nders. From thence they returned quite stupified, and out of their
senses, and were placed in the chair of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory;
not without great need of her assistance to recover their remembrance,
after their great fatigue, of what they had seen and heard; admitting they
had seen or heard any thing at all. Pausanias, who had consulted that
oracle himself, and gone through all these ceremonies, has left a most
ample description of it; to which Plutarch adds some particular
circumstances,(84) which I omit, to avoid a tedious prolixity.

The temple and oracle of the Branchidae, in the neighbourhood of Miletus,
so called from Branchus, the son of Apollo, was very ancient, and in great
esteem with all the Ionians and Dorians of Asia.(85) Xerxes, in his return
from Greece, burnt this temple, after the priests had delivered its
treasures to him. That prince, in return, granted them an establishment in
the remotest parts of Asia, to secure them against the vengeance of the
Greeks. After the war was over, the Milesians reestablished that temple
with a magnificence which, according to Strabo, surpassed that of all the
other temples of Greece. When Alexander the Great had overthrown Darius,
he utterly destroyed the city where the priests Branchidae had settled, of
which their descendants were at that time in actual possession, punishing
in the children the sacrilegious perfidy of their fathers.

Tacitus relates something very singular, though not very probable, of the
oracle of Claros, a town of Ionia, in Asia Minor, near Colophon.(86)
"Germanicus," says he, "went to consult Apollo at Claros. It is not a
woman that gives the answers there, as at Delphi, but a man, chosen out of
certain families, and almost always of Miletus. It is sufficient to let
him know the number and names of those who come to consult him. After
which he retires into a cave, and having drunk of the waters of a spring
within it, he delivers answers in verse upon what the persons have in
their thoughts, though he is often ignorant, and knows nothing of
composing in measure. It is said, that he foretold to Germanicus his
sudden death, but in dark and ambiguous terms, according to the custom of
oracles."

I omit a great number of other oracles, to proceed to the most famous of
them all. It is very obvious that I mean the oracle of Apollo at Delphi.
He was worshipped there under the name of the Pythian, a title derived
from the serpent Python, whic