Revisiting Delphi: Religion and Storytelling in Ancient Greece by Julia Kindt (review)

Building on her previous work on the importance of narrative in the construction and communication of religious thought in ancient Greece, Julia Kindt avoids what she characterizes as the preoccupation of previous scholars with questions of the historicity of oracle narratives to focus on how such narratives—particularly those in which ambiguous or misunderstood oracles are later proven to be correct—reveal underappreciated aspects of Greek religious thought. Focusing on episodes that are rich in oracular references, such as the Croesus story in Book 1, Kindt notes that all of Herodotus’ references to oracles are embedded in narrative and fulfill a number of narratological functions. In a chapter entitled “Euripides,” the Delphic oracle in the Ion that makes Xouthos think that Ion is his son is examined as a manifestation of the playwright’s “semantics of polyphony” (83).