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Numerous classical authors report that natural phenomena played an essential part in one of their most sacred religious rituals: the oracle at Delphi. According to the geographer Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.), for example, "the seat of the oracle is a cavern hollowed down in the depths … from which arises pneuma [breath, vapor, gas] that inspires a divine state of possession" (Geography 9.3.5). Over the past five years, a team of researchers -- a geologist, an archaeologist, a chemist and a toxicologist -- has put that claim to the test, making it much more likely that we will actually...

The temple of Apollo, cradled in the spectacular mountainscape at Delphi, was the most important religious site of the ancient Greek world, for it housed the powerful oracle. Generals sought the oracle's advice on strategy. Colonists asked for guidance before they set sail for Italy, Spain and Africa. Private citizens inquired about health problems and investments. The oracle's advice figures prominently in the myths. When Orestes asked whether he should seek vengeance on his mother for murdering his father, the oracle encouraged him. Oedipus, warned by the oracle that he would murder his father and marry his mother, strove, with...

The Persian Wars may be famed in history, but few artifacts and material remains have emerged to shed light on how the ancient Greeks defeated the Asian invaders and saved Europe in what scholars call one of the first great victories of freedom over tyranny. It is well known that a deadly warship of antiquity, the trireme, a fast galley powered by three banks of rowers pulling up to 200 oars, played a crucial role in the fierce battles. Its bronze ram could smash enemy ships, and armed soldiers could leap aboard a foe's vessel in hand-to-hand combat with swords...

Once dismissed, myths are winning new attention from geologists who find that they may encode valuable data about earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and other stirrings of the earth SEATTLE, WASHINGTON--James Rasmussen, owner of a funky used-record store called Bud's Jazz, and Ruth Ludwin, a seismologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, make an unlikely professional team. Late last year, they were walking down the beach near the bustling Fauntleroy ferry dock, searching for a reddish sandstone boulder. Native American legends-Rasmussen belongs to the local Duwamish people-say the boulder is haunted by a'yahos, a spirit with the body of a serpent and...

Tradition attributed the prophetic inspiration of the powerful oracle to geologic phenomena: a chasm in the earth, a vapor that rose from it, and a spring... The ancient testimony, however, is widespread, and it comes from a variety of sources: historians such as Pliny and Diodorus, philosophers such as Plato, the poets Aeschylus and Cicero, the geographer Strabo, the travel writer Pausanias, and even a priest of Apollo who served at Delphi, the famous essayist and biographer Plutarch... in about 1900, a young English classicist named Adolphe Paul Oppe['s] opinions were so strongly expressed that his theory became the new...

When the Persians decided to add Greece to their already enormous Empire at the beginning of the fifth century BC, the Greek city states obviously objected violently. They formed an alliance under the double leadership of Sparta and Athens. The Spartans led operations on land while Athens did the same on sea... At the time, Herodotus wrote down the deeds of the Athenians and Spartans, making sure that Themistocles and Leonidas remained in people's memory. Themistocles had pounded Athenian heads until they built the navy that would defeat the Persians at Salamis under his command; King Leonidas of Sparta held...