of Olympian Zeus, and custodians and interpreters of his oracle at Olympia. We find various members of this race engaged, from time to time, during the course of Greek history, as soothsayers in the many scattered communities of Dorian Greeks, not only in Sparta or Messenia or Mantinea in the Peloponnese, but in the distant colonies of the west, at Sybaris and Croton in South Italy. When Archias the Corinthian sailed for Sicily and founded the important town of Syracuse, one or more representatives of the Iamid stock accompanied the expedition, assisted in the religious ceremonies with which the new settlement was inaugurated, and obtained a share in the heroic honours assigned, according to universal Greek custom, to the founder.
Iamus, the legendary ancestor of this priestly house, was a son of Apollo, the god of divination, and inspirer of the great oracle at Delphi. The Olympian oracle was connected, as we have seen, with the worship of Zeus; but inasmuch as for some reason the old idea of Zeus as an inspirer of prophecy[1] had to some extent been obscured, and Apollo, the god of Delphi, had gradually occupied the place which Zeus in this aspect had formerly filled in the imagination of the Greeks, it was to Apollo, and not to Zeus, that the Iamids saw fit to trace their origin. Their priesthood at Olympia they described as an office to which the Delphian god had specially appointed their ancestor,
- ↑ His oracle at Dodona, reputed the most ancient in Greece, was extremely famous in early times; but its fame was afterwards completely eclipsed by that of Apollo's oracle at Delphi.
