Delphi (2 page)

This book tells the story of this extraordinary place, and of its significance in the history of the ancient world. How did its famous oracle work, and why did it capture the attention of the ancient world for so long? What were the crucial factors in securing Delphi's emergence as the predominant oracular site in a world teeming with oracles? How did the opportunities provided by offering rich dedications and taking part in athletic competitions contribute to Delphi's importance and its role within ancient society? What, in an ancient world almost constantly beset by tectonic changes in politics and war, enabled Delphi, a small city and sanctuary clinging to the Parnassian mountains, to survive it all? What eventually caused its demise? Why was the modern world of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries so fascinated by this ancient site, and what, if anything, can it still hold of value for us today?

The following pages tackle these questions and, in so doing, put forward a manifesto for how we should study this (and indeed other) crucial locations from the ancient world. Too often, past study of Delphi has been subdivided into its respective activities: its oracle, its dedications, its games; or into particular chronological periods of its activity, particularly its so-called golden age, that of the archaic and classical periods (650–300
BC
); or into particular kinds of evidence for its role and importance (literary, epigraphic, or archaeological). These studies—while without doubt providing important, detailed, and scholarly insights into the sanctuary's history—have often treated each of these particular activities, time periods and sources in isolation from their wider contexts, fuller histories, and complementary viewpoints. But this is not how such activities, time periods, and sources existed in the ancient world, nor indeed how they, or the site itself, were perceived in the ancient world. To see Delphi as the ancient saw it and understood it, we need to consider these multiple activities together across the sanctuary's entire history and through the viewpoint of all the different historical sources available to us. This book seeks to offer such a perspective. It seeks to offer a global, fully rounded, view of the wide spectrum of activity that went on at Delphi across its entire lifespan, in total almost fifteen hundred years, as put forward through the complete range of source material available.

Thus, this book will highlight not only how each of Delphi's activities had its own trajectory of highs and lows over time, but also how Delphi's different activities impacted upon one another, as well as how Delphi's representation varied in the different source materials. And by bringing the study of these different activities, time periods, and sources together, this linked approach will enable us to understand better than ever both how Delphi's role and importance in the ancient world was perceived, shaped, and changed, and how and why Delphi survived for so long. We will, finally, begin to see Delphi—the omphalos of the ancient world—in full and brilliant Technicolor.

In viewing Delphi through this kind of lens, three main phases in its history become apparent, which have, in turn, become the three parts of this book. To my mind, these phases correspond to Shakespeare's famous line in
Twelfth Night
: “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” In
part I
, “Some are born great,” we examine Delphi's oracle and earliest history, the ways in which the ancients sought to understand Delphi's emergence as a place born great and blessed by the gods, and the ways in which the archaeological evidence highlights a much more uncertain and difficult path to prominence. In
part II
, “Some achieve greatness,” we learn about the golden age of Delphi's influence and the multiple ways in which it achieved greatness by becoming central to the ancient world. In
part III
, “Some have greatness thrust upon them,” we see how Delphi was heroized, as well as used, abused, and misinterpreted, and indeed how Delphi actively played up to its developing reputation, from the Hellenistic period until the time of its rediscovery in the nineteenth century, in order to understand how Delphi secured its permanent reputation as one of the great centers of the ancient world. In the epilogue and conclusion, Delphi's story is brought to the present day, asking what value the sanctuary still holds for us and where our investigation of its extraordinary life will go next.

It is a testament to Delphi's unparalleled tenacity and ability to survive that Heliodorus wrote his novel about the love affair at Delphi and about Delphi's crucial place at the center of a connected Mediterranean society not in the hey-day of the classical world, but in the third or fourth centuries
AD
, on the cusp of the Mediterranean world's gradual conversion to Christianity and the end of pagan sanctuaries like the one at Delphi.
⁵
And yet, even in this twilight, Delphi's description glows bright. More tellingly, Heliodorus's description echoes that of another ancient writer, the geographer Strabo, who labeled Delphi, above all, as a
theatron
: a theater.
⁶
It was a space in which most of the moments that mattered in the history of the ancient world were played out, reflected on, or altered. As a result, an understanding of the ancient world and, I would argue, of humankind itself, is incomplete without an understanding of Delphi.

PART I

Some are born great

The oracle neither conceals, nor reveals, but indicates.

—Heraclitus in Plutarch,
Moralia
404D

I

ORACLE

The appointed day had come. Having journeyed up the winding mountain paths to the sanctuary hidden within the folds of the Parnassian mountains, individuals from near and far, representatives from cities and states, dynasties and kingdoms across the Mediterranean had gathered in Apollo's sanctuary. As dawn broke, the word spread that it would soon be known whether the god Apollo was willing to respond to their questions. Sunlight reflected off the temple's marble frontage, the oracular priestess entered its inner sanctum, and the crowd of consultants moved forward, waiting their turn to know better what the gods had in store. The gods were considered all powerful, all controlling, and all knowing; their decisions, time and again, had proven to be final. The consultants had waited perhaps months, traveled perhaps thousands of miles. Now they waited patiently for their turn, each likely entering the home of the god with a great deal of trepidation as to what he might be told. Some left content. Others disappointed. Most thoughtful. With dusk, the god's priestess fell silent. The crowds dispersed, heading to every corner of the ancient world, bringing with them the prophetic words of the oracle at Delphi.

