DELPHI
“When to Apollo’s world-famed land we came,
Three radiant courses of the sun we gave
To gazing and with beauty filled our eyes.”
EURIPIDES, _Andromache_.[25]
Footnote 25:
Translation (modified) by Way.
If leisure is the nurse of sympathetic understanding, “three radiant
courses of the sun” are none too many to give to Delphi. The inner
meaning of this centre of Greece needs not only to be quarried out of
history and literature, but also to be garnered from the abundant beauty
of a landscape which created as well as framed a unique religious life.
At the chief oracular seat of the God of Prophecy antiquarian curiosity
about its early legends and primitive cults makes way for the
realization of Apollo, “the Far-Darter, ruling the glorious temple
wherein all men find welcome.” A modern journey is a successor to the
journeys and pilgrimages undertaken through many centuries by the men
and peoples who sought from his omniscience foreknowledge and advice.
Even the protagonists of shadowy antiquity were brought thither by their
hopes and fears. Heracles, the national hero of Greece, driven by Hera
to madness and murder, asked at Delphi where he should make his home,
and was sent by the oracle to begin his twelve labours. Agamemnon,
anxious lord of the Greek armies, sought advice of the god. Io was
started on her long wanderings over the earth and through literature
because her father was commanded by Apollo’s ministers to drive her from
her home and her country. Because of a Delphic response, the infant son
of Laius of Thebes was exposed on Mount Cithæron. Œdipus, on the fatal
day when he killed Laius, was on his way back from Delphi, whither he
had gone to ask if he were son of the Corinthian king who had reared him
and where he had received the ambiguous answer that he was fated to slay
his father. It was when, as king of Thebes, he sent to “the Pythian
house of Phœbus to learn by what deed or word he might deliver his
pestilence-stricken city” that he unconsciously invoked his own doom.
And it was again the Delphic oracle which closed the pitiful story by
prophesying Œdipus’s final reconciliation with the eternal will.
But these ancient demigods and kings move in a world only half realized
by us. Their dooms and their emotions have the remote nobility, the
superb universality of the Attic drama through which chiefly they are
portrayed. It is in the vivacious pages of the charmingly pious
Herodotus that the desires of living men and women seem to surge, in
failure or fruition, about the Delphic tripod. From the foreign kingdoms
of Asia, from Greek colonies in Africa and Italy, from rock-bound island
harbours, ships were constantly spreading sails at the impulse of
national distress or personal ambition, to furl them in the port that
lay below Delphi. From Lacedæmon, deep in the hollow of the southern
hills, from Thrace’s widespread plains, swept by the northern tempests,
from the wild mountains of Arcadia, from rich Corinth and bright Athens
and every other city of Hellas, men made their way in chariots, on
mules, and on foot, to the knees of Apollo. Mountains and rivers, rude
valleys and hostile villages offered no obstacles, nor were the
suppliants repelled by the “dark sayings, dim and hard to know,” which
were often their only reward. Kings hurried off embassies at the first
signs of rivalry. Adventurers stopped to question the god before
carrying new colonies beyond the seas. Quarrelsome states and cities
asked for advice in their fratricidal plots. Wealthy cities desired to
know if they could always count on their revenues. Ghost-haunted towns
asked the meaning of their spectres. Agricultural communities were eager
to learn how to restore dying crops. Ambitious politicians sought
encouragement in their pursuit of power. Sick men prayed for health,
childless men for offspring. Indeed, to the irreverent the Pythian
priestess must often have seemed to carry a load of oracles as jumbled
as that of Aristophanes’s sausage seller who came staggering into the
market-place at Athens with “responses” to sell,—
“Full of Athenians, and of lentil-porridge too;
Of Spartans; of fresh tunny fish; and of the men
Who in the market measure false the barley-groats;
Of you; of me, and of affairs in general.”
But Aristophanes himself was at heart as conservative a believer in
religion as Herodotus had been. And to piety like theirs, existing from
generation to generation, was due the position that Delphi held not only
as a source of knowledge but as the conscience of Greece. Sometimes in
public affairs this conscience seemed to recommend prudence rather than
righteousness, as in the wretched advice distributed at the time of the
Persian invasion. In private affairs, such as athletics or the use of
trust money, the oracle was always on the side of honour.
It must be borne in mind that along with the widespread acceptance of
the oracular responses went a rationalizing independence of judgment
which sometimes overruled the religious instinct. Cases of obstinate
self-seeking in spite of the plain injunction of the god betray the
exercise of this judgment on a low plane. But, soiled though it
sometimes was by ignoble use, the mental independence of the Athenians,
at least, was a magnificent possession. It saved Hellas when Crete and
Argos and all the lesser brood followed the prudent warnings from
Delphi. It chose an uneven fight for national freedom in the very face
of the accepted conscience of the whole Greek world. Only an
understanding of the noblest aspects of the rôle played by the Delphic
oracle in Greek history and life can throw into sufficiently high relief
the splendid revolt of Athens, when Persia threatened her liberty,
against an ecclesiastical authority which had become debased. The
historian who is the best guide to a dutiful belief in Pythian Apollo
tells the story with implicit sympathy: “Not even the terrifying oracles
that came from Delphi and plunged them into fear persuaded them to
abandon Hellas. They plucked up courage to await the invader of their
land.”
