Michael Scott

“Plutarch, in the first century AD, mentions the pneuma (translated as “wind,” “air,” “breeze,” “breath,” or “inspiration”), and that occasionally the oikos was filled with a “delightful fragrance” as a result of the pneuma, but he does not describe its exact nature. Instead he relays a long-running argument among his friends about why the oracle is less active now than it was in the past. The arguments include less pneuma; the moral degeneration of mankind leading to its abandonment by the gods; the depopulation of Greece and the departure of the daimones (spirits) responsible for divination. But Plutarch also insists that the Pythia did not at any point rant or rave. Instead, he comments that, after a consultation session, the Pythia “feels calm and peaceful.”
― Michael Scott, Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World

“The importance of divination does not mean, however, that the oracular system was never mocked in Greek culture. The consultation of oracles was lampooned in Greek comedy: in Aristophanes’ Knights and Birds, for example, oracle sellers are figures of fun. The strength of their connection with the divine too could be questioned. Euripides, in a fragment of an otherwise lost play (Frag. 973N), wrote “the best seer is the one who guessed right.” Sometimes too their usefulness could be questioned. Xenophon, in the fourth century BC, argued that divination became useful only when human capacity ended.⁵¹ We shall see in the coming chapters instances wherein even the oracle of Apollo at Delphi was said to have been bribed and to have become biased, or was treated with circumspection by even its most loyal consultants. But all these instances represent an aberration from the norm, an aberration that did not in the long term shake belief in the system as a whole, a system that continued to speak of divination as a useful and real connection to the gods.”
― Michael Scott, Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World