What was the oracle of Delphi?
A good place to start with general questions such as yours is Yahoo! Reference, which offers a dictionary, thesaurus, almanac, encyclopedia, and several other cool resources, all rolled into one search box. We tried searching on “oracle at delphi” and found the most promising result to be a Britannica encyclopedia entry about oracles in general. The encyclopedists tell us that oracles were a “source of a divine communication delivered in response to a petitioner’s request,” and “the most famous was that of Apollo at Delphi, where the medium was a woman over 50 called the Pythia.” There were many other details listed, some really quite fascinating, but we wouldn’t want to spoil the fun of reading them yourself. (Suffice it to say, one involved “mounting a sacred tripod.”) We can mention that the oracle’s responses were “often highly ambiguous” and required a third
