The Chasm at Delphi

Abstract

Those who have written upon the Greek Oracles in this country have been content, for the most part, to accept without criticism the traditional accounts of the procedure at these institutions. Where the meaning of a custom appears entirely strange and unsympathetic, there seems to be little to choose between one account of its details and another. Truth is hard enough to discover when the subject is intelligible; when the whole sphere of enquiry is dark its claims yield to those of the picturesque. This has been the fate of the oracles; their place in the life of the Greeks cannot be explained to the satisfaction of our reason and therefore they demand that they should be represented to our imagination with all possible violence. But the very reason which makes us prone to accept any account of the oracles and their procedure if it be sufficiently lurid and effective, should make us exercise the greatest caution before we endorse any traditional account as a fact. We are not the first to refuse our approbation to the oracles, and to demand in the place of intellectual conviction a striking appeal to the imagination.