Delphi (22 page)

According to some later (and doubtful) sources, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, victorious Sparta and her allies asked the Pythian priestess whether Athens should be destroyed; she replied that the victors should spare “the common hearth of Greece.”
⁴⁸
But as the Greek world slowly shook itself free of the dust that had settled in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, how would the Delphians have taken stock of their position in the Greek world? It is telling that at this point in Delphi's story, one of its most enduring legacies comes into focus. By the end of
the fifth century
BC
, somewhere on the architecture of the
pronaos
(the front section) of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the now-famous maxims of Delphi had been inscribed and were viewable by all who came to the sanctuary.
Gnothi sauton—
“know thyself”;
meden agan
—“nothing in excess”; and the less well-known
eggua para d'ate
—“an oath leads to perdition.”
⁴⁹
The statements of wisdom inscribed on the temple at Delphi were—from the fifth century
BC
—ascribed to the Seven Sages, a group whose existence was much noted in the ancient sources from the early sixth century
BC
onward. Some argued that the Delphic maxims were actually responses from the oracle to the Seven Sages, while other later authors attempted to assign each of the Delphic maxims to a particular Sage (and adopted four more sayings so that each of the Sages could have their own).
⁵⁰
But whoever came up with them, it is almost certainly without accident that it was during this time of crisis and uncertainty in the Greek world that they came to have such public renown.

At the end of the century, if the Delphians had contemplated what drew people to the oracle, they would have recognized its role as a central resource of advice for issues affecting individuals and city-states across the Greek world, and yet, that it was also a place inaccessible to some thanks to political and/or military conflict. If they contemplated their sanctuary, they would have seen something that had survived intact the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, and was now groaning under the weight of dedications, many of which testified to the tensions, ambitions, and animosities that had shaken Greece to its core. And at the same time, they would have felt a sense of irony about the Delphic ideals of “know thyself” and “nothing in excess,” which were now emblazoned across their temple. Here was a religious complex that screamed excess, and one that, while often tripping up others who had failed to know themselves and understand the words of the oracle properly, was itself part of a wider world whose identity was anything but known, certain, or stable.

When I stood up, everything rose with me, and the whole
of great Delphi accompanied my movement.

—Amendée Ozenfant (1939: 394–96)

7

RENEWAL

In the years immediately following Sparta's great victory over Athens at Aegospotamoi in 405
BC
, as Athens was forced to submit to the humiliation of being stripped of its fleet and even the very walls that had for so long protected its city, a young Athenian by the name of Xenophon came to consult the oracle at Delphi. His mind was fixed not on the conflict at home, but on an opportunity presented by a conflict abroad, in Persia. The throne of the Persian empire was up for grabs, and he had been invited to join the army of the man intending to usurp it: Cyrus. Journeying to Delphi on the advice of his friend Socrates (the man whom no one was wiser than, according to the Delphic oracle), Xenophon asked the oracle which gods he should sacrifice and pray to so that he might best and most successfully perform the journey he had in mind and, after meeting with good fortune, return home safely. The Pythia responded, and Xenophon returned home to perform the appropriate sacrifices. Socrates, however, pointed out that he had not asked the key question: Should he go? Xenophon had consulted the oracle with his mind already made up.
¹

Within five years, Xenophon would have returned from his campaign, having heroically led his men out of Persia following Cyrus's defeat and death, and Socrates would have been put to death by the city of
Athens as it sought to come to terms with political revolution and instability. In thanks for his lucky escape, Xenophon promised a half tithe (percentage) of the spoils of his campaign to Delphi, which he placed in the treasury of the Athenians. Yet within another thirty years, Xenophon would have transferred his allegiance to Sparta and moved to live near that city, even enrolling his own children in the Spartan education system, and Sparta, preeminent in the years after Aegospotamoi, would have fallen from power, crushed in battle by the combined forces of several Greek city-states.
²

The Greek world was turned on its head more than once in the first decades of the fourth century
BC
, and Delphi could not hope to be immune to this tectonic movement. Several scholars have argued that the effect of such world change was to decrease interest in the Delphic oracle. With very few exceptions, questions about colonization cease at Delphi in the early fourth century
BC
, no appeals for arbitration are known after 380
BC
(when Delphi was called in to arbitrate a dispute between Clazomenae and Cyme over the island of Leuke), and even questions about fighting wars came to a halt after the middle of the century. Parke and Wormell go further and claim that the Spartan consultation about whether to go to war against Athens back in 432
BC
was the last time the Pythia was consulted on a major question of policy not connected with cult or ritual in Greek history.
³
Yet such checklist approaches only highlight one aspect of Delphic business and gloss over the various critical ways in which Delphi was still immersed in the fabric of Greek society at this tumultuous time, acting both as a reflector, but also as a cultivator, and even occasionally as an instigator, of the changes that so fundamentally shook the Greek world.

