Pythia

Guest Post

The Circle of Fame: Apollo, the Corps de Ballet, and the Song of the Muses at Delphi

2020.06.11 | By Domenico Giuseppe Muscianisi §0. The Pythian movement of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo opens with a great scene of song-and-dance on Olympus (verses 182–206), where certain deities perform together. I will argue that choral melic poetry plays a prime role in this section of the Hymn: in fact, these verses share many features in diction and imagery with melic poetry, and in addition they describe a choral… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

Some jottings on the pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle

2016.11.03 | By Gregory Nagy These jottings—that is all they are—stem from my notes for a talk that I am presenting 2016.11.03. The title of the talk is: “The dynamism of mouvance in the pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle.” Why do I say mouvance in my title? It is because this term captures what I plan to argue about the verbal medium used by the Pythia in making responses to… Read more