Nor is there here any inconsistency. The faithful in all religions have
refused to identify the sins and follies of the priests with the will of
the gods. The Persians might intimidate or buy the ministers of Apollo.
The Alcmæonidæ, exiled from Athens, might bribe them to do their selfish
will. Cleomenes of Sparta might purchase his throne from them. But the
pious had always the refuge created by Sophocles for Iocasta when she
declared the oracle was false: “It came not from Phœbus but from his
servants.” When the Persians had been defeated, Athens, on the flood
tide of victory, freedom, and power, raised noble memorials of her
struggle in the sacred precinct of the oracle which had advised her not
to fight. When the modern traveller has brought himself to see that this
was not done in grim humour but in unbewildered piety, he is ready to
undertake his own journey to Delphi.
Of all the possible approaches none can be happier than a drive on a
moonlight night up from the little port of Itea, the inglorious terminus
of the eight hours’ sail from Piræus through the canal and along the
Gulf of Corinth. The comfortable carriage road winds through the
“moon-blanched” olive orchards and vineyards of the ancient Crisæan
plain, mounting gradually toward the steep slopes of Parnassus and its
attendant mountains, and twisting in long courses among shadowy
hillsides which only hint at rude crags and deep ravines. Perhaps it was
some such night as this that led the writer of the Homeric Hymn to
Artemis to see the sister of Apollo, “slackening her fair-curved bow and
going to the mighty hall of Phœbus in the Delphians’ rich deme and
arraying there the Muses’ and the Graces’ lovely dance.” The exquisite
grace of the landscape, half hidden, half revealed through the fragile
veil of silver light, seems like a gentle preparation for the epiphany,
expected on the morrow, of the god of the golden blade.
The carriage passes very early by Amphissa, the capital of modern Phocis
as it was of ancient Locris, and an hour later halts, to rest the
horses, at a dim corner of the village of Chryso, a name which preserves
that of the Crisa of antiquity. All this drowsy territory has been the
stage of one of the significant dramas of history. The modern demarch
hospitably presses water from the village fountain upon modern
wayfarers, but the Crisæans once used their strategic position as owners
of the whole wide plain to plunder pilgrims on their way to the shrine.
This evil monopoly gave way, early in the sixth century, to the powerful
confederation of twelve Greek states, known as the Delphic Amphictyony,
whose representatives met at Delphi twice a year and ruled the affairs
of the sacred domain. During almost one hundred and fifty years, with
unquestioned right, whatever internecine wars were in progress,
delegates from Thessaly and Bœotia, from Athens and Sparta, from Phocis
itself and from other lesser states could pass and repass through Crisa,
while the fertile plain went untilled. Even after war invaded the
protected territory the existence of the Council was not endangered. But
the constitution of the delegates changed with the fortunes of battles.
By the middle of the fourth century the Phocians were struck from the
list and the Macedonians added. Philip had become the chief actor,
seizing his opportunity when the men of Delphi, at the instigation of
the Athenian delegate, Æschines, attacked the men of Amphissa because
they were turning the consecrated wilderness of the plain into
corn-fields and olive groves and filling up the empty places with
prosperous houses and busy little potteries. A series of easy steps led
to the overthrow of Greek freedom.
But under the compassionate moon the sentimentalist continues his way,
in wilful oblivion of the catastrophe of the drama, to the point nearest
ancient Delphi. This is the tiny village of Kastri, which less than
twenty years ago was plying its life on the unconscious surface of earth
spread over the ruins of the sacred site. At great expense of money and
trouble it was picked up by the French excavators and deposited, safe
and whole, a little farther to the west around the sharp corner of the
mountain, where, in fear of slipping into the deep valley below, it
curls close to Parnassus’s side. Here lodgings may be obtained either in
a conventional hostelry or, preferably, in a low-eaved peasant house,
where on cool nights a wood fire glows in a big stone fireplace and the
light of candles is eked out by diminutive copper lamps which would have
seemed primitive to Agamemnon.
The popular time for ancient pleasure-seekers to visit Delphi was in the
middle of August, when games were held in honour of Apollo. At that
season, if ever, the slopes and peaks of Parnassus were accessible, but
the burning heat as the rocks reflected the sun’s rays, alternating with
heavy thunderstorms as the wind rushed up from the valley, must have
modified the comfort of visitors. In the spring the modern traveller
will find an equable and pleasant climate. And also, prepared as he may
be for the solemnity and the lonely grandeur of the scenery about
Delphi, he will discover unanticipated qualities in the landscape which
are illuminative of certain elements in the significance of the place. A
walk along the highway that leads from Kastri to and through the ruined
precinct reveals both the expected and the new. Toward the southwest
lies the Crisæan plain filled with olive groves. Beyond its gray-green
breadth gleams the Corinthian Gulf with the far-off mountains of Arcadia
girding the horizon. Directly in the west the snow-capped mountains of
Locris, the highest in Central Greece, fret the sky. Southeastward
plunges the valley of Delphi, formed by Mount Parnassus on the north and
by Mount Cirphis on the south, and watered by the river Plistus which in
a long line of gleaming argent seeks its westerly home in the bay of
Itea.
