Also the dragon, earthborn, in craftiness coming behind thee,
and was defeated in battle and slain in those very spots by |B| Neochorus, a man of Haliartus, who bore a shield with the device of a serpent. There are many such answers given to the old people, all hard to grasp and remember, which I need not give you at length, since you know them.
XXVIII. ‘Our present settled condition, out of which the questions now put to the God arise, I welcome and accept. There is great peace and tranquillity, war has been made to cease, there are no wanderings in exile, no revolutions, no tyrannies, no other plagues or ills in Greece asking for potent and extraordinary remedies. But when there is nothing complicated or mysterious, or dangerous, only questions on petty |C| popular matters, like school themes, “whether I should marry”, “whether I should sail”, “whether I should lend”, and the most serious responses given to states are concerning harvests and cattle-breeding and public health, to clothe these in metre, to devise circumlocutions, to introduce strange words on questions calling for a plain, concise answer, is what an ambitious sophist might do, bedizening the oracle for his own glory. But the Pythia is a lady in herself, and when she descends thither and is in the presence of the God, she cares for truth rather than for |D| glory, or for the praise or blame of men.
XXIX. ‘So perhaps ought we too to feel. As it is, in a sort of agony of fear, lest the place should lose its reputation of three thousand years, and a few persons should think lightly of it and cease to visit the oracle, for all the world as if it were a sophist’s school, we apologize, and make up reasons and theories about things which we neither know nor ought to know. We smooth the critic down, and try to persuade him, whereas we ought to bid him be gone—
He shall first suffer in a loss not light—[[125]]
|E| if that is the view which he takes of the God. Thus, while you welcome and admire what the Wise Men of old have written up: “Know thyself”, and “Nothing too much”, not least because of the brevity which includes in a small compass a close hammer-beaten sense, you blame the oracles because they mostly use concise, plain, direct phrases. It is with sayings like those of the Wise Men as with streams compressed into a narrow channel; there is no distinctness or transparency to the eye of the mind, but if you look into what has been written or said about them by those who have wished to learn the full meaning of each, you |F| will not easily find longer treatises elsewhere. The language of the Pythia illustrates what mathematicians mean by calling a straight line the shortest between the same points; it makes no bending, or curve, or doubling or ambiguity; it lies straight towards truth, it takes risks,[[126]] its good faith is open to examination, and it has never yet been found wrong; it has filled the shrine |409| with offerings from Barbarians and Greeks, and has beautified it with noble buildings and Amphictyonic fittings. Why, you see for yourselves many buildings added which were not here formerly, many restored which were ruinous or destroyed. As new trees spring up by the side of those in vigorous bearing, so the Pylaea flourishes together with Delphi and is fed upon the same meat; the plenty of the one causes the other to take on shapeliness and figure and a beauty of temples, and halls of meeting and fountains of water, such as it never had in the thousand years before. Now those who dwell about Galaxius |B| in Boeotia felt the manifest presence of the God in the abundance and more than abundance of milk:
From all the kine and every flock,
Plenteous as water from the rock,
Came welling, gurgling on its way
The milk that day.