If leisure is the nurse of sympathetic understanding, “three radiant courses of the sun” are none too many to give to Delphi. The inner meaning of this centre of Greece needs not only to be quarried out of history and literature, but also to be garnered from the abundant beauty of a landscape which created as well as framed a unique religious life. At the chief oracular seat of the God of Prophecy antiquarian curiosity about its early legends and primitive cults makes way for the realization of Apollo, “the Far-Darter, ruling the glorious temple wherein all men find welcome.” A modern journey is a successor to the journeys and pilgrimages undertaken through many centuries by the men and peoples who sought from his omniscience foreknowledge and advice. Even the protagonists of shadowy antiquity were brought thither by their hopes and fears. Heracles, the national hero of Greece, driven by Hera to madness and murder, asked at Delphi where he should make his home, and was sent by the oracle to begin his twelve labours. Agamemnon, anxious lord of the Greek armies, sought advice of the god. Io was started on her long wanderings over the earth and through literature because her father was commanded by Apollo’s ministers to drive her from her home and her country. Because of a Delphic response, the infant son of Laius of Thebes was exposed on Mount Cithæron. Œdipus, on the fatal day when he killed Laius, was on his way back from Delphi, whither he had gone to ask if he were son of the Corinthian king who had reared him and where he had received the ambiguous answer that he was fated to slay his father. It was when, as king of Thebes, he sent to “the Pythian house of Phœbus to learn by what deed or word he might deliver his pestilence-stricken city” that he unconsciously invoked his own doom. And it was again the Delphic oracle which closed the pitiful story by prophesying Œdipus’s final reconciliation with the eternal will.