quent missions from
them. This temple was dedicated to Zeus, and connected with the temple
was an oracle which enjoyed more reputation in Greece than any other
save that at Delphi, and which would seem to date from earlier times
than the worship of Zeus; for the normal method of gathering the
responses of the oracle was by listening to the rustling of an old oak
tree, which was supposed to be the seat of the deity. We seem here to
have a remnant of the very ancient and widely diffused tree-worship.
Sometimes, however, auguries were taken in other manners, being drawn
from the moaning of doves in the branches, the murmur of a fountain
which rose close by, or the resounding of the wind in the brazen
caldrons which formed a circle all round the temple. Croesus proposed to
the oracle his well-known question; Lysander sought to obtain from it a
sanction for his ambitious views; the Athenians frequently appealed to
its authority during the Peloponnesian War. But the most frequent
votaries were the neighbouring tribes of the Acarnanians and Aetolians,
together with the Boeotians, who claimed a special connexion with the
district.

Dodona is not unfrequently mentioned by ancient writers. It is spoken of
in the _Iliad_ as the stormy abode of Selli who sleep on the ground and
wash not their feet, and in the _Odyssey_ an imaginary visit of Odysseus
to the oracle is referred to. A Hesiodic fragment gives a complete
description of the Dodonaea or Hellopia, which is called a district full
of corn-fields, of herds and flocks and of shepherds, where is built on
an extremity ([Greek: ep eschatie]) Dodona, where Zeus dwells in the
stem of an oak ([Greek: phegos]). The priestesses were called doves
([Greek: peleiai]) and Herodotus tells a story which he learned at
Egyptian Thebes, that the oracle of Dodona was founded by an Egyptian
priestess who was carried away by the Phoenicians, but says that the
local legend substitutes for this priestess a black dove, a substitution
in which he tries to find a rational meaning. From inscriptions and
later writers we learn that in historical times there was worshipped,
together with Zeus, a consort named Dione (see further ZEUS; ORACLE;
DIONE).

The ruins, consisting of a theatre, the walls of a town, and some other
buildings, had been conjectured to be those of Dodona by Wordsworth in
1832, but the conjecture was changed into ascertained fact by the
excavations of Constantin Carapanos. In 1875 he