The custom of a woman giving utterance to the decrees of the god originated partly from the peculiar estimation in which women were held by the Dorians, and partly from the natural tendency of the female sex (so often remarked by the ancients) to fits of ecstasy. Prophetesses were elsewhere also frequently connected with temples of Apollo; as, for instance, Manto, during the fabulous age, with the Ismenian and Clarian temples, and Cassandra with that of Thymbra, whose nature was nearly allied to that of the sibyls, who likewise were always connected with temples of the same god. As to the manner in which the responses of the Pythian priestess were delivered, Heracleitus of Ephesus says, that “_the god, whose oracle is at Delphi, neither utters nor conceals any thing, but gives signs_;”(1400) which at least serves to contradict the common idea of the designed ambiguity of this oracle.
This temple must however have lost much of its dignity, when it condescended, for the sake of rich offerings from the Lydian monarch, to answer enigmatically the insidious questions which Crœsus put to the Grecian oracles. In earlier times a Greek would not have dared, without the greatest faith in its responses, to approach the temple, which had regulated almost the whole political state of Greece, conducted its colonies, instituted the sacred armistices, and established by its authority the legislation of Lycurgus. For in general the god had not to announce what _would_, but what _should_ take place; and he frequently declared events not as to happen independently of his injunction, but as the consequence of his answers. All Dorians were in a certain state of dependence on the Pythian temple; and as long as that race possessed the ascendency in Greece, the hearth in the centre of the earth (μεσόμφαλος ἑστία), with its eternal fire, at Pytho,(1401) was considered as the Prytaneum and religious centre of the whole of Greece.(1402)
9. In ancient Greece, however, prophecy was by no means derived altogether from Apollo, but merely that species of it which proceeded from a rapturous and entranced state of the soul. Nevertheless, the enthusiastic and imaginative frame of mind, in which cool grottos, with their flowing waters and hollow echoes, seemed to transport the votary into a former world, was derived from the Nymphs: and the Bacidæ, who were considered as under the influence of the Nymphs (νυμφόπληκτοι), have no more to do with Apollo than the σεληνιακοὶ, among whom Musæus is reckoned.