Delphi (37 page)

Figure 11.2
. A view of the stadium at Delphi following a makeover thanks to the benefaction of Herodes Atticus in the second century
AD
(© EFA/P. Aupert [Aupert FD II Stade fig. 142])

Figure 11.3
. The Meleager sarcophagus, at the moment of its discovery in the nineteenth century (© EFA [La redécouverte de Delphes fig. 86])

Moreover we catch brief glimpses of the continued use of the oracle in this period, mostly for private inquiries, but also for more official ones. A Spartan
theopropos
was sent to consult during Marcus Aurelius's reign (about what, we do not know), and stories circulated that the oracle had even been involved in ensuring that Galen, one of the most famous medical practioners in the ancient world, give up his studies in a different field to concentrate on medicine.
²¹
Yet with renewed attention paid to
the oracle, so too was it subjected to greater criticism in a world that was fast changing and would, in less than 250 years, officially reject paganism entirely in favor of Christianity. One writer, Lucian of Samosata, writing in the middle and second half of the second century
AD
, chastised the Delphians for being at the beck and call of dedicators because their fates were tied to that of the oracle, and railed against the famed obscurity and ambiguity of Delphic oracular responses, a trope that would continue to play well with Christian writers keen to undermine oracular sanctuaries and paganism in general in the years to come.
²²

Yet it was during the reigns of Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verrus, and Marcus Aurelius in the second half of the second century
AD
that Delphi was immortalized in another set of writings: those of Pausanias. Despite the survival of Pausanias's
Description of Greece
, we know almost nothing about the writer himself; indeed we are not even sure of his name. He seems to have come from Asia Minor, possibly Magnesia in Lydia. Born during the reign of Hadrian, circa
AD
110–15, he was old enough to have seen Antinous, Hadrian's lover, alive before Antinous drowned in the Nile on 30 October
AD
130. Compared with other famous men of his time, he was about the same age as Ptolemy of Alexandria, and a little older than Lucian of Samosata and Galen of Pergamon. His writings belong to the period
AD
155–80 and fit into a broader genre of literature known as
periegetic
: tour guide mixed in with, among other things, geography, history, mythology, art history, and ethnography.
²³
His
Description of Greece
appears to do just what it says on the tin. Starting in Athens in book 1, Pausanias claims to deal with “
panta ta hellenika”
(“all things Greek” 1.26.4) and proceeds to travel around Greece, describing Olympia in the middle (books 5–6) and Delphi in the final book (book 10).
²⁴
As a result, his detailed descriptions of many Greek sites are instantly recognizable to those studying ancient Greece today and were a fundamental guide to the early excavations of those sites, Delphi included.
²⁵

And yet, there have always been a number of questions about how to understand his text. At the same time as it was an indispensable aid to excavators in the nineteenth century, literary and textual scholars like von
Wilamovitz Moellendorff intensely criticized his work. More recently, there has been a concerted effort to highlight the difficulties in taking Pausanias at face value, and even a question about his usefulness for archaeological research.
²⁶
No longer do we see him as simply recording what he saw, but as a writer with particular interests and views writing to a very particular agenda, and shaping what he reported to fit that mold. As such, Pausanias's text is now considered not simply a straightforward tour guide, but rather a cognitive map created to express a particular ideology of Hellenism contiguous with the greater project of reshaping (and creating) a unified Greece as seen in other initiatives like Hadrian's Panhellenion. Pausanias's focus, scholars have stressed, was on stories, places, objects, and moments that spoke to Greek unity, and most definitely to Greece's past rather than its present: with only two exceptions, no monument discussed by Pausanias at Delphi was erected later than 260
BC
(the exceptions being the stadium and a structure in the Athena sanctuary). Pausanias's present-day Delphi, indeed any part of Delphi's history subsequent to the assumption of full control by the Aetolian league, seems not to have fit with Pausanias's project, which sought to stress the antiquity, cultural history, memory, and importance of an (ancient) unified Greece.
²⁷

