Dodona in the mountains of Epirus was the oldest oracle of the Greeks, and it preserved a strikingly archaic form of divination: reading the will of Zeus in the sound of an oak.
The oldest Greek oracle
Herodotus called Dodona the most ancient oracle in Greece, and Homer already knew it. It was sacred to Zeus in a local form, Zeus Naios, worshipped alongside the goddess Dione. Where Delphi worked through a priestess in trance, Dodona's priests, and later priestesses called the Peleiades, or "doves", interpreted natural signs: the rustling of the leaves of a sacred oak, the cooing of doves in its branches, and the sound of a bronze cauldron struck in the wind.
The lead tablets
Excavation has recovered thousands of thin lead strips on which enquirers wrote their questions, many of them ordinary and personal: whether to marry, whether a child was one's own, whether to change trade, whether a venture would prosper. This is one of the richest surviving records of what ancient people actually wanted to know from their gods, and it shows an oracle used far more by private individuals than by states.
Growth and silence
From a simple tree sanctuary Dodona grew into a substantial complex with a temple of Zeus, other shrines and a large theatre for the festival held there. It declined under Roman rule, was damaged in war, and fell silent with the suppression of pagan worship at the end of antiquity. The site is an archaeological park in north-western Greece, the theatre among its most imposing remains.