Delphi (31 page)

Figure 9.1
. A reconstruction of the column, frieze, and statue erected by Aemilius Paullus following his victory over King Perseus of Macedon at the battle of Pydna (© Dietrich Reimer-Verlag [Front Cover image, H. Kähler
Der Fries vom Reiterdenkmal des Aemilius Paullus in Delphi
]

The great survivors of this sea change in Greece's history were old friends of Delphi: the Attalid ruling family of Pergamon and particularly its current ruler Eumenes II. He had fought with Rome against Antiochus of Syria, informed against Perseus of Macedon to the Roman Senate (in part following Roman suspicions of him being a Perseus supporter), been left for dead after being ambushed on the road to Delphi by Perseus's operatives, and now lived to see the downfall of Macedon and the rise of Roman power.
³¹
In 159
BC
, Eumenes II finally passed away and was succeeded by his brother Attalus II. At Delphi in that year, celebrations were held in honor of Eumenes II and Attalus II on the back of a huge financial donation to the sanctuary by the Attalid rulers themselves. New festival celebrations and sacrifices, the Eumeneia and the Attaleia, were initiated at Delphi on a huge scale. Fifteen hundred liters of wine were prepared for the festival banquet, and financial sanctions imposed on those who failed to carry out their appointed roles in the celebration.
³²
The Delphians went further and erected a statue of the new Attalid ruler in the sanctuary right by the sacred processional area in front of the Athenian stoa in the Apollo sanctuary (see
plate 2
). Attalus II was clearly in awe of the variety and standard of artistic accomplishment at Delphi. He sent painters to Delphi to make copies of its many monuments, and especially the paintings by Polygnotus from the fifth century
BC
Cnidian lesche building. Delphi, in return, not only accommodated Attalus's artistic mission, but honored his artists in inscriptions engraved onto the monument of Eumenes II erected in his honor earlier in the century.
³³

The Amphictyony did not, however, fare quite so well following Roman victory at Pydna. The French epigraphist Georges Daux argues that there are only two certain instances of Amphictyonic action in the entire period 166–46
BC
, that of their participation in the arbitration of a dispute over the city of Lamia between Sparta and the Dorians of the Metropolis (an Amphictyonic tribal grouping); and that of their honoring of an Athenian. This lull is perhaps to be associated with a further rearrangement of the Amphictyonic council conducted around 165
BC
to reflect the altered political map of Greece following Roman victory.
³⁴

Yet the Amphictyony and the city of Delphi survived much more successfully than other parts of Greece. In the early 140s, Roman forces were back in action at Pydna, this time to dispatch a pretender to the Macedonian throne. Two years later, in 146
BC
, in the same year in which the Romans won their historic victory over Carthage and destroyed that city, a league of Peloponnesian cities, known as the Achaean league, which had been on good terms with Rome, turned against Rome. The Roman general Lucius Mummius, with approximately 23,000 men including forces from Crete and Pergamon, marched on the league in what has become known as the Achaean War. At the end of 146
BC
, Mummius defeated the league in the battle of Corinth and in punishment plundered and burned the city of Corinth to the ground. Every Greek city that had been part of the league was put under direct Roman control.
³⁵

The destruction of Corinth in 146
BC
marked another turning point in Rome's relationship to Greece and, along with the destruction of Carthage in the same year, a new phase in Roman domination of the Mediterranean. Mummius celebrated his victory in part by sending dedications to Delphi: ironically the sanctuary was increasingly becoming the location for the commemoration of Roman victories over Greece. But as a result, perversely, Delphian interaction with the wider Greek and Mediterranean worlds seems to have shrunk. The surviving accounts of proxeny decrees—honors offered by the city of Delphi to individuals from elsewhere—show that in the first half of the second century
BC
, Delphi was welcoming and forming relationships with people from all over the Greek world. But from 146
BC
onward, that circle shrinks considerably, to almost only its immediate neighbors and mainland Greece (although Delphi continues to honor Romans—almost a prerequisite given the increasing Roman control of Greece), with an almost total absence of the Aegean islands, Asia Minor, and Africa.
³⁶

