Kiwi Hellenist: The Not-So-Cryptic Oracle of Delphi (Gainsford)

A 2018 blog post by Peter Gainsford, a classics academic at Victoria University of Wellington, examining how the Delphic oracle actually operated against the popular image of cryptic riddling verse. Read here directly for its own discussion of Joseph Fontenrose's 1978 catalogue of Delphic responses: Gainsford reports Fontenrose's own count that across the sixth century BCE to the first century CE, only one authentic historical Delphic response was ever delivered in verse, a figure Fontenrose uses to argue that most of the famous verse-oracle stories preserved by later writers, Croesus's among them, cannot be historical on his own reckoning. A secondary discussion of a scholarly source, not the source itself.