Women also were priestesses at the oracles of Hellas, which were seats of the worship of certain divinities, where prophecies were imparted to inquiring souls through the instrumentality of the attendants of the deity. The oldest and most venerated of the oracles was that of Zeus at Dodona, mentioned by Homer. Here, among the prophetic oaks, priestesses read the future in the rustling of the leaves and in the creaking of the branches, in the bubbling of a spring and in the sounds made by brazen cymbals hung near the sacred shrine. Herodotus visited this oracle, and gives the names of the three priestesses who officiated in his time. These priestesses--Promenia, Timarete, Nicandra--related to him a very interesting story concerning the origin of the oracle. They traced its sacred legends back to the worship in the famous temple of Thebes in Egypt. Two doves, they said, flew away one day from the city of Thebes and took their flight into distant lands. One alighted in Libya, on the spot where the oracle of Jupiter Ammon was later established; while the other, crossing the sea, flew as far as Dodona, where, perching on an oak, in human voice she commanded those that heard her to establish there an oracle of Zeus. For this reason the priestesses were known as Peliades, or doves. When, however, Herodotus inquired of the priests in Thebes about the tradition, they told a different story: that two priestesses of their temple had once been carried off from Egypt by the Phoenicians and sold into slavery, and that one of these priestesses finally established herself at Dodona. So, whether dove or priestess, the tradition of the Egyptian origin of the oracle seemed confirmed. Apollo, however, rather than Zeus, was the god of prophecy, and it was generally in connection with his shrines that oracles were spoken. Usually, fountains whose water was supposed to influence the workings of the mind, or caverns whence escaped a gas producing delirium or hallucination, were regarded as places where the divinity was present. Hence there existed numerous oracles of Apollo in Greece proper and in Asia Minor. The most celebrated of the latter was the oracle of the Didymaean Apollo at Branchidae, near Miletus, where a priestess uttered prophecies, seated on a wheel-shaped disk, after she had bathed the hem of her robe and her feet in the sacred spring and had breathed the vapors arising from it.