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115]
56. "But now I come to you,
Apollo, sacred guard of earth's true core,
Whence first came frenzied, wild prophetic words.
1
Chrysippus filled a whole volume with your oracles
2 ;
of these some, as I think, were false; some came true
by chance, as happens very often even in ordinary
speech; some were so intricate and obscure that
their interpreter needs an interpreter and the oracles
themselves must be referred back to the oracle; and
some so equivocal that they require a dialectician to
construe them. For example, when the following
oracular response was made to Asia's richest king:
When Croesus o'er the river Halys goes
He will a mighty kingdom overthrow,
3
Croesus thought that he would overthrow his enemy's
kingdom, whereas he overthrew his own.
