Python is the great serpent of the Oracle of Delphi, slain by Apollo in the days when the god first came to Pytho (the older name for Delphi). The myth is the foundation story of the most important religious site of the Greek world. It explains the place-name Pytho and its derived adjective Pythian (the Pythian Games, the Pythia, the Pythian Apollo); it explains why the oracle at Delphi was Apollo’s and not someone else’s; and it explains the word “python” itself, which has come to mean any great snake, any monstrous or oppressive force, and, in modern computing, any powerful programming language that can swallow its user.
The Slaying of Python
The earliest full account of the killing of Python is the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (third century BCE, but using older material). The hymn tells how Apollo, freshly born, went down from Olympus to look for a place to be his oracle. He came to Pytho, the place later called Delphi, and found it guarded by a great serpent, “a dread and monstrous beast,” who was the bane of many men and who lay across the cleft in the rock from which the prophetic vapours rose. Apollo killed the serpent with his silver bow, and the place was his.
This is the basic story, and it is told in many later sources. But the slaying of Python is also a darker story than this, and the older versions of the myth preserve something closer to the original. According to these, the serpent was not just a beast. It was a child of Gaia, the Earth, who had been the guardian of the oracle before Apollo came. The oracle at Delphi is older than Apollo: it had been a place of prophecy in the Bronze Age, and the cult of the Earth-mother is preserved in the figure of Gaia herself, who is said to have given the oracle to Themis and to have prophesied there in the days before Apollo. Apollo’s killing of Python is, on this reading, a conquest: the new Olympian order displacing the older chthonic one. The later Greeks were aware of this, and the Pythian festival commemorated the killing with rites of purification, in which the symbolic serpent was ritually slain and the god himself was symbolically cleansed of the pollution of killing.
The Pythian Games
The Pythian Games, held every four years at Delphi in the August of the third year of each Olympiad, were the second-most important of the four panhellenic festivals (after the Olympics at Olympia). They were founded, according to tradition, by Apollo himself in honour of his victory over the serpent. In the earliest version, the games were musical: the prize was a wreath of laurel, sacred to Apollo, and the contests were in singing to the lyre, singing to the flute, and the like. In the classical period, athletic events were added, but the musical contests remained the heart of the festival. The Pythian festival was also the occasion of one of the three great dramatic performances of the Greek year, along with the City Dionysia at Athens and the Lenaia.
The Greek name of the festival, Pythia, comes from Python, the serpent, and the priestess of the oracle, the Pythia, takes the same name. The connection is direct: the woman who delivers the prophecy at Delphi does so because the place was once the haunt of the serpent that Apollo killed.
The Decay of the Serpent
After the killing, the body of the serpent was, in one tradition, left to rot in the sun (pythein, “to rot,” being the folk etymology of Pytho). In another tradition, it was buried under the temple, and the vapours that rose from its grave were the vapours of the oracle. In a third, the body was thrown into a chasm and the sun melted it. All three traditions preserve the same idea: the serpent’s death was a victory, but a victory that left a mark on the place, and the oracle’s power was tied up with the serpent’s body. The decay and the prophecy were the same substance.
In the early fifth century BCE, the play of Apollonius of Carpathos on the subject (only fragments survive) treated the slaying of Python as a story of divine arrogance and pollution, with Apollo having to be purified at Tempe. This darker version is the one that Euripides plays on in the Iphigenia in Tauris, when Iphigenia remarks on the blood-guilt of Apollo for the killing of the serpent, and the same anxiety shows up in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, where the Furies, ancient earth-spirits, are displaced by Apollo and Athena at the new Areopagus court.
The Word “Python”
The Greek Pythō (Πυθώ) and Pythōn (Πύθων) became the Latin Python, and from the Latin the word entered all the Romance languages and English. The English usage follows the original Greek usage: python means (1) a great serpent; (2) in modern zoology, the pythons of Africa, Asia, and Australia (a subfamily of the Pythonidae, named by François Marie Daudin in 1803); (3) in modern computing, the Python programming language (first released in 1991, named for the British comedy group Monty Python, which the creator Guido van Rossum was reading at the time). The deeper resonance of the word — great snake, prophetic, displaceable by the gods — is not what most modern users have in mind, but it is the inheritance of the Delphic myth.
A Note on Reading the Myth
The Python myth is one of the clearest examples on this site of how the Greek gods’ victories are not always clean. Apollo’s killing of the serpent is a foundation — it is what makes the oracle possible — but it is also a pollution, and the Greek cult at Delphi kept both halves of that thought. The Pythian festival included not just athletic and musical games but a ritual of purification, in which the killing was ritually re-enacted and ritually atoned for. The same is true of many of the Greek god-myths: Zeus’s defeat of the Titans, Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus, even the Olympians’ dealings with the older gods of the sea. The myth is rarely a simple triumph. It is a settlement of accounts, and the account almost always leaves a residue.
For more, see our profile of Apollo, the Gaia page, and the Delphic oracle discussion in the Daphne article. For the broader theme of how the Olympian order displaces the older chthonic one, see our guide to the Olympian gods.