Herodotus informs us, that one of the first oracles in Greece was imported from the Egyptian Thebes. It happened, says Mr. Mitford in his History of Greece, that the master of a Phœnician vessel carried off a woman, an attendant of the temple of Jupiter, at Thebes on the Nile, and sold her in Thesprotia, a mountainous tract in the northwestern part of Epirus, bordering on the Illyrian hordes. Reduced thus unhappily to slavery among barbarians, the woman, however, soon became sensible of the superiority which her education in a more civilized country gave her over them; and she conceived hopes of mending her condition, by practising upon their ignorance what she had acquired of those arts which able hands imposed upon a more enlightened people. She gave out that she possessed all the powers of prophecy to which the Egyptian priests pretended; that she could discover present secrets, and foretell future events. Her pretensions excited curiosity, and brought numbers to consult her. She chose her station under the shade of a spreading oak, where, in the name of the god Jupiter, she delivered answers to her ignorant inquirers; and shortly her reputation as a prophetess extended as far as the people of the country themselves communicated. These simple circumstances of her story were afterwards, according to the genius of those ages, turned into a fable, which was commonly told, in the time of Herodotus, by the Dodonæan priests. A black pigeon, they said, flew from Thebes in Egypt to Dodona, and, perching upon an oak, proclaimed with human voice, “That an oracle of Jupiter should be established there.” Concluding that a divinity spoke through the agency of the pigeon, the Dodonæans obeyed the mandate, and the oracle was established. The historian accounts for the fiction thus: the woman on her arrival speaking in a foreign dialect, the Dodonæans said she spoke like a pigeon; but afterwards, when she had acquired the Grecian speech and accent, they said the pigeon spoke with a human voice. The trade of prophecy being both easy and lucrative, the office of the prophetess was readily supplied both with associates and successors. A temple for the deity and habitations for his ministers were built; and thus, according to the evidently honest, and apparently well-founded and judicious, account of Herodotus, arose the oracle of Jupiter at Dodona, the very place where tradition, still remaining to the days of that writer, testified that sacrifices had formerly been performed only to the nameless god.