The valley of the Plistus lies in full sight after the Crisæan plain and
the gulf beyond it have been blotted out by a turn in the road which
leads sharply around a large, rocky ridge, the barrier between the new
town and the old. This ridge formed the western wall that isolated
Delphi in lonely remoteness between the bare steep rocks of Cirphis and
the cliffs of massive Parnassus, which spreads its huge buttresses over
the surrounding country. Rising two thousand feet above the level of the
sea, these cliffs present a magnificent expanse of gray and red
limestone, and still reflect the brilliant morning sun, true to their
ancient name of the “Shining Rocks.” Where they bend around, in their
long course, a deep gorge is formed from which the storied spring of
Castalia still issues. Above the gorge, invisible when one stands under
the cliffs but conspicuous from lower levels, rise twin peaks, seeking a
proud supremacy.
Superb mountains, precipitous cliffs, deep ravines, lonely valley, all
are here. But here too, softening, transfiguring, some unforeseen
influence is at work. Over the mountains a friendly, familiar sunshine
casts a gentle glamour. Olive trees fearlessly silver the long slopes
that stretch from the shining rocks to the glistening river. In jocund
profusion, tripping through the valley and climbing up the steep places,
pink and white almond trees flower like blushing dryads. The Far-Darter
has chosen this hour to lay aside his bow. No longer does he come,—
“angered in heart, with his bow on his shoulders and close-covered
quiver, while in his anger the shafts on his shoulders are clanging,
and like to the Night is his coming,”—
but he lifts the “golden lyre” that quencheth even the lightning spear,
the bolt of Zeus’s immortal fire.
Or perhaps Apollo has abdicated for a time and it is Dionysus who is
concealing the terror of the oracle beneath the sparkling audacity of
spring. For the worship of this multiform god had a strong hold on
Delphi, and the “beat of his unseen feet” as he was wont to lead his
Mænads in furious dance among the uplands of Parnassus echoes through
Greek poetry. According to one set of legends, Dionysus was the first to
hold the oracle. According to another, Apollo regularly departed for
three months each year, leaving the more fiery god of inspiration in
charge of the sacred tripod. In any case the relation between the divine
brothers seems to have been very amicable. An old vase-painting
represents them as affectionately shaking hands under a palm tree.
The scene of the Dionysiac revels was the broad table-land which lies,
more than three thousand feet above the level of the sea, between the
Shining Rocks and the peaks of Parnassus. Here amid the wooded ravines
and open meadows the flashing, flowing Dionysus, god of all ardent life,
lord of the ichor of spring, held one of his many courts. It is
significant of the unparalleled inclusiveness of Greek ideals that not
only on “the topmost heights of Caucasus” and in the “vales of Lydia,”
but also above Apollo’s temple where were inscribed in letters of gold
the maxims of the seven sages, “Know thyself” and “Nothing too much,”
the god of mad impulse and unchartered freedom should have been seen to
leap and dance, and give “to his female followers the note for the
Bacchic tune.” Every two years, “when spring flashed out for the first
time” and sorrow might be swallowed up in joy, a torch festival was held
in his honour by women of the surrounding country. Even from Attica
women made their way to join in the celebration, travelling over the
same “Sacred Way” by which the Athenians periodically sent their
offerings to Delphi, and which Apollo had taken on his civilizing march
through the wild places of men, escorted with great reverence by the
road-making people of Athens. The passionate desire for the mad
nocturnal revels which awaited the Bacchantes at the end of their long
journey was attributed by Euripides, who must often have seen the
procession starting out from Athens, to Tyrian women on their way to the
service of Phœbus at Delphi. Detained in Thebes by the civil war of
Œdipus’s sons, they tease their imaginations with visions of the rock
that flasheth a splendour of light and the cloven tongue of the torches’
flame, of the vine that each morning offers up its giant cluster to brim
the cup of the mystic ritual, of the snow-smitten, lonely ridges where,
with souls unafraid, they might be wreathing the happy dance.[26]
Footnote 26:
Cf. Way’s translation of the _Phœnissæ_, 219 ff.
But mortal women were not the only companions of Dionysus. The exuberant
play of nature, the change from death to life as winter made way for
spring, not only goaded human hearts with a divine torture, but peopled
the hills with lithe nymphs of untouched soul, rollicking with Pan and
even with the greater god whose joy, to spirits touched to finer issues,
was more terrible than sweet. Pan and the nymphs had their special
dwelling-place in the Corycian Cave, which Pausanias mentions as one of
the four most famous caverns of the whole world, “among a total number
past finding out.” It was certainly the most remarkable one in Greece, a
country abounding in “caves that open upon the beach or in the deep
sea,” and in mountain caverns due to the frequent honeycombing by
earthquake and subterranean currents. Very large and containing two
chambers, it lies about seven miles northeast of Delphi, near the top of
one of the low hills which form the northern boundary of the Parnassian
uplands. According to the descriptions of travellers, the greater
chamber has slender stalactites hanging from the roof at both ends, and
at the inner end stalagmites rise from the ground to meet them. The
other chamber, like a remote shrine, must be reached through a narrow
passage and lies in almost total darkness. At the mouth of the cave an
inscription was found containing a dedication to Pan and the nymphs.
