Dodona: The Oracle That Answered Everybody

A man named Lysanias had a question he could not ask anyone at home. He scratched it into a strip of lead about the size of a bus ticket, folded it shut, and handed it in at the sanctuary of Dodona: is the child that Annyla is carrying mine?

The strip survived. So did roughly four thousand others, lifted out of the mud of a sanctuary in the mountains of north-western Greece over the last century and a half. They are the nearest thing the ancient world has left us to a transcript of what ordinary people actually lay awake worrying about.

The oldest oracle, and it was a tree

Dodona sat in Epirus, in high country that stayed cold and remote all through antiquity. The same corner of Greece held the oracle of the dead on the Acheron, a long day's walk to the south-west. The god at Dodona was Zeus, called Zeus Naios, worshipped beside a female partner named Dione. Herodotus says it was the oldest oracle in Greece and passes on the explanation: two black doves flew from Egyptian Thebes, and one settled at Dodona and spoke with a human voice, telling the people to set up an oracle of Zeus. The priestesses who served it were called the Peleiades, the Doves.

Homer already takes the place for granted. In the Iliad Achilles prays to "Zeus of Dodona," whose interpreters, the Selloi, sleep on the ground and never wash their feet. In the Odyssey Odysseus claims to have gone there to hear the will of Zeus "from the high oak with its crown of leaves." That is the odd, stable heart of the place. The god lived in a tree, with a spring at its roots, and for a long stretch of its history the sanctuary had almost nothing built around it: the oak, and a ring of bronze cauldrons on tripods.

Nobody is sure how it answered

The mechanism is genuinely unsettled, and the ancient sources do not agree. They variously describe priests reading the rustle of the oak leaves, the noise of the bronze cauldrons ringing against each other in the wind, doves moving in the branches, and the Peleiades speaking while inspired, the way the Pythia at Delphi did. Later visitors mention a bronze statue of a boy holding a whip, set up so that the wind swung the lashes against a cauldron and kept it sounding. "The bronze of Dodona" became a Greek proverb for a person who will not stop talking.

And then there are the lots, which are the least picturesque option and may have been the most common. Cicero passes on a story from Callisthenes: before the battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE the Spartans sent to Dodona to ask about victory, and the pet ape of the king of Molossia got loose, knocked over the jar that held the lots, and scattered them and the other equipment across the floor. The priestess called it the worst possible sign and told the Spartans to think about survival rather than winning. Whatever else was happening at Dodona, there was a jar of lots on the floor to be knocked over.

Many of the surviving tablets fit that. They are phrased for a yes or a no, sometimes laying out two courses, "whether by doing this, or by doing that." Some carry an extra mark or letter that may be the answer. Some were used more than once, the old question scraped off and a new one cut in, which is hard to picture in a shrine of inspired verse and easy to picture in a room where you paid, wrote your question down, and drew a token.

Whose baby, which god, and should I keep sheep

The contrast with Delphi is the thing that jumps out. Delphi's recorded questions are full of cities: found a colony where, go to war or not, adopt this cult or not. Dodona has some of that too, from Corcyra and Tarentum and the kings of Epirus. But most of the strips are somebody's private life.

They ask whether to marry, and whether to marry this particular person, and whether to marry now. They ask whether the enquirer will have children, and by which wife, and to which god he should pray to get them. A man called Hermon asks Zeus and Dione which god to approach for "useful children" by a woman named Kretaia, on top of the one child he already has. They ask whether to take up sheep-farming, whether to sail as a trader, whether to stay on the land, whether it is safe to lend money to a named man. They ask which god to petition about failing eyes or a bad chest, the same practical instinct that sent people to sleep in the sanctuary of Asclepius and wait for a cure. One well-known strip asks the king of the gods to name the person who stole some wool and some cushions.

We have Lysanias's question about Annyla. We do not have the reply. That is true of almost all of them: the questions are cut deep into the lead in a careful hand, and the answers, if they were ever written at all, were a scratch, a token, or a word spoken aloud and gone.

Sacked, then left in a drawer

Dodona was plundered by the Aetolians in 219 BCE and rebuilt. It was wrecked again when the Romans devastated Epirus in 167 BCE and carried off much of its population. It kept going in a reduced way into the Roman period, the oak still standing when Pausanias wrote about it, and faded out with the rest of pagan worship. A late tradition says a Christian finally cut the tree down.

The tablets started coming out of the ground in 1875, and more in the 1930s, and then most of them went into storage. A French scholar published 167 of them in 2006. The full set, more than four thousand strips, appeared in two Greek volumes in 2013, and the work of actually reading them is still going on, with a project now re-editing the corpus online from better images than the first editors had. Lysanias folded his doubt about Annyla into a piece of lead well over two thousand years ago, and it sat in a box for most of a century before anyone published what it said.