_:' and thou
wouldst cajole us with such pompous language! who knows not that if
there be a sea-fight, it must either be in seed-time or harvest? It is
certain it cannot be in winter. Let things go how they will, thou wilt
secure thyself by this Jupiter whom Minerva is endeavouring to appease.
If the Greeks lose the battle, Jupiter proved inexorable to the last; if
they gain it, why then Minerva at length prevailed."[19]

Eusebius has preserved some fragments of this criticism on oracles by
Oenomanus. "I might," says Origen, "have recourse to the authority of
Aristotle, and the Peripatetics, to make the Pythoness much suspected. I
might extract from the writings of Epicurus and his sectators an
abundance of things to discredit oracles; and I might shew that the
Greeks themselves made no great account of them."

The reputation of oracles was greatly lessened when they became an
artifice of politics. Themistocles, with a design of engaging the
Athenians to quit Athens, in order to be in a better condition to resist
Xerxes, made the Pythoness deliver an oracle, commanding them to take
refuge in wooden walls. Demosthenes said, that the Pythoness
philippised, to signify that she was gained over by Philip's presents.

CESSATION OF ORACLES.

The cessation of oracles is attested by several prophane authors, as
Strabo, Juvenal, Lucien.

Lucan, and others, Plutarch accounts for the cause of it, either that
the benefits of the gods are not eternal, as themselves are; or that the
genii who presided over oracles, are subject to death; or that the
exhalations of the earth had been exhausted. It appears that the last
reason had been alleged in the time of Cicero, who ridicules it in his
second book of Divination, as if the spirit of prophecy, supposed to be
excited by subterranean effluvia, had evaporate