Certainly a fit abode for divine embodiments of soulless nature was this
vaulted, echoing grotto, whose cavernous mouth opens upon the widespread
beauty of an untamed world. Æschylus may have seen the “Corycian Rock”
or he may have trusted to the eyes of others in describing its hollow
loneliness, “the home of birds, and the resort of deities.”
If it is difficult to disentangle the myths which connect several gods
with one place, it is still more difficult to understand the legends
which hint at the infinite complexity of each god in any one of his own
several spheres. In studying the Delphic Apollo, the clear outlines of
the great god as he governed the Greek world will best be preserved by
noticing those stories which have been preferred by the poets. It was
natural that Æschylus should penetrate beyond any individualized form of
divine activity to primeval forces, following the legend which made
Apollo a late heir to the first owners of the oracle, to Earth herself
and to her daughter, holy Law. It was equally characteristic that
Euripides, with his eye for vivid detail, should have been attracted by
the story which begins with Leto’s golden-haired son coming from the
fruitful meadows of his birthplace, Delos, to the Dionysus-haunted
summit of Parnassus. Under its shadow, amid the thick-leaved laurel, lay
as guardian of the holy place a dragon with gleaming talons. This horrid
monster the young god slew, thereafter taking his seat upon the golden
tripod. Earth, appearing only as the mother of the dragon, sought to
wrest from him the right of prophecy. But, swift of foot, he fled to
Olympus and the throne of Zeus, and the king of the gods laughed and
shook his awful hair and gave to his youthful son in perpetuity the
sovereignty over the Delphic abode.
The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which contains the oldest account of the
killing of the dragon, also relates that the god chose Cretans to be his
first ministers. Whatever the historical basis of this story may be, its
telling gives the riotous Ionian poet a chance to transform Phœbus
Apollo into a dolphin deflecting from its course a swift ship sent out
from Cretan Cnossus to Pylos on the border of the Ionian Sea. The
dolphin caused it to traverse strange waters, beyond Peloponnesus and
the ford of Alpheus, past the steep ridge of Ithaca and wooded
Zacynthus, into the harbour of Crisa. Here the dolphin disappeared and
the god leaped from the ship in the guise of a star at high noon, while
sparks of frequent fire flew from him and flash of splendour reached the
sky. On shore he appeared as a man, lusty and strong, and persuaded the
Cretans to dance in his train and to take charge of the temple. By
suggesting that they might use for themselves the flocks brought for
sacrifice, he overcame their fear that they would fare but meagrely in a
country neither vine-bearing nor rich in meadows.
The story of the hymn is too confused to be worthy of Apollo. He was no
music-hall performer, making lightning transformations, but lord, in
simplicity and dignity, of music and all harmonies, elder brother and
guide in the paths of conduct. So at least he reveals himself on a
spring morning beneath the Shining Rocks lit by his sunlight from the
south.
But homelier memories also come to life. It may have been in the
“fragrant dawn” of a day like this that the boy Odysseus, while he was
on a visit to his grandfather, went hunting with his uncles in the windy
hollows of wood-clad Parnassus and killed a great boar. From its white
tusks he had received a wound which was to leave an indelible scar and
years later betray his identity to his aged nurse. Certainly it must
have been on such a morning that another boy, Ion the acolyte, was
performing his early tasks for the temple when visitors from Athens
arrived to question him about the sights. They were women who had
accompanied the queen Creusa when she and her husband, like many others,
came to Delphi in their childlessness. In her youth, before her marriage
to Xuthus, she had been loved by Apollo and had borne him a son in his
cave below the Athenian Acropolis. The baby had been abandoned by her,
but a servant had carried it to Delphi and left it as a foundling with
the priestess. Unknown to Creusa, he had grown into the boyish minister
of his divine father. The plot of the Euripidean drama which uses the
story is sensational, including attempted murders and many complications
before mother and child recognize and accept each other. But the boy Ion
is one of the happiest creations of a poet whom Aristophanes accused of
skepticism. His unstained youth consecrates his daily work of sweeping
the temple floor, adorning the doorway with fresh wreaths and laurel
boughs and driving away the wild pigeons. Reared by a holy woman in the
remote quiet of the sanctuary, he has become a vessel, crystal clear, to
hold the purest essence of religious feeling. His morning hymn reflects
the unspoiled reverence with which, among the greedy hordes, many must
have turned to Delphi:—
“Lo! the radiant Sun, his four horses a-span!
Now with splendour his car flingeth light o’er the earth,
And the stars from the sky at this dazzle of fire
Flee for refuge and hide in the temple of Night,
And inviolate peaks of Parnassus are lit
As they welcome the Day’s car for mortals.
