The Collaborative International Dictionary
Pythian \Pyth"i*an\, a. [L. Pythius, Gr. ? belonging to Pytho, the older name of Delphi and its environs: cf. F. pythien.] Of or pertaining to Delphi, to the temple of Apollo, or to the priestess of Apollo, who delivered oracles at Delphi.
Pythian games (Gr. Antiq.), one of the four great national festivals of ancient Greece, celebrated near Delphi, in honor of Apollo, the conqueror of the dragon Python, at first once in eight years, afterward once in four.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
c.1600, "pertaining to Delphi or Delphic Apollo," from Pythia + -an. As a noun from 1590s.
Wikipedia
Usage examples of "pythian".
From the sixth century Before the Common Era, the Pythian games, one of the great quartet of Panhellenic festivals, had been held in the third year of the Olympic cycle.
In the second Pythian Ode10 Pindar repeats, and would appear to endorse, the old monitory legend of Ixion, who for his outrageous crimes was bound to an ever revolving wheel in Hades and made to utter warnings against such offences as his own.
The Pythian games were celebrated in every third Olympic year, on the Cirrhaean plain in Phocis, under the superintendence of the Amphictyons.
Among those of them that held the yearly archonship at Athens was Pisistratus, son of the tyrant Hippias, and named after his grandfather, who dedicated during his term of office the altar to the twelve gods in the market-place, and that of Apollo in the Pythian precinct.
They made Klinger an offer he thought was too low so he was running around to Lendro, Pythian Mining, South Africa Metal Combine, all of them with these reports on the ore body he'd found out there on the mission land trying to raise the ante.