Partly because Sparta had been banned by the city of Elis from Olympia for the last decades of the fifth century
BC
(as a result of a disagreement between them), Delphi had received the brunt of Sparta's monumental dedications following its victory over Athens. These dedications, thanks to the plethora of Athenian monuments at Delphi, were able to artistically, architecturally, and spatially oppose and outdo those of the Athenians. In the following years, as Spartan power was projected across
the Greek mainland, Delphi continued to benefit. King Agis of Sparta set up a dedication paid for with money from his plundering in central Greece: it was placed high on top of a tall column to ensure its visibility and prominence inside this increasingly crowded sanctuary. Yet Sparta was soon troubled by the zealous empire-building of one of its most successful generals, the architect of victory over the Athenians, Lysander. It was later said that Lysander had designs on the kingship of Sparta and sought constitutional change to alter the kingship to election rather than family right (with the ultimate aim of taking the title himself). To do so, he was said to have turned to the one authority with the power to convince Spartans of the need for such dramatic change—the Pythia—seeking to bribe her with vast sums of money. But, for once, his advances were rejected, and a second plan, to employ Delphi as the legitimator of a scam involving a supposed son of Apollo, was thwarted by Lysander's death in battle in 395
BC
.
⁴

Sparta, despite its powerful position in Greece, was by no means the only consulter of the oracle at this time: it was claimed in the fourth century
AD
by the pagan emperor Julian that Athens had been instructed by Delphi at the end of the fifth century
BC
to build a temple to the Mother of the Gods (the foreign deity Cybele) to ease her anger at the city; this structure became the Athenians' archive house in the city's agora.
⁵
Also, it is from this period, the end of the fifth century and the first half of the fourth century
BC
, that two of the crucial inscriptions for evidence regarding the costs of consulting the oracle (that we met in the first chapter) seem to have been set up as part of public statements of the close relationship between the oracle and different city-states across the wider Greek world. The inscription of Phaselis (in Asia Minor) set out the tariffs for public and private consultations, and that of Sciathus (in the Aegean) set prices for both public and private consultation of the oracle, and perhaps, as well, for the lot oracle available at Delphi.
⁶
In the same period, inscriptions were also set up at Delphi to record the privileges granted to particular associations. The most well-known is that for the Aesclepiads (a religious association tied to the god of healing Asclepius), who set up their own inscriptions to publicize their Delphic
honors in the sanctuary. Nor was Sparta the only dedicator in the sanctuary: Pythian victors (including those from Athens) represented their victories with statues in the Apollo sanctuary, and individuals increasingly celebrated their close relationship with Delphi (e.g., their status as proxenos) with statues, or were honored for their abilities with statues put up by others (e.g., the orator Gorgias of Sicily was honored in this way with a statue on the temple terrace).
⁷

Despite this plethora of individuals and associations, it was impossible to ignore the presence of Sparta at Delphi in the first three decades of the fourth century
BC
, and increasingly impossible to ignore Sparta's rather heavy-handed projection of power across Greece. King Agesilaus of Sparta dedicated a percentage of the hundred talents'-worth of war booty extracted from his campaigns in Asia Minor at the occasion of the Pythian games in 394
BC
. He also manipulated the oracular network to assure divine approval for his attack on Argos during a religious festival. Agesilaus first went to the oracle of Zeus at Olympia (which was now much more firmly under the Spartan thumb than it had been in the last decades of the fifth century
BC
) to ask for approval for the attack, then traveled to Delphi, an oracular shrine with more international weight than that of Olympia (but less under the thumb of Sparta), where he asked simply if the son agreed with his father. Apollo, son of Zeus, could hardly not agree with his father, king of the gods, and by implication, the response Agesilaus had extracted from the oracle of Zeus at Olympia. Agesilaus had manipulated the system to perfection.
⁸

Such stories underscore the irony of Delphi's position in the Greek world. It was a well-respected oracle, with centuries of authority behind it, in the midst of a lavish sanctuary filled with hundreds of monumental dedications from across the Mediterranean world; it was a host of international athletic and musical games that were respected throughout Greece; and it was managed by a pluri-regional association of cities and states. Yet it was also a small community living by its wits, clinging to a mountainside in central Greece. It is estimated that Delphi had one thousand citizens (with a total population, including foreigners and slaves, of perhaps five thousand) in the early fourth century
BC
. The population
was not divided into demes spread out over the landscape as at Athens and the territory of Attica: the very nature of the Delphic landscape (the sanctuary and city surrounded by the 150–200 square kilometers of sacred land that had to remain uncultivated) meant that citizens of Delphi had to live in, or in the immediate vicinity of, Delphi itself (see
map 3
,
plate 1
). Moreover, the overwhelming success of the sanctuary in the preceding centuries had warped the population to such an extent that most other settlements in the surrounding area had withered away; Delphi was extraordinarily isolated for such a small and yet powerful community.
⁹
The surviving inscriptions do indicate that it had some control over areas of land beyond the sacred “no-man's” land, from which it could draw income. As well, surveys of the land immediately around the city show that it was cultivating its own cereal crops, as well as maintaining sheep on the mountain plateau around the Corycian cave (see
map 3
,
fig. 0.2
).
¹⁰
But, to all intents and purposes, Delphians were dependent for their livelihood on the sanctuary, as the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo
, composed approximately two centuries before, had forecast they would be. This was reflected in the fact that the city's key civic structures—the meeting place of the civic assembly, the council chamber (bouleuterion), and the prytaneum (smaller executive council chamber)—were all located within, or very close to, the sanctuary of Apollo itself.
¹¹
The very success of Delphi had provided its small community a living, but it had also left its citizens isolated within the wider landscape, and tied their fortunes tightly to that of the sanctuary. As a result, Delphi's identity was always not only that of independent authority, but also of vulnerable prize as well as of tool susceptible to manipulation.

All three aspects of this identity were on display during first decades of the fourth century
BC
. In Plato's detailed analysis of an ideal state, Delphi was to occupy a prominent role. All legislative affairs relating to the establishment of shrines, sacrifices, and other form of cult for gods, daimones and heroes, as well as the graves of the dead and the services to be performed for the spirits of the dead, were to be overseen by the oracle at Delphi. Such a prominent role for Delphi would also be echoed in Plato's later work: Delphi was to be master of all laws about divine matters, final
arbiter in the appointment of interpreters of the sacred laws, and consultant about all public festivals and sacrifices.
¹²