When one views the dramatic site of Delphi, it is understandable that the god Apollo would choose it for his principal sanctuary. It is nestled on the south slopes of Mount Parnassos, under the twin cliffs, the Phaedriadhes (the Bright Ones), which glow red when they catch the setting sun. Delphi was considered the centre of the world and the myth recounts that Zeus, curious about the exact location of the earth's centre, released two eagles from Mount Olympus which flew in opposite directions and met at Delphi. He marked the spot with the omphalos ("navel") stone which his mother Rhea had wrapped in swaddling clothes to take his place and fool his father Kronos (Figure 1).

The god Apollo was born on the island of Delos from which he set out to make his way in the world. When he arrived at Delphi, the site was already occupied by the cult of the mother goddess Ge and protected by her son, the snaky god Pytho. Apollo defeated Pytho but revered him by maintaining his name as an epithet for his cult at Delphi, and his priestess was known as the Pythia and his games as the Pythian.

The sanctuary of Pythian Apollo was the most famous oracle in the ancient world. Herodotus recounts that when Croesus was trying to determine the location of the most reliable oracle in the world, he sent embassies bearing gifts and a test question to all the famous contemporary oracles and found that only Delphi passed the test. Many of the questions asked of the Pythia have survived inscribed on lead tablets but none of the answers were recorded by the priests. The most famous answer that we know was recorded again by Herodotus when Croesus, the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia, asked the Pythia whether he should cross the Halys River and attack the Persian king, Cyrus the Great. The Pythia's characteristically enigmatic reply was if Croesus should cross the Halys river, a great empire would fall. When heartened by this answer and he did attack Cyrus, it was he, Croesus, who was defeated. The one boon that Croesus requested of Cyrus upon his capture was to have his manacles sent to Delphi as a rebuke to the oracle which had failed him after he had bestowed so many luxurious gifts on the sanctuary. Unabashed, the Pythia retorted that Croesus had failed to follow up on the first response and ask which empire would fall (Figure 2).

Apollo

We have no evidence for the worship of Apollo at Delphi before the eighth century BC when, according to tradition, the cult of Apollo Delphinios was introduced by priests from Knossos. The Delphic oracle became internationally renowned and the Greeks would not undertake any major endeavour before seeking the advice of the Pythia. This is especially true for Greek city states contemplating commercial or colonizing voyages. The process of consulting the Pythia was a lengthy one as the oracle only operated for a limited number of days over a nine month period. One envisions the sanctuary full of people kicking their heels while waiting for their turn, people from every corner of the known world whiling away the time by exchanging gossip and news. It would have been the perfect place to go on a fact-finding mission, and the priests being resident and therefore privy to all who visited, became repositories of a wealth of information.

The Pythia was chosen from the priestesses of Apollo over fifty and had to agree to a life of seclusion. On the day when she was scheduled to pronounce oracles, usually the seventh of the month, she would bath in the Castalia Spring and undergo a purification involving barley-smoke and laurel leaves. She would enter the Temple of Apollo, sit on a tripod seat over the fissure of Pytho, drink water from the Kerna fountain and chew laurel leaves. Upon sinking into a trance she would respond to questions with garbled utterances which were transcribed by the priests of Apollo into verse which were then read in public in front of the temple. It was in the best interests of the priesthood to give as unbiased and as good advice as possible, and most often they did. Sometimes their use of logic and reliance on collected intelligence may not have served them well for they did not always bet on the right horse, most famously when they counseled surrendering to the Persians.

Delphi was also the site of the Pythian games, established as a quadrennial event by 582 BC and the most important games in Greece after the Olympics (Figure 3). Because Apollo was the god of music and the arts, the games here had a very different flavour. The first event was for singing a hymn to the god, but soon the usual athletic contests such as running, riding and chariot racing, joined other contests for singing, dancing, flute and lyre playing. Homer is said to have visited the site but did not compete. The poet Hesiod was reputedly disqualified for not knowing how to play a harp while he sang. These events were held in the theatre above the temple and the stadium nestled in the pine forest above the sanctuary. The prize at the games was a laurel wreath in commemoration of Apollo's lost love, the nymph Daphne. In her desire to avoid the unwanted sexual attentions of Apollo, Daphne was turned into a laurel tree by her protective father.

