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Oracle: the story
The late 5th century BC was Greece’s “golden age.”
The demon-haunted pagan world was moving unevenly toward reason and personal
responsibility. In 415 it was the height of the Athenian empire, the middle
of a “Cold War” that punctuated the protracted conflict between
Athens and Sparta. A young man named Kylon arrives at Delphi seeking help.
Everyone seems to know him, and to be curious about what he will ask.
He suspects he is being pumped for information, but decides to tell his
story anyway: a band of men attacked his family farm four years before
and killed his parents. Their leader violated his sister and before they
left said, “You aren’t who you think you are.” Kylon
became sole protector of his sister and the child born of the rape, but
she has now disappeared, probably abducted and sold into slavery. Honor,
if nothing else, compels him to find her. He believes the Oracle can help.
When he is allowed into the temple of Apollo he confesses that he tracked
and killed his family’s killers. In a trance the Pythia, the channel
for Apollo’s prophecies, utters a mysterious quatrain. In a private
talk she explains that the Oracle is a complex institution, one that gathers
information and dispenses trusted advice. If he will work for the Oracle,
the Oracle will, in turn, help him.
After training in what today would be called spycraft, he is sent to Delos
under an assumed name to recover a bronze tripod with political and possibly
mystical value, and convey it to Athens.
Kylon succeeds, and arrives to find the city feverishly preparing to invade
Sicily. He believes his sister has been sold in the Sicilian city of Syracuse.
Since the Oracle asked him to be ‘eyes and ears’ with the
invasion fleet, and this mission coincides with his own, he bluffs his
way onto an Athenian warship belonging to the man he now believes may
have abducted his sister and nephew. On the journey he begins to unravel
the meaning of the prophecy one line at a time, and to learn something
of his own visionary powers, related to the tripod, but his guilt continues
to pursue him. He gradually uncovers the reasons for the massacre of his
family bound up in the origins of the Peloponnesian War itself.
The Athenian empire had grown arrogant and expected the Sicilians to rise
up and welcome them as liberators, but their information was inaccurate
and the invasion is a disaster. In a skirmish with the Syracusan cavalry
Kylon manages to capture a young officer and with his help slip into Syracuse,
reunite with his sister and discover her fate.
He is wounded in a battle between Athens and Syracuse, and during his
recovery learns at last the source of his guilt. He and his sister come
to understand their own powers and their place in the most extensive and
important intelligence organization in the ancient world, the Delphic
Oracle. They will have their work cut out for them in the immediate future.
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