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Thus it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth year the ephors should choose a clear and moonless night and sitting down observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a meteor or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned against the deity, and they suspended him from his functions until the Delphic or Olympic oracle should reinstate him in them.
Of its many translations, it is conceded that none have done, and none can do it justice; they can do little more than give its plan and general character. The following, in brief, is the story of this famous tragedy: OEdipus Tyrannus. La'i-us, King of Thebes, was told by the Delphic oracle that if a son should be born to him, by the hand of that son he should surely die.
Then came Philiscus the poet, the priest of Osiris, with all the servants of the god; then the Delphic tripods, the prizes which were to be given in the wrestling matches; that for the boys was nine cubits high, and that for the men twelve cubits high.
"The only Scripture that occurs to me just now," said Hiram, in a hush of the gale, "is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." That was veritably a Delphic utterance at that moment, had Hiram only known it. Some one has suggested that there is a providence that watches over children and fools. It is certain that chance does play strange antics. Men have fallen from balloons and lived.
To all this fell to be added the financial embarrassment; Sulla had already been obliged to empty the treasuries of the Olympian Zeus, of the Delphic Apollo, and of the Epidaurian Asklepios, for which the gods were compensated by the moiety, confiscated by way of penalty, of the Theban territory.
The Erinyes brought forward their accusation, and Orestes made the command of the Delphic oracle his excuse. When the court voted and the voices were equally divided, Orestes was acquitted by the command of Minerva. Byron, in "Childe Harold," Canto IV., alludes to the story of Orestes: "O thou who never yet of human wrong Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis!
But Croesus, as a king, a foreigner, and a suitor of unexampled munificence, was privileged, especially because the ministers of the Delphic temple had doubtless found it easy to extract the secret by bribery from some one of the royal mission.
"Would you like to hear what was prophesied of me?" "What a question!" "Listen then; the saying I will repeat to you came to me from no less an oracle than the Delphic Pythia: "'That which thou boldest most precious and dear Shall be torn from thy keeping, And from the heights of Olympus, Down shalt thou fall in the dust." "Is that all?" "Nay two consolatory lines follow." "And they are ?"
If she would make the regeneration of homes the great achievement of our day, then would she indeed come with promise and blessing. But, alas! she is so far vagrant in her habits a fortune-telling gipsy, not a true, loving, useful woman. Unhappily for Mrs. Emerson, it was the weird-eyed, fortune-telling gipsy whose Delphic utterances had bewildered her mind.
The presence of this article, is easy to explain: it typifies the human heart, which, when perfectly placid and clear, reflects the very image of the Deity. When you stand, therefore, in front of the shrine to worship, you see your own image reflected on its shining surface, and the act of worship is tantamount to the old Delphic injunction, "Know Thyself."
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