Pausanias's goals are understandable. His
Description of Greece
came at a time of heightened interest in, and prosperity for, the country; as well as at a time of recognition that Greece's trump card in a fast changing Mediterranean world was its claim to an unrivaled historical and cultural contribution. But, was he successful in his literary goals? In two ways, it could well be argued that he was not. His own work, the
Description of Greece
, seems not to have been much read in antiquity. The first surviving mention of him and his text is 350 years after his death, in the time of the Roman Emperor Justinian subsequent to Rome's conversion to Christianity. But perhaps more importantly, and indeed what might explain his lack of success, is that by the time of his death circa
AD
180, the brand of philhellenism ignited by Hadrian had begun to splutter slightly.
²⁸
It is telling that one of the two monuments Pausanias mentions in his description of Delphi, and which dates from after 260
BC
,
is the stadium, and that his description of it differs from what we find today (see
fig. 11.2
). Pausanias claims that Herodes Atticus paid for the spectator banks to be made out of marble. But the surviving ones are of local limestone. Scholars have discounted the possibility that the marble has been lost. Instead they believe it was likely never there. Pausanias may well have written about what he heard was intended, but, after the death of Herodes Atticus in
AD
177, it seems the plans were scaled back. The opulence was no longer justified, and stone from the local quarry was used instead. At the same time, when Pausanias writes about the sacred lands belonging to Apollo, and which had remained uncultivated since the sixth century
BC
, it is telling that no one at Delphi seems to know exactly why this is the case. He hears some say it is because they are cursed, and others that it was not good earth for olive trees.
²⁹
Respect for Delphi, it seems, was beginning to falter, and Delphi's trump card—its reputation as a place of cultural memory and unsurpassed history—was threatened by its own lack of knowledge about its own history.

But this was by no means a sudden downfall. At the end of the
second century
AD
, with the arrival of Septimius Severus as emperor (AD 193–211), Delphi once again sent ambassadors to congratulate him on his military victories over rivals (that had brought him to power), and, no doubt, to ask him to reconfirm the liberty and autonomy of the city and sanctuary in accordance with his predecessors. This he did, and the Delphians duly wrote up his response on the walls of the temple of Apollo. In addition, during the reigns of Severus and his son Caracella, a further restoration of the temple of Apollo seems to have been undertaken and overseen by the proconsul of the Roman province of Achaea, Cn. Claudius Leonticus.
³⁰
Indeed, at least for the city and citizens of Delphi, the end of the second century
AD
and the beginning of the third seems to have been a relatively prosperous and stable time. One Amphictyonic secretary from this period, M. Junius Mnaseas, could claim to be the grandson of a Pythian priestess and descended from a number of priests of Apollo; such, it appears, was the stability of the governing class within the city. Moreover Delphi's inhabitants were wealthy enough for numerous statues to be put up in the sanctuary for members of their own
families, as well as for a number of important Romans and Roman officials.
³¹
The Imperial governor (and corrector of Delphi), Cn. Claudius Leonticus, who was probably responsible for a series of renovations of the temple, is thanked with no less than five statues set up by individual Delphians for taking care of all Delphi's affairs. Moreover, although the dating is notoriously difficult, the initial elaboration of the Roman agora space at the entrance to the sanctuary of Apollo continued, and seems to have been accompanied around this time by an expansion to the south with the construction of a complex originally thought to be a set of baths, but now thought likely to have been a complex of housing, shops, and service workshops (see
plate 2
).
³²

It seems, thus, that the celebrations by people like Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century
AD
, that the time of oracles was over, were premature in a number of ways. Not only do we have evidence that the oracle at Delphi continued to give responses right through into the fourth century
AD
(and even the Christian writer Origen of Alexandria writes about the Pythia in the present tense in the mid-third century
AD
), but also it seems that the oracular sanctuary at Delphi continued to be respected enough by the Roman state and its citizens to ensure that the Delphians did well enough for themselves to continue embellishing their sanctuary and city during that time.
³³
At the same time, as we saw in the introduction to this book, it was in the third, or even, fourth century
AD
that Delphi starred as the setting for Heliodorus's fictional novel,
Aethiopica
, which portrayed Delphi not only as the center of (and well connected with) a wide Mediterranean world, but also as a busy and prosperous sanctuary.

