An elderly oracle in Delphi, the most sacred oracle of ancient Greece, attempts a retrospective of her entire strange life spent as Pythia, First Lady and voice of the god Apollo.
When she was a young virgin with disturbing psychic powers, she was delivered into the service of that sacred place by her very own parents. She has now spent a full sixty years as a mediator, with her torn mouth, uttering ambiguous prophetic phrases from the bronze tripod in the sanctuary beneath the temple.
Having spent a whole life at the mercy of the god, the priests, and the people, she has witnessed the decline of Delphi and its influence on the world. Her thoughts on the mysteries of the oracle, embodied in her own strange gifts, are intertwined with her feminine perspective and intuition regarding the human weaknesses of the High Priest himself, an authentic Athenian, whose intrigues against the Romans come at the cost of dishonor and ruin.
This wonderful little novel, left merely a draft due to the unexpected death of the author in 1993, is a psychological and historical triumph. An absolutely convincing portrait of a woman's experience, something rather rare in Golding's entire work. Arieka, the Pythia, is one of his brightest creations.
