Dodona

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The oldest words spoken at Dodona are a complaint about the weather. They come not from a king or a philosopher but from a god served by men with dirty feet. In the sixteenth book of the Iliad, Achilles lifts a cup he keeps for no one else, pours wine to the ground, and prays — and the god he names is not the Olympian of the assembled pantheon but something older and more local — Zeus the king of Dodona, Pelasgian and far-dwelling, lord of a wintry Dodona around whom live the Selloi, his interpreters, men with unwashed feet who sleep on the ground. The line is strange enough that it has the feel of a fossil. A wintry mountain, a circle of barefoot interpreters who do not wash and do not leave the earth at night, a Zeus addressed by a tribal epithet — this is not the sky-father of later cult but the resident power of a particular grove, and the poem preserves him without explaining him.

Dodona sits in the mountains of Epirus in northwestern Greece, in a high enclosed valley under Mount Tomaros, far from the sea-lanes and the colonial cities where Greek religion did most of its public business. The Odyssey keeps the same memory: in the false story Odysseus spins for the swineherd Eumaeus, the wanderer claims to have gone to Dodona to hear the will of Zeus from the god’s high-leafed oak. That a lie should be made plausible by a trip to Dodona tells its own truth — the place was known, and known as the spot where one went to learn the mind of the god from a tree. The Greeks themselves, asked to name their most ancient seat of divination, named this one. Delphi on Parnassus, seat of Apollo, grew grander, richer, and more entangled in the politics of cities; Dodona kept the prestige of being first, and the strangeness of an older world.

The personnel and the Doves

The god of the grove was Zeus Naios — the dweller, the one who inhabits the place — and he did not hold it alone. His consort at Dodona was Dione, and her name is the plainest mark of the site’s age: it is simply the feminine of his own, the name Zeus declined as though a goddess, an arrangement with almost no parallel in mature Greek cult, where the god’s wife is Hera. Dione had her own temple in the precinct, rebuilt across the centuries; Homer knows her elsewhere as the mother of Aphrodite, the goddess who gathers her wounded daughter into her arms in the fifth book of the Iliad after Diomedes pierces the love-goddess’s hand. At Dodona she is the female half of the divine name, a survival from a stratum of belief in which the sky-power had a feminine double rather than a separate queen.

The interpreters changed over the long life of the sanctuary. Homer’s Selloi — also written Helloi — are the barefoot men who sleep on the ground, keeping a ritual contact with the earth from which the god’s signs were thought to rise. Later sources speak instead, or also, of priestesses: three women who held the office at any one time, called the Peleiades, the Doves. The name binds the human interpreters to the birds that nested in the sacred oak and to the whole bird-symbolism that runs through the founding stories. When the historian Herodotus came to Dodona to ask how the oracle began, it was three of these women — he records their names, Promeneia, Timarete, and Nicandra — who told him the local version.

Two stories of the founding

Herodotus set down two accounts, and adjudicated between them in his own way. The priests of Egyptian Thebes told him that two of their sacred women had been seized by Phoenician traders and sold abroad, one into Libya and one into Greece, and that this second woman founded the oracle at Dodona, carrying her Theban rites with her. The Doves of Dodona told him something stranger and lovelier: that two black doves flew out from Egyptian Thebes, one settling at the Libyan shrine of Ammon and one in the oak at Dodona, and that the bird at Dodona spoke with a human voice and commanded that an oracle of Zeus be founded there. Herodotus, characteristically, tried to reconcile them: the doves, he reasoned, were the foreign priestesses themselves, called birds because their speech was at first an unintelligible foreign chatter, and called black because they were Egyptian. Whether the cult came as an import from the Nile or rose from Greek soil older than memory, Herodotus left the rival claims standing side by side, and so they have stood since — the same site held by its own tradition to be the oldest thing in Greek religion and by another to be a transplant from a still older country.

How the oak spoke

The mechanism of the prophecy is harder to recover than the legends about it, partly because it seems genuinely to have changed across the roughly thousand years the oracle worked. The sources name several media, and they need not have operated at once. There was the rustling of the leaves of the sacred oak, read by the interpreters as the god’s answer. There were the doves in its branches, their movements and cries taken as signs. There were bronze cauldrons hung about the precinct so that they touched and rang in the wind — the chiming of Dodona became a proverb in Greek for talk that never stops, a sound that goes on answering long after the question. And there was the drawing of lots, marked tokens shaken or selected to yield a verdict. Some of these belong to the poets’ picture of an archaic wonder; others left their trace in the dirt. What the wind in the oak and the ringing of bronze could give was rarely a speech. More often it was the simplest of replies, a yes or a no to a question already framed by the person who came — a procedure closer to the lot-oracles and incubation shrines such as that of the hero Amphiaraus than to the hexameter responses of Apollo’s prophetess.

