Description of Greece

​I have heard also that shepherds happened upon the oracle, and became inspired by the vapor and prophesied from Apollo. The greatest reputation, and from the most people, is for Phemone, that Phemone became the first prophetess of the god, and first sang the hexameter. But Boio, a local woman who composed a hymn for Delphi, said that the oracle was established for the god by those who arrived from the Hyperboreans, both others and especially Olen; and that he was the first to prophesy and the first to sing the hexameter.

​Boio has composed the following: “There indeed a memorable oracle was completed for you by the sons of the Hyperboreans, Pagasus and divine Agyieus.” And enumerating also others of the Hyperboreans, at the end of the hymn she named Olen: “And Olen, who became the first prophet of Phoebus, and first crafted the song of ancient verses.” However, what has come down to memory does not belong to any other, but only to the oracle-giving of women.

​They say that the temple was built for Apollo in the most ancient times of laurel, and that the branches were brought from the laurel in Tempe; and this temple would have been fashioned in the shape of a hut. The Delphians say that the second temple was made by bees from the wax of bees and from wings; and they say it was sent to the Hyperboreans by Apollo.

​Another story is also told, that a Delphian man, whose name was Pteras, built the temple; and that according to this, the temple also got its name from its builder; and they say that from this Pteras a Cretan city is also named, with the addition of a letter, Aptereis. For as for the story concerning the fern that grows in the mountains, how they wove a temple from this herb while it was still green, I do not accept this story at all from the beginning.

​As for the third of the temples, that it was made of bronze is no wonder, seeing that Acrisius made a bronze chamber for his daughter, and for the Lacedaemonians the temple of Athena of the Bronze House remains even to our day, and for the Romans the forum, being a wonder because of its size and its other construction, has its roof of bronze; so for Apollo also, it would not be at all improbable that a bronze temple should have existed.

​However, the other things did not convince me, either that the temple was the work of Hephaestus, or the things about the golden singers, which indeed Pindar sang of concerning that temple: “And from above the pediment, golden Keledones were singing.” This man indeed seems to me to have made these things in imitation of the Sirens in Homer; nor indeed did I find the manner in which it happened that the temple disappeared described in the same way, for they say that it both fell into a chasm of the earth and was melted by fire.

​The fourth was built by Trophonius and Agamedes, and they record that it was made of stone; and it was burnt down when Erxicleides was archon at Athens, in the first year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad, which Diognetus of Croton won. The temple to the god in our time was built by the Amphictyons from the sacred funds, and a certain Spintharus of Corinth was its architect.