Who Could Hold the Office

Unlike many priesthoods of the Greek world, the office of Pythia was not restricted to a particular noble lineage. Diodorus Siculus reports that the role was originally held by a young, unmarried woman chosen for her virtue, but that the practice changed after a Thessalian visitor named Echecrates abducted and raped a young Pythia, prompting Delphi to select instead women over the age of fifty who continued to dress as unmarried girls in symbolic reference to the older custom. Multiple women could hold the office across a single generation, sometimes with more than one serving in rotation to meet demand at the height of Delphi's reputation, and Plutarch, who served as a priest at Delphi in his later life and wrote several treatises examining the oracle's workings and apparent decline, is a key ancient witness to how the office was staffed and understood by contemporaries.

The Pythia's local, non-hereditary selection sits in some contrast to the office of the prophetai and other Delphic priests, who were drawn from established local families, and ancient and modern commentators alike have puzzled over how a role carrying such enormous religious and political weight came to rest, procedurally, on ordinary women of the town rather than on priestly dynasties of the kind found governing other major sanctuaries of the Greek world.