For a thousand years the most authoritative voice in Greek religion belonged to a woman on a tripod at Delphi, and to the priests who framed what she said.
The oracle and the Pythia
Delphi was sacred to Apollo, who in myth had killed the earth-serpent Python and taken the site. Prophecies were delivered by the Pythia, a priestess who, seated over a cleft in the sanctuary, entered a trance and spoke on the god's behalf; her utterances were rendered into verse or prose by attendant priests. Consultations happened on fixed days; states and individuals paid a fee and sacrificed before enquiring. The classic scholarship of Joseph Fontenrose distinguished the historically credible responses from the later legendary ones. The god was held to speak ambiguously, and the tradition preserved famously double-edged answers.
The navel of the world
A stone called the omphalos marked Delphi as the earth's centre, the point where two eagles released by Zeus from opposite ends of the world had met. The sanctuary carried the maxims "know thyself" and "nothing in excess", inscribed at the temple and treated as distilled Greek wisdom. Delphi guided colonisation, ratified laws and adjudicated between cities; it was a genuinely panhellenic institution, and the treasuries lining its Sacred Way were built by rival states to display their offerings.
The Pythian Games and the end
Every four years the site hosted the Pythian Games, second only to the Olympics, combining athletic and, distinctively, musical and poetic contests in Apollo's honour. The oracle's influence declined under Roman rule and ceased when the Christian emperors closed the pagan sanctuaries at the end of the fourth century CE. The ruins on the slope of Mount Parnassus are a major archaeological site and the source of some of the finest surviving Greek sculpture.