Delphi

Certain · the excavated sanctuary

On Parnassus’s slope, where Apollo slew the Python, the Pythia on her tripod delivered the god’s answers for a thousand years. The maxims of the seven sages — Know thyself, Nothing in excess — stood in the forecourt; Socrates traced his whole mission to the oracle’s answer that no man was wiser than he; Oedipus, Laius, Croesus, and half of tragedy took their doom from this spring. The omphalos stone marked the meeting point of Zeus’s two eagles: the center of the earth.