Because of the importance of the oracle and the games, many city states established a permanent presence at the sanctuary by building treasuries. The list of treasuries is virtually a who's who of important cities in the ancient world. The most ornate of these was the Treasury of the Siphnians, the sculpture from which is a highlight of the Delphi Museum (Figure 4). The Treasury of the Athenians has been reconstructed and gives the visitor a clear sense of what these small structures would have looked like (Figure 5).

History of the Sanctuary of Apollo

Because of the importance of the site, a dispute arose between two nearby towns as to who should have control of the sanctuary. The First Sacred War (595-586 BC) ended with the creation of the Amphictyonic League which was a federation of 12 city states, including arch rivals Athens and Sparta, which reorganized and presided over the Pythian Games. In 548 BC when fire destroyed the 8th century temple of Apollo, funds were raised from all over the Mediterranean to rebuild the temple and enlarge the sanctuary.

Between the Persian Wars (498-480 BC), the oracle advised Athens to trust in their wooden walls. Some Athenian politicians interpreted that advice literally and advised the building of wooden fortifications while Themistocles advised building a navy. The people of Athens were saved by evacuating to Salamis and entrusting their deliverance to their fleet. The site of Delphi was saved from the Persians by a miraculous landslide. Through the second half of the fifth and the early fourth centuries BC, there were three more Sacred Wars (448, 356, 340 BC) between various Greek city states over control of the sanctuary and its sacred lands in the Krisaean plain below.

Aerial of Sanctuary

In the fourth century BC, Delphi came under the influence of Macedonia and benefited from a period of enlargement and refurbishing. In 279 BC the sanctuary was again miraculously saved from the invasion of the barbarian Gauls. The Pergamon dynasts, famous for their battles with the Gauls, were generous patrons of the sanctuary in the third century BC and built a stoa (the Stoa of Attalos I) as well as refurbishing existing monuments. Control of the sanctuary then passed to the Aetolian League (290-190 BC) before falling to the Romans in 189 BC. Sulla sacked the site in 86 BC, and later Nero is recorded to have carted off 500 bronze statues back to Rome in 51 AD. There was still a lot to be seen when Pausanias visited the site during and after the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian (117-138 AD) despite the depredations of Sulla and Nero.

After the emperor Theodosius banned the cult in 385 AD, the sanctuary went out of use and was neglected and pillaged of its treasures and quarried for building material. By the nineteenth century it lay forgotten beneath the modern village of Delphi. The treasuries on the Athena Pronaia terrace were used as houses and a monastery reused walls of the gymnasium. When the foreign schools of archaeology were being formed and given a choice of sites, the French School of Classical Studies of Athens chose Delphi (as well as Delos) as one of their three sites and began to dig here in the 1861 and 1880. There was a pause in the permit to the French as a result of a dispute between the French and Greek governments concerning a French tax on Greek currants. Since this dispute's resolution in 1891, the French excavations have been continuous up to the present. The Greek department of Antiquities moved the modern village to its present location in 1891 to facilitate the excavations. The French excavations are published in the monumental series Fouilles de Delphes.

Pausanias at Delphi

One of the reasons that we know so much about the ancient site of Delphi is because of the writings of one of the first travel writers. Pausanias travelled through Greece in the second century CE and recorded what he saw in the order that he saw it in his work Periegesis Hellados (Description of Greece). Therefore at Delphi he records the monuments as he climbed the Sacred Way up to the temple of Apollo. We do have some inscriptions which corroborate his description but for the most part "without him the ruins of Greece would be a labyrinth without a clue, a riddle without an answer," according to James Frazier, classicist and anthropologist.