The one benefit of this closer-to-home focus after 146
BC
seems to have been the renewed presence of Athens at Delphi. An inscription on the wall of the Athenian treasury at Delphi records Athenian involvement in 140
BC
as arbitrators in a local dispute over the extent of
Delphian territory. In 138
BC
Athens revived the Athenian Pythaïs festival, which had not occurred since the late fourth century
BC
and was intended to celebrate Apollo's arrival at Delphi thought to be via the Athenian territory of Attica. The heart of the festival was a procession along the sacred road from Athens and Delphi and a return to Athens bringing fire from the sacred hearth of the Apollo temple. The festival was intended to stress the close historical, religious, and geographical links between Athens and Delphi; and its renewal, at a time in which both, given recent Roman actions toward other Greek cities, felt the need for mutual support and comfort, is particularly understandable. The Pythaïs, which had been an irregular event undertaken only in relation to particular divine signs (like lightning) was now turned into a regular festival, celebrated every eight years, with the event recorded each time in inscriptions on the walls of the Athenian treasury, which tell us not only that there had been many oracles in the past prescribing the festival, but also that some three hundred to five hundred people were involved in the sacred procession. It was also on the occasion either of the first Pythaïs in 138
BC
, or a decade later in 128
BC
, that the Athenians composed and then inscribed on the highly visible southern wall of their treasury at Delphi not only the words but also the musical notations for two hymns to Apollo (see
plate 2
,
fig. 5.4
). These hymns, which have been fundamental to the study of ancient music, and were discovered early on in the initial excavation of the sanctuary at the end of the nineteenth century, record the celebration of Apollo through sacrifice, song, and prayer.
³⁷

Yet this (re)blossoming of the relationship between Athens and Delphi did not stop here. In 134
BC
, the Amphictyony, having received five ambassadors from Athens, appear to have confirmed the privileges accorded to the Dionysiac guild members of Athens back in the third century
BC
. On the treasury of Athens in Delphi, as well as in the theater of Dionysus in Athens, the record of both the original honors and their restatement over a century later were inscribed and published. Crucially, though, the Amphictyony highlights in the inscription that their confirmation of such privileges is contingent on Roman approval (a smart and perhaps
necessary move in the wake of increasing Roman control after the destruction of Corinth in 146
BC
).
³⁸
These privileges were later augmented, after the actors' star performance at the Pythaïs of 128
BC
, with a series of further rights in 125
BC
, and would be restated again after the Roman Senate had also commented on Athenian prowess in 112
BC
.
³⁹
Indeed, the language used in these inscriptions is not only testament to the strength of relationship between Delphi and Athens, but also, more widely, to Athens's increasing reputation as a cultural powerhouse. In its public inscription of 125
BC
, the Amphictyony honored the “people of Athens, who are at the origin of everything that is good in humanity, and who brought mankind up from a bestial existence to a state of civilisation.”
⁴⁰

At the very same time, however, as the city of Delphi and the Amphictyony were honoring Athens in such fulsome terms, Delphi itself was embroiled in scandal. Traditionally dated to 125
BC
, but perhaps occurring as late as 117
BC
, the Amphictyony were called to an emergency session, the only one in their history for which the inscribed list of attendees named both the official representatives, the
hieromnemons
, and their advisors, the
pylagores
. In the aftermath of the event, the entire dossier of documents relating to the affair was inscribed on the side of the temple of Apollo, and it tells a story not only of conflict at Delphi, but of continuing Roman interest in the sanctuary.
⁴¹
It appears that a group of Delphians linked to the son of Diodorus had usurped a series of objects belonging to Apollo for their own purposes, breaking one of the fundamental tenets of the sanctuary and of Greek religious belief (and for which in the past the punishment had been death). Thirteen Delphians in return, led by Nicatas, son of Alcinus, reported on their actions in the first instance to the Amphictyony, but, fearing for their lives while the slow wheels of Amphictyonic bureaucracy turned, fled from Delphi to Rome. There, they appeared before the Roman Senate pleading for its support. The Senate decided to take up the case and, through the Roman proconsul of Macedonia, put pressure on the Amphictyony to deal speedily and properly with the situation, thus precipitating the Amphictyony's emergency session. Following their investigation, serious mistakes were found in the sacred accounts thanks to objects wrongly
appropriated and the need to redefine the boundaries of Apollo's sacred land.
⁴²
Elite Delphians were charged with taking sacred treasures, and were forced to make good the god's financial loss.
⁴³
The total fines imposed came to fifty-three talents and fifty-three mines. Yet at the same time as this scandal appears to show equally Delphian misbehavior, Amphictyonic action, and Roman willingness to engage in the minutiae of Delphic management, it perhaps also indicates a certain reluctance on the part of the Amphictyony to acquiesce beyond the necessary to the will of Rome. The engraving of an inscription recording praise from the Amphictyony for the thirteen brave Delphian whistle blowers was actually left unfinished, and, despite the large fine supposedly imposed, those responsible for the sacred theft seem to have suffered little more than a rap on the knuckles: some of them appear as priests of Apollo in the sanctuary a few years later.
⁴⁴

