This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Joseph Fontenrose's study of the Delphic oracle's actual documented responses complicates the popular image of ancient prophecy as always mysterious and open to any reading, showing that many recorded oracular answers were in fact specific and practical, addressing real political and civic questions Greek city states brought to Delphi, with the oracle's own priests operating within a documented, ongoing institution.
That documented institutional context matters for a prophecy entry because it shows ancient prophecy was frequently a functioning civic and religious practice with its own procedures, questions submitted, fees paid, priests consulted, rather than only the occasional dramatic pronouncement later legend remembers, and an entry on ancient prophecy records that ordinary, procedural side alongside its more famous individual predictions.
A prophecy entry therefore tries to record a prophecy's actual documented institutional or personal context, who could ask, how an answer was delivered and preserved, wherever that context survives, since Fontenrose's own account shows the institution behind a prophecy is as much a documented fact as the prediction itself. That same institutional discipline belongs in every prophecy entry drawn from the ancient world, wherever comparable evidence of procedure and personnel actually survives.