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Vapor rises between the gilded claw feet of the tripod, the three-legged stand she sat on. In the 1990s geologists found two faults and traces of the gas ethylene under the temple. That is roughly what Plutarch had said.

For something like a thousand years, states did not go to war, found colonies, or change their laws without asking a woman sitting on a three-legged stool at Delphi. The Pythia was not an aristocrat or a trained priestess. She was picked from the local women of the town, sometimes a farmer's wife. Once installed she gave up her old life and her own name. On the seventh day of the month, nine months a year, she washed at the Castalian spring and went down into the inner chamber of Apollo's temple. There she sat over a crack in the floor, holding laurel and a bowl of spring water, and answered. The answers were famously slippery, and the most quoted ones are the ones that ruined the people who received them. Croesus of Lydia was told that if he crossed the river Halys he would destroy a great empire, which he did: his own. Athens, facing the Persian invasion, was told to trust in a wooden wall, and spent an anxious week arguing about whether that meant a fence or a fleet. Two mottoes were cut into the forecourt of the temple: know yourself, and nothing in excess. That is not mysticism. It is advice from someone who has watched a lot of powerful men make the same mistake. Ancient writers said a sweet-smelling vapor rose from the chasm and put the Pythia into her state. For most of the twentieth century scholars called that fiction, because the French excavators had found no chasm. Then in the 1990s a geologist and an archaeologist worked the site together. They found two faults crossing directly beneath the temple, tarry limestone under them, and traces of ethylene and methane in the spring water. Ethylene smells sweet and makes people light-headed. It was coming up exactly where Plutarch said it did, and Plutarch had been a priest at Delphi. Plutarch also recorded the ugly day. A Pythia was pushed to prophesy on a bad date to suit important visitors. She went in unwilling and came out screaming in a voice the priests called harsh. She threw herself at the door, the delegation ran, and she died within days. Collier painted her in 1891 with her eyes half shut, the vapor coming up around the tripod's gilded feet, and one bare foot resting on the frame of the stool. The Earl of Kintore gave the painting to the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1893, and it has hung in Adelaide ever since.