In one aspect of Delphic business, however, there were signs of change, and this was the Pythian games, which had long been a stalwart of Delphic business, and a major reason for the sanctuary's continuing success. But the sanctuary was to become something of a victim of that success. On the one hand, certain communities, like that of the Hypatians, seem to have been stalwart supporters of the games, and even to have taken the opportunity of the festival to conduct a ritual in honor of Neoptolemus at his small cult area in the Apollo sanctuary from the second century
AD
onward. But on the other hand, from
AD
180
AD
through to
AD
268, there seems to have been a massive exportation of the Pythian games, at the command of successive emperors, to twenty-seven cities in the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Syria. At first sight, this might seem good news only for Delphi, and without doubt, the spread of the Pythian games must in some part have been inspired by the high regard in which the Delphi Pythian games were held. But in reality these were not carbon copies of the Delphic games. They were loosely based on them, but incorporated a wide range events and practices. Moreover, in no way does the spread of the Pythian games seem to have been officially linked to their original location: not a single epigraphic attestation of this expansion survives at Delphi.
³⁴
Instead these new sets of games are known predominantly through the publicity generated in their newfound homes. So, while the “original” Pythian games would with little doubt have continued to hold a particular attraction, these new ones throughout the Roman world must have drawn attention away from Delphi. This was especially the case because these new games seem to have been motivated in the third century
AD
by a shift in the worship of the emperor away from temple building and sacrifice toward the performance of agonistic festivals and ceremonies in his presence. Given that the way to honor the emperor was increasingly through games, no one city or sanctuary could expect to hold the monopoly on these activities, and indeed we should expect increasing rivalry between the different events, which meant increased competition for the Pythian games at Delphi, especially as new Pythian games were hosted in cities closer and closer to Delphi. A Pythian festival, almost identical to that at Delphi, was founded at Thessalonike under the Emperor Gordian III (AD 238–44). As a result, despite the liveliness of the Pythian games at Delphi depicted in the sources for mid-late second century
AD
, the inscribed catalogs of victors shows a marked decline in numbers during the first half of the third century
AD
.
³⁵

One of the reasons the Pythian games, as opposed to the Olympic games, became the model for export was their association with the god Apollo. During the course of the third century
AD
, Apollo, and
particularly Apollo Helios (Apollo “of the Sun”), who was deemed the Greek equivalent of the Roman Sol Invictus (“Invincible Sun”), became a more and more popular patron deity for emperors. Yet the third century
AD
was also a period of prolonged crisis for the Roman empire: confronted by ongoing invasion from multiple directions; dealing with a continued, bitter, and violent struggle for Imperial control within Roman society; suffering from brief fractures in the empire itself and accompanied by economic difficulties and even plague.
³⁶
On the one hand, Delphi did its best to keep up with this continually changing, fractured, and fraught political landscape. Emperor Gordian III (despite his approval for the setting up of identikit Pythian games at Thessalonike) was honored by the Amphictyony and the city of Delphi with a statue in the sanctuary. So, too, the city of Delphi honored Valerian (AD 253–56) and his son Gallienus who was co-ruler with him for a time (AD 253–60), and then sole ruler (AD 260–68). Likewise, the city of Delphi set up a statue of his successor, Claudius Gothicus (AD 268–70), and later for Carus, who ruled for only a year in
AD
282–83.
³⁷
At the same time, the sanctuary itself was not unattended to or unpopulated. The first phase of the eastern baths, completed on a terrace between that of the stoa of Attalus and the Roman agora, can be dated to the second half of the third century
AD
(see
plate 2
). Likewise, dedicators still came to the sanctuary from far afield. Sinope, on the Black Sea, erected a statue to its own athletic superstar in
AD
250–75, and, in keeping with the military and political instability of the period, a group of mercenary soldiers erected a statue of their leader in the sanctuary at some point during the third century
AD
.
³⁸