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A priestess, or Pythia, who was seldom or never seen by any of the profane vulgar, was the immediate vehicle of communication with the God. She was cut off from all intercourse with the world, and was carefully trained by the attendant priests.
The Son of God is at enmity with the serpent; the serpent pursues a woman, and is trodden under foot by the Son. Zeus is the god of the Greeks; Apollo is his son; Leto or Latona is pursued by Python, the serpent, and is slain by Apollo. To commemorate this deed a temple was erected at Delhi to Apollo, and the priestess was called the Pythia.
The people were so much distressed that they sent at last to ask the Pythia what they should do; and the Pythia said that there was only one way to save the land from destruction, that they must give the king's daughter, Andromeda, to the monster to be devoured.
"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 ?"
What the Pythia had foreshown to himself, she might foreshow to others; and, when tempted by the same princely bribes, she might authorize and kindle the same aspiring views in other great officers.
"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 ?"
A few lessons from my teacher of rhetoric hard by the Forum I will give you a letter to him when you become wise enough to accept a suggestion which I am reminded to make you a little practise of the art of mystery, and Delphi will receive you as Apollo himself. At the sound of your solemn voice, the Pythia will come down to you with her crown.
Aristomachus nodded assent, and Phryxus read aloud a second time the answer of the Pythia: "If once the warrior hosts from the snow-topped mountains descending Come to the fields of the stream watering richly the plain, Then shall the lingering boat to the beckoning meadows convey thee Which to the wandering foot peace and a home will afford.
In the literature she appears first in the sixth century B.C. along with the Pythia, but she was then thought of as well established and ancient.
"There is," says Emanuel Deutsch, "a peculiar something supposed to inhere in epilepsy. The Greeks called it a divine disease. Bacchantic and chorybantic furor were God-inspired stages. The Pythia uttered her oracles under the most distressing signs. Symptoms of convulsion were ever needed as a sign of the divine."
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