Appendix: Plutarch – A Philosophical Enquiry into an Enigmatic Divine Sign

Summary

Introduction

This appendix to the study of Delphic oracle stories is focused on a different kind of text, featuring yet a different kind of storytelling from the one under investigation in the main chapters of the book: Plutarch's dialogue The E at Delphi. In this dialogue Plutarch (c. 50–120 CE), who was himself a priest at Delphi, recounts a conversation he had many years earlier when he was still a young man about the meaning of an ominous letter E that could be found at the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. The text is part of the so-called Moralia, a collection of seventy-one essays and dialogues, written by Plutarch himself, all similar in style and register but extraordinarily diverse in content, touching upon themes as different as On How to Listen to a Lecture or How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend. Three of these texts, including our treatise, constitute the so-called Pythian dialogues. Set at Delphi, these dialogues investigate questions pertaining to oracular divination, including the reasons for the decline of oracles in Plutarch's time (Obsolescence of Oracles) or the question why oracles were apparently spoken in a much more prosaic fashion in Plutarch's time than in older times (Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse).

In this instance, the participants in the dialogue (most notably Ammonius, Lamprias, Plutarch, Theon, Eustrophus, Nicander) enquire into the meaning of the epsilon which had allegedly been on display at Delphi since time immemorial. The legendary Seven Sages of Greece allegedly dedicated the original wooden version of the E sometime in the distant past. By Plutarch's time it had been ‘upgraded’ twice: the wooden epsilon was first replaced by a bronze version dedicated by the Athenians, and later by a gold version of the same letter, dedicated by Livia, the wife of the Roman emperor Augustus.

Classical scholars have variously sought to determine the location of the letter, based on references to the sign in a number of literary sources, the archaeological evidence and its depiction on Roman coins (see fig. 1). Unfortunately, however, this has invariably proved difficult. According to Plutarch's treatise, the epsilon was on display somewhere towards the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, together with a number of other Delphic maxims, most notably perhaps the famous ‘know thyself’ (gnōthi seauton).