And the wilderness myrrh to Apollo’s high roof
Curls fragrant and dim,
And from tripod divine now the Delphian dread
For the Hellenes intones with oracular cries
What Apollo proclaims from his portals.
“Up, ye Delphians all who to Phœbus give aid!
To Castalian fount with its silvery whirl
Go, wash ye, be cleansed in its pure running stream,
And enter the shrine,
Your lips guarding well, that in silence refrained,
Or with words that are good, you interpret his voice
Unto those who his counsels would follow.
While I’ll serve at the tasks which from childhood are mine
And with consecrate wreaths and with branches of bay
I will make the ways pure to Apollo within.
For a motherless child and unfathered I dwell
As a ministrant here in the fostering care
Of the temple of Phœbus Apollo.”
This unstudied rapture is interrupted by the worldly women, exclaiming
over the wonderful sculptured metopes of the temple. Euripides, with the
usual license of the Greek dramatists, put before his legendary
characters the works of art that he himself might have seen in the
latter part of the fifth century before Christ, when a rich civic and
artistic life was occupying the stage of the vast theatre into which, as
Strabo observed, Nature had moulded the site of Delphi. The semicircular
valley opens only on the east, and from it terraces, like tiers of
seats, rise from the Plistus to Parnassus. The ancient city of Delphi
lay in two portions along the base of the Shining Rocks. The modern
highroad approximately marks the division between the upper terraces,
which held the sacred precinct, and the lower, where were the houses and
business buildings of the permanent inhabitants, and also, east of
Castalia, a few temples and other public structures. It is the upper
terraces, west of Castalia, which enchain our attention, although all
that is left even here, save for the small reërected Treasury of the
Athenians, made of Parian marble, are remnants of walls, low-lying
foundations, traces of pavement, broken bases, and pieces of graven
stone. But they represent sacred ways and buildings, monuments and
statues which made glorious one of the richest centres of Greece, from
long before the time of Euripides to the destructive epoch of Nero and
beyond. Delphi became the pride of the Macedonians as it had been of the
Athenians and the Spartans, and under their sovereignty the Delphic
Amphictyony continued and the oracle was the centre of the new
widespread Hellenic world. The Gauls attacked Delphi in the third
century B. C. as vainly as the Persians had attacked it in the fifth
century. Even the ruthlessness of Rome brought no immediate destruction.
Æmilius Paulus, the final conqueror of Macedon, set up near Apollo’s
temple, in the most conspicuous place of the entire precinct, a monument
to his victory. Even Nero seems to have wished to repair the temple, but
the story that he afterwards tore it down because of an oracular
response which reflected upon his moral character is at least _ben
trovato_. He divided the Crisæan plain among his soldiers and carried
off an enormous number of statues from Delphi. But a still greater
number was left, and the glory of the god’s dwelling place had not
vanished. Under Hadrian, the imperial apostle of culture, new treasures
were added, and a little later Pausanias saw more than he could
describe. It was not until two more centuries had passed that the oracle
itself with one last cry became dumb forever. To the ambassador of
Julian the Apostate, who was seeking advice in his wars with the
Persians, the message was given:—
“Say to the King now that levelled to earth is the temple of splendour,
Phœbus no more has a roof for his head nor the laurel prophetic;
Gone is the voice of the fountain and dried is the chattering water.”
Theodosius put a formal end to the Delphic cult as well as to the
Olympic games.
From Apollo’s slaying of the earth-born dragon to the Byzantine
emperor’s destruction of the oracle is a long stretch of centuries.
Within them fell the brilliant epochs which filled Delphi with the
opulence of all the arts. As Greek and barbarian brought hither their
well-wrought schemes and passionate desires, so they brought also, in
offerings to the god, their best skill in architecture and sculpture and
painting, their rarest workmanship in marble and bronze and gold and
silver. Ghostly proofs of the existence of some of these offerings the
French excavators have within twenty years evoked from the reluctant
soil. Gallic precision and insight have even made of ruined walls and
broken stones an orderly array easily perceived by the traveller who is
patient enough to follow his guidebook. The Museum supplements the
ground foundations by several important sculptural details.