The Sanctuary

A visitor to the site follows the path followed by all ancient visitors to the site. The sacred way winds its way from the entrance at the southeast corner of the sanctuary, having left the Roman agora behind, and zigging up the hillside first almost due west and then turning back and zagging northeast up to the eastern entrance of the Temple of Apollo. On the way one passes dedications of statues commemorating military victories and other achievements of the Greeks and other peoples of the Mediterranean. At its height, one must imagine a clutter of statues squeezed in wherever they could fit. At times there is irony in the placement, such as the location of an Arcadian dedication commemorating a victory against the Spartans directly across the Sacred Way from a Spartan dedication commemorating their victory over the Athenians at Aegospotami during the Peloponnesian War. As one proceeds up, the most notable building before one gets to the Temple of Apollo, is the reconstructed Treasury of the Athenians, built with the spoils from their victory over the Persian at the Battle of Marathon. It is a Doric style building with two columns in antis built just after 490 BC. It was re-erected in 1904-06 by the French in co-operation with the city of Athens.

The Sacred way leads up to the Great altar in front of the Temple of Apollo (Figure 6). According to tradition as recounted by Pausanias, the first three temples were made of laurel, beeswax, and bronze, but the first temple attested by archaeology was built in the 7th century BC and was destroyed by fire in 548 BC. A replacement was started in 536 BCE and finished by the exiled Alcaemonids from Athens in 513-505 BC. The Archaic pedimental sculpture was carved by Antenor, some fragments of which are now on display in the museum. This temple was in turn destroyed in 373 BC. The current temple was constructed between 366-329 BC by the architects Xenodoros and Agathon. It was made of poros stone with a peripteros of 6 columns on the front and 15 on the sides which were stuccoed over. The entablature was decorated with shields captured from the Persians at Plataea. This last phase was damaged in the Thracian raids in 88 BCE and restored by Domitian. What one sees today are one re-erected column of the facade and portions of others and so it dominates the site. One sees the foundations of the outer colonnade and the interior sekos but nothing remains of the interior arrangement. Supposedly there was a lower chamber under the back room in which were the omphalos and the oracular chasm.

Above the temple, a path leads up to the Theatre, one of the best preserved in Greece. It was built in stone in the 4th century BCE and restored in 159 by the Pergamene king Eumenes II, and later by the Romans. It has 35 rows of seats and could seat 5,000 people. The front of the stage was decorated with a frieze of the Labours of Herakles, now in the Delphi Museum.

Theatre above the Temple of Apollo

Well above the theatre, accessed by walking through a peaceful pine forest is the stadium. It was built partially out of the living rock with some of the supporting masonry dating to fifth century BC. The north side had 12 rows of seats and a platform to accommodate the presidents of the games. The curved west end and the south side only had 6 rows of seats. Altogether, 7,000 people could be accommodated. Four pillars remain of the Roman Triumphal Arch which formed the entrance at the south-eastern corner, built by Herodes Atticus, the famous Athenian philanthropist.

The Castalia Spring

On the right as one approaches ancient Delphi is the famous Castalia Spring tucked into a ravine right under the Phaedriades. Apollo is said to have planted a laurel tree here which he brought from the Vale of Tempe. All visitors purified themselves here before entering the sanctuary. At first it would have been a simple spring but was later elaborated, finally with a Roman fountain house. Many poets found inspiration from drinking the waters here and it was said that if you drink of the waters of the Castalia Spring, you would return to Greece. Alas, access to the springs has been cut off temporarily as the Roman fountain is in the process of being restored by the Department of Antiquites.

The Athena Pronoia Temple (“The Marmaria”)

Just south of the main road leading from Arachova to Delphi is a small sacred terrace. This is the area of the Delphi environs which has yielded the earliest evidence of occupation. In soundings beneath the standing Classical remains, evidence for a Mycenaean cult center has been inferred from late Bronze Age sherds and artifacts. The first Athena temple was built in the Archaic period and was a small peripteral temple and known as the Athena Pronaia temple, the "Athena-in-front-of-the-temple" (Guardian of the Temple). This temple was destroyed by a rock fall before the time of Herodotus in the fifth century BC, the same miraculous event which routed the Persians from their assualt, and replaced by an adjacent temple in the fourth century BC when the area became known as Athena Pronoia, "Athena Forethought/Providence." Most of the other structures on this terrace are treasury buildings, which were resused as village houses up until 1891 when the village of Delphi was moved. Pausanias describes a statue in front of the later temple of Athena, "which was bigger than the (cult) statue inside" dedicated by the city of Massalia (modern Marseilles). The Treasury of the Massalians was built in 530 BC and was building with two Aeolic columns, in antis, supporting the front porch and made of marble from the island of Paros.