Without doubt, what fascinates us most about Delphi are the stories surrounding its oracle and the women who, for centuries, acted as the priestesses and mouthpieces of the god Apollo at the center of a Delphic oracular consultation (see
fig. 1.1
). But just how did the oracle at Delphi work, and why did it work for the ancient Greek world for so long?

Figure 1.1
. Tondo of an Athenian red-figure cup c. 440–30
BC
, found in Vulci, Etruria, showing Aegeus consulting Themis/the Pythia (© Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz [Staatliche Museum, Berlin])

These are difficult questions to answer for two central reasons. First, because, incredibly for an institution so central to the Greek world for so long, there has survived no straightforward, complete account about exactly how a consultation with the oracle at Delphi took place, or about how the process of bestowing divine inspiration upon the Pythian priestess worked. Of the sources we have, those from the classical period (sixth through fourth centuries
BC
) treat the process of consultation
as common knowledge, to the extent that it does not need explaining, and indeed the consultations at Delphi often act as shorthand for descriptions of other oracular sanctuaries (“it happens here just like at Delphi …”). Many of the sources interested in discussing how the oracle worked in any detail are actually from Roman times (first century
BC
to fourth century
AD
), and thus at best can tell us only what the people in this later period thought (and often they offer conflicting stories) about a process that, as all of those writers agreed, was by then past its heyday. Also, while the archaeological evidence is of some use both in helping us understand the environment in which the consultation took place and in revealing possible scenarios about the process by which the Pythia was inspired during the classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, it comes up short in helping us understand the first centuries of the oracle's existence (the late eighth and seventh centuries
BC
), during which the oracle was, according to the literary sources, astoundingly active.
¹

The second difficulty surrounding the oracle is in analyzing the literary evidence for what questions were put to her and the responses she gave.
²
This is not only because many of the responses are recorded for us by ancient authors writing long after the response was supposedly uttered, and sometimes by those hostile to pagan religious practices, like the Christian writer Eusebius. And it is not only because these writers themselves often were relying on other sources for their information, with the result that even if two or more describe the same oracular consultation, their records of it are often different. It is also because these writers tend not to record oracular consultations as “straight” history, but rather employ these stories to perform a particular function within their own narratives.
³
As a result, some scholars have sought to label as ahistorical nearly everything the oracle from Delphi is said to have pronounced before the fifth century
BC
. Others have thought it almost impossible to write a history of the Delphic oracle after the fourth century
BC
because of difficulties with the sources. Still others have tried to steer a middle path in a spectrum of more likely to less likely, albeit with the understanding, as the scholars Herbert Parke and Donald Wormell put it in their still-authoritative catalog of Delphic oracular responses
in 1956, that “there are thus practically no oracles to which we can point with complete confidence in their authenticity.”
⁴

As several scholars have remarked, it is thus one of Delphi's many ironies that the Pythian priestesses—the women central to a process that was supposed to give clarity to difficult decisions in the ancient world—have taken the secret of that process to their graves and left us instead with such an opaque view of this crucial ancient institution. In such a situation, the only option is to produce a fairly static snapshot of what we know was a changing oracular process at Delphi over its more than one thousand–year history; a snapshot that is both a compilation of sources from different times and places (with all the accompanying difficulties such an account brings) and one that inevitably takes a particular stance on a number of conflicting and unresolvable issues.

The oracle at Delphi was a priestess, known as the Pythia. We know relatively little about individual Pythias, or about how and why they were chosen.
⁵
Most of our information comes from Plutarch, a Greek writing in the first century
AD
, who came from a city not far from Delphi and served as one of the priests in the temple of Apollo (there was an oracular Pythian priestess at the temple of Apollo, but also priests—more on the latter later). The Pythia had to be a Delphian, and Plutarch tells us that in his day the woman was chosen from one of the “soundest and most respected families to be found in Delphi.” Yet this did not mean a noble family; in fact, Plutarch's Pythia had “always led an irreproachable life, although, having been brought up in the homes of poor peasants, when she fulfils her prophetic role she does so quite artlessly and without any special knowledge or talent.”
⁶
Once chosen, the Pythia served Apollo for life and committed herself to strenuous exercise and chastity. At some point in the oracle's history, possibly by the fourth century
BC
and certainly by
AD
100, she was given a house to live in, which was paid for by the sanctuary. Plutarch laments that while in previous centuries the sanctuary was so busy that they had to use three Pythias at any one time (two regular and one understudy), in his day one Pythia was enough to cope with the dwindling number of consultants.
⁷

Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus “of Sicily”), who lived in the first century
BC
, tells us that originally the woman picked had also to be a young virgin. But this changed with Echecrates of Thessaly, who, coming to consult the Pythia, fell in love with her, carried her off, and raped her; thus the Delphians decreed that in the future the Pythia should be a woman of fifty years or older, but that she should continue, as Pythia, to wear the dress of a maiden in memory of the original virgin prophetess. Thus, it is thought not uncommon for women to have been married and to have been mothers before being selected as the Pythia, and, as a result, withdrawing from husbands and families to perform their role.
⁸