There were many localities and objects made holy by legendary
associations, like the tomb of Neoptolemus, Achilles’s red-haired son,
whose murder is described by Euripides and whose quadrennial worship
brought crowds of Thessalians to Delphi; or like the marble Omphalos, or
navel stone, flanked, in Pindar’s day, by golden eagles which marked the
meeting place of the winged explorers sent east and west by Zeus in
search of the exact centre of the earth. But of paramount importance in
the religious life of Delphi was the Temple of Apollo, built above the
deep cleft in the ground that held the sacred spring of prophecy. The
Priestess sat upon a tripod in the adyton or holy of holies, directly
over the fissure from which a natural vapour issued, and her ravings
were transmitted by the priests in ambiguous hexameters. The site of the
first primitive temple was preserved, but upon it rose successive
structures. The temple that was seen by Herodotus and Thucydides, by
Pindar, by Æschylus and Euripides was built in the latter half of the
sixth century to replace an older one destroyed by fire. In the fourth
century an earthquake necessitated still another, and it is to this one
that the existing foundations are attributed, although fragments of the
other are not wanting. Owing to the shifting history of the fourth
century, this temple was long in building and was not yet completed when
Demosthenes thundered out his scorn that the barbarian of Macedon had
assumed the “honours of the temple,” to which even all the Greeks could
not pretend. The work had been undertaken by an international
commission, and inscriptional records of the contributions are richly
suggestive of the private life of the times. Many individuals and some
states promised first fruits. An actor and a physician of Athens sent a
tithe of their earnings. Among individuals the Peloponnesians were the
most pious, although contributions straggled in from Attica, Bœotia,
Northern Greece, the islands, Africa, and Sicily. Collectors went from
house to house, and by far the larger number of contributors gave no
more than a drachma. Doubtless in many cases this modesty was due to
poverty rather than to indifference, and the religious sentiment
prompting the gifts must often have been comparable to that which reared
the arches and illuminated the windows of the Cathedral of Chartres. For
the sake of such contributors one could wish that after the Roman
restorations the Delphic temple had not been allowed to crumble under
earthquakes, corroding rains, and the tread of the unnumbered years. Of
adyton and oracular chasm the excavators have found no smallest trace,
and not even one column rises from the low foundations to give evidence
of things unseen. But, at least, unlike the Parthenon and many another
great shrine, it was never converted into a church of an alien faith.
Secular buildings followed in the wake of the religious importance of
Delphi. The Amphictyonic Council had a hall for its meetings to the west
of the sacred precinct, on or near the site now occupied by the little
chapel of St. Elias. Here, in sight of the Crisæan plain, the incendiary
speech of Æschines had its full effect. Within the precinct, safe from
attack in times of war, public treasuries were erected by Asiatic kings
and Greek tyrants, by Greek states in Asia Minor and colonies in Italy,
and by sovereign cities like Athens and Thebes.
The erection of a treasury often followed upon some public success, but
other monuments and statues also rose at the feet of Apollo to mark the
tidal flow of national fortunes. A study of all such memorials, known to
have existed at Delphi, would be equivalent to a detailed study of Greek
history. The repulse of the Persians from the mainland and of the
Carthaginians from Sicily, and the stemming of the later invasions of
Gallic barbarians required thank-offerings to the Delphic god. The rise
of Athens, the struggle of Ionian and Dorian, the victory of Sparta, the
late hegemony of Thebes are here commemorated; and with these the lesser
quarrels of Sparta with Argos and Arcadia and of Athens with Megara, and
the petty warfare of Phocians and Thessalians.
A myriad of statues and monuments commemorated personal interests or
feeling. From a haul of tunny fish to the discovery of stolen goods, no
event was too prosaic to inspire an offering from island or village.
And, throughout Greece, from Macedonia to Crete, towns delighted to
express their reverence by gifts of marble and bronze. Midas from Asia
Minor sent a chair of state and Crœsus sent a golden lion and silver
bowls. Arcesilas of Cyrene in northern Africa, in the fifth century,
celebrated a Pythian victory by the gift of a sculptured chariot and
charioteer. The statue still remains, the most famous single object
discovered at Delphi. Dominating one room in the Museum, he seems in his
bronze dignity as untroubled by the chilling silence of to-day as was
his living prototype, in the hippodrome in the plain below, by the noise
and tumult of the day of victory. The description by Sophocles of the
Delphic chariot race in which Orestes was supposed to be killed
reproduces the excitement against which many a charioteer must have had
to steady his nerves.[27]
Footnote 27:
The passage is quoted in chapter xviii, p. 406.
Of statues of mortals dedicated by themselves or by their admirers there
was no end. Among these persons were the great rhetorician Gorgias, to
whose teaching Greek prose owed its first artistic development, and
Phryne, the famous courtesan of Thespiæ. With her statue, seen by men of
Demosthenes’s age between the figures of the Spartan king Archidamus and
Philip of Macedon, we may surrender the effort to distinguish the links
in the mighty chains which, as in Plato’s vision, bound the Greek earth
to a heavenly throne.
It is less difficult to understand the Greek harmony between the graver
and brighter needs of the common life which added to the temples and
treasuries of Delphi buildings for recreation and enjoyment. A
club-house was erected by the rich Cnidians, where conversation, the
favourite amusement of all Greeks, could be carried on. Centuries later
Plutarch made it the scene of his dialogue on the decay of oracles. If
the age of the Antonines showed a loss of faith, art at least held its
own, and the talkers must have added to the pleasure of skeptical
speculation a delight in the decorations which dated from the fifth
century before Christ. They consisted of pictures by Polygnotus of the
capture of Troy and Odysseus’s journey to hell. Now only bits of stucco
painted blue betray their presence, and fragmentary stones alone are
left of the splendid building. Little more is left of the beautiful
colonnades which furnished protection from sun and rain to the frequent
crowds. In fairly good preservation still is the Theatre, where, as in
all the religious centres of Greece, dramatic representations added
literature to the pageant of artistic gifts. Equally inevitable was a
Gymnasium; but most important of all was the Stadium, in which the
quadrennial games were held.
