Apollo, we may be sure, did not get his birthday gift without substantial concessions. He took the name of the ancient Phoebe, daughter of earth, nay more he was forced, woman-hater as he always was, to utter his oracles through the mouth of a raving woman-priestess, a Phoibas. Herodotus in the passage already quoted (p. 370) justly observed that in the remote land of the Bessi as at Delphi oracular utterance was by the mouth of a priestess. Kassandra was another of these women-prophetesses of Gaia. She prophesied at the altar-omphalos of Thymbrae, a shrine Apollo took over as he took Delphi[1008]. Her frenzy against Apollo is more than the bitterness of maiden betrayed; it is the wrath of the prophetess of the old order discredited, despoiled by the new; she breaks her wand and rends her fillets and cries[1009]: ‘Lo now the seer the seeress hath undone.’ The priestess at Delphi, though in intent a Phoibas, was called the Pythia, but the official name of the priestess Kassandra was, we know, Phoibas[1010]: ‘The Phoibas whom the Phrygians call Kassandra,’ and the title, ‘she who is ceremonially pure,’ lends a bitter irony to Hecuba’s words of shame. The word Phoibades is never, so far as I know, actually applied to definite Bacchantes, though I believe its use at Delphi to be due to Dionysiac influence, but another epithet _Potniades_ points the same way. In the _Bacchae_[1011], when the messenger returns from Cithaeron, he says to Pentheus: ‘I have seen the wild white women there, O king, Whose fleet limbs darted arrow-like but now From Thebes away, and come to tell thee how They work strange deeds.’ The ‘wild white women’ are in a hieratic state of holy madness, hence their miraculous magnetic powers. Photius[1012] has a curious note on the verb with which ‘Potniades’ is connected. He says its normal use was to express a state in which a woman ‘suffered something and entreated a goddess’ and ‘if any one used the word of a man he was inaccurate.’ By ‘suffering something’ he can only mean that she was possessed by the goddess (ἔνθεος or κάτοχος), and he may have the Maenads and kindred worshippers in his mind. Madness could be caused by the Mother of the gods or by Dionysos, in fact by any orgiastic divinity. * * * * *