One of the downsides of the Roman defeat and subsequent carving up of Macedon during the course of the second century
BC
was that mainland Greece was left without a well armed and coordinated buffer zone between it and the “barbarian” tribes to the north. As a result, raids by northern tribes became more frequent during the second half of the century and into the first twenty years of the first century
BC
.
⁴⁵
Delphi—as it had been in the past—was an obvious target, given its large collections of precious dedications and minimal armed protection. In 107
BC
, the Delphians honored M. Minucius Rufus for protecting Greece against barbarian raids. The threat, and resultant gratitude, was obviously very real. The Delphians offered one statue with a Greek inscription and another with a Latin inscription, the only known occurrence of such bilingual honors in Delphic history.
⁴⁶
Surviving texts from Delphi also attest to Roman concern for safe passage around the wider Mediterranean at this time. An inscription from 100
BC
, carved into the base of the victorious monument of Aemilius Paullus, relates a Roman law (translated into Greek) asserting the rights of Romans to safe passage across the seas and urging all Greeks not to give aid to pirates. In the same year, the threat to local Delphians was also made clear. Kidnappers were reported operating in the vicinity of the sanctuary.
⁴⁷

Yet it is also apparent that despite these threats, the sanctuary continued to enjoy a good deal of patronage, especially at the time of the Pythian games. At the turn of the first century
BC
, the stadium seems to have undergone a refitting; in 97
BC
the city of Delphi honored an Athenian comic poet Alexandrus with a statue in the sanctuary, and the eastern Locrians honored their Pythian victor Aristocrates with a statue. In 90
BC
we hear that Antipatrus of Eleuthernai was invited by the Delphic polis to play the water organ for two days during the Pythian games, as paid entertainment for visitors, in addition to the musical and athletic competitions.
⁴⁸
It is also during the first century
BC
that we first hear of a cult at Delphi in honor of Dionysus Sphaleotas and the establishment of an official cult shrine in his honor near the terrace of Attalus at Delphi. The surviving inscription claims that this cult dated back to the Trojan War, and that the cult would go on to be respected into late Antiquity.
⁴⁹

Yet the beginning of the first century
BC
, not withstanding the threat of foreign invasion, also represented the start of a broader downturn in Delphic fortunes. In 87
BC
, the Roman general Sulla, having marched on Rome only the year before, was on campaign in Greece against the forces of Mithridates, the latest threat to Roman control of the eastern Mediterranean. In part thanks to his precarious relationship with Rome, Sulla found himself in need of money. He turned to Greece's best bank vaults: its sanctuaries. Taking the treasures from Olympia and Epidaurus, he wrote to the Amphictyony at Delphi to warn them of his intention to raid the sanctuary. He sent his agent in Phocis, a man named Caphis, to Delphi to organize the plunder. Once there, Caphis was said to have heard the sound of Apollo's lyre and took it as a sign of the god's displeasure at what was being done. He reported this to Sulla, yet Sulla replied that the sound of the lyre meant the god's pleasure not displeasure and instructed Caphis to continue. Sulla was not ignorant of Delphi's importance; he had most probably consulted the oracle himself several years before and was said to carry with him everywhere a small golden statue of Apollo from Delphi, which, when in particularly tight situations, he was said to have always kissed. But he was also a canny political and military operator in a tight spot: he found himself at odds
with Rome to the west and at war with Mithridates to the east; neglecting the treasures he had at his disposal was simply not an option.
⁵⁰