This Stadium lay far beyond the sacred precinct to the west, and
occupied a lofty and magnificent situation. In what Pausanias calls “the
highest part of the city” the slopes of Parnassus break sufficiently to
leave a narrow shelf of flat ground. Every foot of this was used for the
erection of the structure, the northern side being bounded by the
precipices of the great mountain, the southern side being supported by a
wall of polygonal masonry. Part of this wall is still left, and in the
interior there are tiers of seats to tempt the dreamer. The marble with
which Herodes Atticus is said to have faced them in the second century
after Christ is now all gone. But one may yet sit on the original stone
and see not only the valley of the Plistus far below, but westward a
bright strip of the Corinthian Gulf. Here once gathered eager thousands
to watch the foot races and the wrestling matches, and to hear the
contesting flutes and the rival lyres. Originally, before the Crisæan
war, the Pythian festival had occurred only once in eight years and had
consisted of a contest in singing, to the accompaniment of the lyre, a
hymn to Apollo. The early musical festival found its aftermath in the
combination of musical with athletic contests in the more frequent
“Games” instituted by the Amphictyons after they had taken Delphi under
their common charge. This was a part of that general reorganization in
the sixth century by which the Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean, and
especially the Olympic games were thrown into high relief among the
multitudinous festivals of Greece. At Delphi a hymn in honour of the god
of the golden lyre continued to be an important part of the proceedings.
Among the most conspicuous discoveries of the French are three fragments
of such hymns, engraved on stone, two of them accompanied by musical
notation. The hymns are late ones, of no especial merit, but their
scores have furnished a key to that art which played so large a part in
Greek education, literature, and philosophy, and which made the Pythian
festival a reminder of the lord of music.
Of the hymns in honour of mortals victorious in the games we still have
some of the greatest representatives in the Pythian odes of Bacchylides
and Pindar. Pindar may well boast that his song of triumph was a
splendour in the Pythian crown of Hiero of Syracuse; that he would come
to him over the deep sea, a light shining farther than any heavenly
star. For only through a victory at some one of the four great festivals
of Greece was even a tyrant sure of any Panhellenic honour. The
centrifugal forces of Greek life found an antidote in these expressions
of common ideals. It has, indeed, been often said that the only other
antidote lay in the political organization of Delphi itself. But this
political unity was limited, and, if Delphi focused Greek interests in
any way that even Olympia could not, the reason must be sought in facts
that lay beneath a particular form of government. In the lofty Stadium
men from cities whose disparate and jealous memorials lay below united
in self-forgetful applause of all the victors.
Here the traveller may pause to grasp, amid the chaos of swift
impressions, a picture of the Delphic life. In it religion and politics,
art and amusement coalesced into a stream of almost illimitable
influence. From month to month without cessation pilgrims sought the
oracle. The store of information about public and private matters thus
brought to the oracular seat gave to the priests a knowledge of
political conditions which they could easily transmute into an
apparently supernatural wisdom and a unique power in public life. Hand
in hand with this political power went an ethical sovereignty due to the
essential religiousness of the Greeks. And lastly, the more continuous
influx of visitors, over against an infrequent and congested festival,
may easily have rendered the artistic influence of Delphi more insistent
than that of Olympia. Xerxes was better acquainted with what was worthy
of note at Delphi than even with what he had left in his own house, for
many of those about him were continually describing the treasures. Often
the seed of such descriptions, or of actual sight, must have fallen on
richer soil than an Oriental despot’s imagination. Who knows what
village smithy in Thessaly or Arcadia was stimulated to a finer output
by the iron stand made by Glaucus of Chios to hold the big silver bowl
sent to Delphi by Crœsus’s father? Indeed, the wonderful animals and
plants wrought in relief for the first time upon welded iron may have
inspired many a designer in Athens and Corinth. And many a young
sculptor must have taken home from his Pythian pilgrimage a knowledge of
Phidias and Praxiteles and Lysippus.
Thus was the world forever pouring itself into Delphi and again, like a
retreating wave, bearing something of Delphi away with it, something
larger and richer even than the golden honours that were symbolized by
the crown of laurel so eagerly borne home by the victors in the games.
