In Greek mythology, Python (Ancient Greek: Πύθων) was a great serpent — sometimes depicted as a dragon — that dwelt at Delphi, which the Greeks held to be the center of the earth, marked by the omphalos (navel) stone. Born of the earth-goddess Gaia, Python guarded the oracular sanctuary that belonged to its mother. It became the chthonic adversary of the Olympian Apollo, who slew it and claimed the shrine and its oracle for himself. From the serpent the site and its prophetess took the names Pytho and Pythia, and Apollo's victory was commemorated in the Pythian Games.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Python (mythology)" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Mythology
Python, sometimes written Pytho, presided at the Delphic oracle, which existed in the cult center for its mother, Gaia ("Earth"); Pytho was the place-name that had been substituted for the earlier name Krisa. The Greeks regarded the site as the center of the earth, a point represented by the omphalos (navel) stone, which Python guarded.
Like many monsters of myth, Python was known as a child of Gaia. Before Apollo could establish his temple and take possession of the oracle, he first had to remove the serpent that warded the spot. The Delphic oracle would go on to become the most famous and revered in the entire ancient Greek and Roman worlds.
II.Versions and interpretations
Several distinct accounts survive of Python's origin and of its death at Apollo's hand. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the god, searching for a place to found his shrine, comes to Delphi, finds Python menacing the inhabitants, slays it, and declares himself master of the oracle.
In the version told by Hyginus, Hera — jealous that Zeus had made Leto pregnant with Artemis and Apollo — sent Python to pursue Leto across the world and so prevent the divine birth. When Apollo was only four days old he hunted the serpent to Mount Parnassus and killed it with his arrows beside the cleft of rock where the priestess sat upon her tripod. A related tradition, recorded in an epigram and by Clearchus of Soli, held that Python sought to assault Leto, and that as it pursued her she set Apollo upon a stone and cried out to him in Greek to shoot.
After the killing, Zeus was said to have ordered Apollo to purify himself for the bloodshed and to institute the Pythian Games as penance, games that Apollo himself would oversee. The oracle's priestess thereafter became known as the Pythia, named from the place Pytho.
Later writers and scholars read the myth in various ways. Erwin Rohde took Python for an earth-spirit conquered by Apollo and buried beneath the omphalos, one deity raising a temple over the grave of another. Karl Kerényi noted older accounts that distinguished two dragons — the female Delphyne (from δελφύς, "womb") and the male Typhon (from τύφειν, "to smoke") — whom narrators came to confuse with Python. An allegorical reading interpreted the story as the dispersal of fogs and vapors rising from marshes (Python) by the rays of the sun (Apollo's arrows), and Robert Graves saw in Hyginus's account a memory of the Hellenes seizing a pre-Hellenic shrine.
III.Etymology and the name Pytho
The names of the Delphic sanctuary and its prophetess were both traced back to the serpent. The Greeks derived Pytho — the older name of Delphi — and Pythia, the title of the oracle's priestess, from the verb πύθειν (pythein), "to rot," explaining that the place was so called because the slain serpent's corpse rotted there in the heat of Hyperion (day) or Helios (the sun).
Apollo's own epithet "Pythian" and the Pythian Games likewise carried the serpent's name forward, fixing the memory of the slaying into the very identity of the cult.