Before Xerxes's invasion of Greece in 480 BCE, Athens sent envoys to consult the Delphic oracle twice. The first response was uniformly grim, telling the Athenians to flee to the ends of the earth; deterred, they returned to the temple as suppliants and asked for a kinder word. The second response was still troubling but held out one hope: that a wooden wall alone would not fall and would save the Athenians and their children, and that holy Salamis would bring death to the sons of women, whether at the sowing or at the harvest of the grain. The professional interpreters read the wooden wall as the old thorn palisade around the Acropolis and the Salamis line as a coming Athenian defeat there. Themistocles argued before the assembly that if the oracle meant destruction for the Athenians it would have called Salamis wretched rather than divine, so the wooden wall must mean the fleet and the coming disaster must fall on the enemy rather than on Athens.
Facts
Fulfillment
Claimed FulfillmentThat the wooden wall, rightly understood as the Athenian fleet rather than the timber palisade on the Acropolis, would not fall, and that the destruction named at holy Salamis would come down on the Persian invaders rather than on Athens. 1 Documented ResponseAthens accepted Themistocles's reading. The city was evacuated to Salamis, Aegina and Troezen, and the Athenian contingent, the largest in the combined Greek fleet, fought in the straits at Salamis in September 480 BCE. The Persian fleet was decisively defeated, and Xerxes withdrew the greater part of his army from Greece within the year, a sequence the Athenian tradition read as the wooden wall having held exactly as promised and the destruction at holy Salamis having fallen, as Themistocles argued it would, on the Persians rather than on the Greeks. 1 Sources
Primary SourceHerodotus, Histories, Book 7, chapters 140 to 144. 1 Origins
Attributed Author / CompilerThe Pythia at Delphi, the priestess of Apollo who delivered both responses to the Athenian envoys. 1 Disputed
Documented ResponseModern scholarship questions how much of the story as Herodotus tells it, writing a generation or more after the events, reflects a response genuinely delivered in 481 BCE rather than a later, more polished retelling. Joseph Fontenrose's catalogue of Delphic responses places the wooden wall oracle among his Questionable Responses rather than accepting it as a straightforwardly historical utterance, the second oracle's specificity, correctly naming Salamis as the decisive site, reading on his own stated method as more consistent with composition after the fact than with genuine prediction. The same caution attaches to a separate, long-standing ancient suspicion that Delphi had made its own accommodations with the advancing Persians and so had reason to hedge, soften or later reshape what it was remembered to have told Athens. 2 Dating
Predicted DateNo calendar date beyond the year of the consultations survives. Herodotus places both responses in 481 BCE, roughly a year before Xerxes's army reached Attica in the late summer of 480 BCE. The oracle names no specific day for the outcome it describes, only the place, Salamis, where it would be decided. 1 Date Attributed481 BCE, the second of two consultations that year; the first response, delivered to the same envoys, was withheld by the Athenians as too dire to carry home until a Delphian resident advised them to return with olive branches as suppliants for a milder word. 1 Attributions
TraditionThe Delphic oracular tradition of Apollo, in which the Pythia, in a state ancient writers describe as divine possession, delivered responses that Delphi's own resident exegetes and visiting inquirers alike then had to interpret, often against more than one competing reading, as happened here. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The sanctuary at Delphi where the oracle was delivered, home already to its own separately registered case, the response given to Croesus.
The battle the tradition reads as the oracle's promise fulfilled, holy Salamis named in the oracle's own text.
The wider war whose course this oracle, and Themistocles's reading of it, decisively shaped.
The Athenian statesman whose reading of the wooden wall as the fleet, argued against the professional interpreters, is the reason this oracle changed the course of the invasion.
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