Tholos of Athena Pronoia

The most notable of the buildings on the Athena Pronoia terrace is the Tholos, for which the terrace gets its nickname of Marmaria. This circular structure made out of Pentellic marble with a circular peripteros of 20 slender Doric columns, was built in the early fourth century BC by the architect Theodorus, who was so proud of it that he wrote a treatise on its construction. The interior was decorated with 10 Corinthian half columns. Surprisingly, Pausanias does not mention this unique building in his brief discussion of the terrace. He describes only four structures, the first in ruins (the old Athena temple), the next empty of statues and offerings (perhaps the Tholos), the third had portraits of Roman kings, and the fourth is called the Temple of Athena Foresight. We do not know what the function of this beautiful structure was but it may have been built to house a statue robbed by the time of Pausanias. In the fifteenth century, Cyriacus of Ancona mistook it for the Temple of Apollo. Three columns and the entablature of this graceful ruin were re-erected in 1938 and make this one of the most picturesque remains of the ancient site of Delphi.

The Gymnasium

Between the Marmaria and the Castalia Spring, south of the Arachova-Delphi road is the Gymnasium. This two-level complex of athletic building was built in the late Classical and Hellenistic periods and rebuilt during the Roman period. On the upper level was the xystos or long colonnade where the athletes practiced in bad weather and a parallel track in the open air. On the lower level are the remains of a peristyle court which served as a palaestra or wrestling ground, which is the most recognizable of the standing remains. A monastery was built into this Palaestra, actually reusing some of the ancient walls. It was moved out when the village was relocated in 1891. Next to the palaestra were a bath complex with a cold plunge and some sitz baths built into the back of the terrace. A hot bath was added in the Roman period. In the vicinity, there is a column fragment signed by Byron.

The Museum

A modern museum has been built on the edge of the site and is filled with the results of the excavations in and around the sanctuary of Apollo. Highlights from the early history of the site include a copy of the omphalos stone and the Halos Treasure, religious objects from the sanctuary ritually buried in a pit called a bothros. This treasure included fragments from an early cult statue and probably resulted from the early 6th century destruction of the Temple of Apollo. This statue was made in the cryselephantine technique by which gold and ivory covered a wooden statue. In the same room are fragments of a sixth century BC silver plated bull, the largest example surviving from antiquity of a statue made of a precious metal. One room is dedicated to the sculpture from the Treasury of the Siphnians, built as a result of the finding of gold mines on the island. According to Pausanias, the god commanded them to bring a tithe of the profits to him. When they stopped paying the tribute, the mines were flooded! This treasury is the most ornately decorated with a Caryatid porch (columns in the form of women) and a frieze which shows the episodes from Trojan War and the Battle of the Olympian Gods and the Giants.

Bronze Charioteer

The highlight of the musuem's collection is undoubtedly a bronze statue known simply as The Charioteer. It was sculpted in about 470 BC and commemorated the victory of a Syracusan prince in a chariot race of the Pythian games and was probably paid for by Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse. It is one of the few ancient bronzes to come down to us as most would have been melted down to reuse their valuable raw material. It was part of a group which would have stood on a terrace wall up slope from the Temple of Apollo. It fell from this terrace and was preserved by a landslide to be excavated by the French in 1896. It is famous for the contrast between its severe Classical formality and its intensity and life-like aspects. Note especially the veins on the hands and the feet. This piece drives home to us the enormity of what we have lost from antiquity.

 

 

© Odyssey, Adventures in Archaeology. 2001