The questions in lead

That is why the recovered heart of Dodona is not its theology but its archive. Excavation in the precinct has turned up more than four thousand small tablets of lead, thin strips on which visitors scratched the thing they wanted to know before submitting it to the god. They are the largest body of such questions to survive from the Greek world, and they are almost unbearably ordinary. People asked whether to marry, and whom. They asked whether a child was truly their own. They asked whether to risk a sea voyage, whether to take up a particular trade, whether to buy a piece of land or move to another town, whether a runaway or a stolen object would be recovered, and — over and over — which god they should pray and sacrifice to in order to get well. A man asks whether the children his wife is carrying are his. A woman asks to which god she should turn for the health of herself and her household. Kings and cities asked too, about wars and alliances and the safety of campaigns; but the bulk of the lead is the anxiety of households, the questions a person asks when there is no one else to ask. The answers, scratched on the same metal or given aloud and lost, survive only in fragments; what endures is the asking.

One tablet of the fourth or third century BCE is not a private question at all but a civic one, and it opens a window onto the whole worldview. The community of the Dodonaeans themselves — the people who lived around the sanctuary and tended it — inscribed a question to Zeus Naios and Dione asking whether the harsh winter then afflicting them had come because of the impurity of some particular man: whether, that is, the storm was a punishment, and a single person’s wrongdoing the cause. The question takes for granted that weather is moral, that misfortune has an author, and that the god in the oak can name him. It is the same instinct as Achilles pouring wine to wintry Dodonaean Zeus, carried down a thousand years and pressed into a strip of lead.

Stone, theater, and the cutting of the oak

For most of its history the oracle worked with very little architecture. The oak stood within a modest precinct, the Sacred House, walled and rewalled around it; the temples of Zeus and of Dione were small. The monumental phase came late and came from a king. Pyrrhus of Epirus, who reigned in the early third century BCE, made Dodona the religious center of his kingdom, and under him and his successors the bare grove acquired the apparatus of a Hellenistic capital: a theater seating something on the order of seventeen thousand, among the largest in Greece, cut into the slope below the sanctuary; a stadium for games; a council house for the assembly of the Epirote League. The Naia, the festival of Zeus Naios, was elaborated into athletic and dramatic contests on the grand model. For a few generations the oldest and strangest of the Greek oracles wore the dress of the Hellenistic age.

It did not wear it for long. In 219 BCE the Aetolians under Dorimachus stormed and burned the sanctuary; Philip V of Macedon and the Epirotes rebuilt it. Half a century later the destruction was Roman: in 167 BCE Lucius Aemilius Paullus, having defeated Macedon, ravaged the towns and sanctuaries of Epirus in punishment for the region’s alliance with the losing side, a blow from which Dodona never fully recovered. The Naia were revived and the oracle went on answering, in diminished form, into the imperial centuries of the Roman world, the lead tablets thinning and the great theater standing half-empty. The end, when it came, was the end of all the old cults: as the temples were legislated shut across the empire in the late fourth century CE, the prophetic oak of Dodona was cut down. The site passed to a Christian bishop — Theodorus of Dodona sat at the Council of Ephesus in 431 — and an early basilica rose among the ruined shrines before the place was finally abandoned. The theater and the foundations were recovered by the excavator’s spade beginning in the 1870s, and the lead tablets continue to be read and published, an oracle now answering historians on the one subject it documented better than any site in Greece: what ordinary people were anxious enough to ask a god.

The reading of the lead

The questions themselves are now the great scholarly object. The first tablets came out of the ground in the excavations of Constantin Carapanos in 1875 and 1876 and were published in his Dodone et ses ruines (Paris, 1878); the systematic modern corpus runs through Éric Lhôte’s edition of the best-preserved lamellae, Les lamelles oraculaires de Dodone (Geneva, 2006), and Esther Eidinow’s Oracles, Curses, and Risk among the Ancient Greeks (Oxford, 2007), which set the questions against the broader Greek practice of seeking to manage the unknown. The decisive event was the publication in 2013 of more than four thousand further tablets from the twentieth-century excavations of Demetrios Evangelidis, edited by Ioulia Vokotopoulou, Sotirios Dakaris, and Anastasios-Phoivos Christidis — a body of material so vast that the online edition project Dodona Online was founded to bring the whole archive into a single searchable corpus. In 2023 the lead tablets of Dodona were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register, recognized as a unique surviving record of the everyday concerns of an ancient people. The standard narrative history of the sanctuary remains H. W. Parke’s The Oracles of Zeus: Dodona, Olympia, Ammon (Oxford, 1967), which traces the cult from the Homeric Selloi to its closing — and which set the comparison, three oracles of Zeus, the Epirote oak beside Olympia’s altar of ash and the Libyan ram-god of the desert, all answering for the same sky.

A modern oak stands where the old one is supposed to have stood. The wind still moves it; that much of the apparatus, at least, never needed restoring.

→ Related: Divination · Zeus · Delphi · Dione · Herodotus · Odysseus · Prophecy · Hellenistic Period · Apollo · Amphiaraus