And yet there was a further significance in the fragile wreath itself,
however infrequently realized by athletes and spectators, which pointed
beyond the artistic and moral power of the Pythian God. The wreath was
made of leaves brought from, the Vale of Tempe, where Apollo had plucked
his own crown of victory, when, as lord of light, he had vanquished the
powers of darkness and had been purified from the evil which the
struggle had entailed. Laurel (or bay) trees grew in the valley of
Delphi itself, lingering on until the middle of the nineteenth century,
when the last one is said to have drooped and died in the little garden
of the church of St. Nicholas which, before Kastri was removed, stood in
front of the spring of Cassotis. This spring, not yet exhausted, was the
feeder of the oracular chasm and watered the grove of Apollo,
“freshening with an ever-living stream the undying gardens” from which
Ion gathered his laurel broom. Not only did the acolytes use laurel in
their simple tasks, but the Priestess fumigated herself with burning
boughs before she sat upon the tripod, and chewed laurel leaves before
she delivered her prophecies. But the meaning of Apollo’s crowning, from
which the sacred uses of the laurel sprang, was beyond the reach of Ion,
untroubled “worshipper within the Temple’s inner shrine.” Nor to moderns
is the revelation likely to come until the Shining Rocks grow pale and
night obliterates the lively daylight of the spring. Into the dark void
left by the withdrawal of Apollo swings the moon, no longer
compassionate but majestic. Suddenly upon the receptive imagination
descends the Delphic awe. The almond trees slip into shadowy
insignificance. The hills stand out dark and brooding, while their
ravines deepen unfathomably. And through the fearful silence sounds the
prophetic voice of an unseen god vaster than the consciousness of the
race which created him. The quality of sublimity and awfulness now
apparent in the landscape explains the influence of that ideal of
omnipotent righteousness which, among a singularly intellectual people,
gradually formed for itself a living centre. For an understanding of
such a god at Delphi one must turn to Æschylus. To him Apollo was a god
“who knew not how to do unrighteousness,” in whose hands were loosed the
tangled skeins of human sin. Sophocles, in his dramas of Œdipus’s life,
represented the folly and wrong-doing of a noble nature forgiven by the
Pythian god after the willing endurance of a just punishment. But
Æschylus, in the “Eumenides,” deals with a much subtler aspect of divine
law. That its opening scene is laid at Delphi is appropriate to the
overshadowing importance of its religious meaning. Orestes had been told
by the oracle to kill his mother, as a divinely ordained punishment for
her murder of her husband. But there is no slaying that does not involve
guilt, as Apollo himself knew when he slew the foul dragoness. The awful
Furies hound Orestes from Argos to the altar in the innermost shrine of
the Delphic temple. Here is laid the Æschylean scene. The Furies, with
their hair of coiling snakes, mutter in a savage sleep, ready at a
signal to fall once more upon the wretch who has obeyed the god against
the human conscience. The suppliant Orestes, doubting and hopeless,
crouches at the altar steps. And towering over them all stands the
saving God who had once, in a fair vale of purification, put upon his
own head the crown of victorious goodness. He promises Orestes no easy
rescue from the earthly consequences of his god-directed act. He must be
pursued once more by the hateful spawn of Darkness over the sea and
through sea-girt cities. But at last he shall come to Athens, a
suppliant of Athena, and Apollo himself will come and gain for him
freedom and the forgiveness of his kind, and justice among men shall be
forever established. This is no mere praise, however splendid, of the
wisdom and the justice of Athens. It is rather the embodiment of the
idea which to the Greeks shone as a “far-off heavenly star” above all
the expedients of practical religion, or all the necessities of worldly
power. Among the hills and cliffs of Delphi dwelt a god whose ways were
past finding out, whose commands led to terror but whose service led to
peace.
Thus with the lengthening of day into night rises the flood tide of
fragmentary realizations of ancient thought. But the tide ebbs with the
sinking moon. The cold night air draws the dreamer back to the waiting
fires and hospitable copper lamps of Kastri. As he makes his homeward
way through the low dark ruins, which are all that the intrepid
archæologists could summon from the grave of centuries, he is moved to
wonder whether Delphi, save for its natural beauty by day and by night,
has any place in modern thought. The ancient interpretation of its
importance was by no means only a religious one. The Greeks cannot be
understood only through an Æschylus of profound spiritual insight, or an
Herodotus of intelligent piety. Thucydides, amid the bustle of its life,
was as rationalizing in his ideas about Delphi as we can be amid its
dead ruins. To him as to us, its oracular power was a matter of
superstition. He would have attributed Socrates’s faith in it to his
goodness rather than his knowledge, and doubtless anticipated the modern
explanation of the wisdom of the priests. And yet Thucydides accepted
without question the political and civic value of such a centre for the
Greek world. Now that that value has disappeared with the world it
served, we are left to find a new value in the imperishable human
thoughts which were inspired by Delphi and have outlived its marbles,
its silver and gold, its laurel crowns and echoing lyres. For any
subsequent religion has but created, _mutatis mutandis_, the differing
types of men through whom we know the pagan god. If the oracle is dumb,
and Apollo but an antique fable, yet men of the twentieth century may
still find in the poets and thinkers of Greece expressions of their own
faith or their own doubt. They may find also that blending in one mind
of belief born of idealism with unbelief born of experience which is
familiar to the modern world. Pindar’s piety was such that “at Delphi
they kept with reverence his iron chair, and the priest of Apollo cried
nightly as he closed the temple, ‘Let Pindar the poet go in unto the
supper of the god.’” And yet he uttered the universal lament:—
“Much tossed, now rise, now sink the hopes of men, the while they
cleave the waves of baffling falsity, and never yet hath any one on
earth obtained from God a token sure of anything to come. Blind is the
verdict of the future.”