Delphi
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Figure 5.4. The imposing Athenian treasury in the Apollo sanctuary at Delphi (P. de la Coste-Messelière & G. Miré Delphes 1957 Librarie Hachette p. 98)
Does this amount to a tangible charge of betrayal by Delphi in Greece’s critical hour? Not really—it is more useful to think of the oracle in the context of its surroundings. Much of northern Greece, to which Delphi was historically linked, took the view that it was powerless to resist the Persian invaders. Equally it can be argued that Gelon sent his gifts to Delphi not because it was pro-Persian, but because it was a conveniently accessible point in the middle of Greece (and he sent them on condition that they should be returned if Xerxes did not win).51 It is worth noting that Xerxes himself did not send gifts to Delphi, but instead to the nearby sanctuary of Apollo Ptoios. Moreover, the Persians may never have attempted to attack Delphi, if Herodotus is to be believed, since he reports that Mardonius, the Persian commander, believed in an oracular response given by a different oracle that if the Persians attacked Delphi, the sacrilege would ensure that the gods made their campaign fail.52 The divine defense of Delphi thus spoken of in the literary sources (and for certain promulgated by the Delphians themselves in later years) may, thus, be a made-up story, not to hide Delphic Medism, but to give the city and sanctuary at least some honor and crucial role in what was to become a famous war in Greek history.
Critically, whatever the whispers in the air about Delphi in the run-up to the Persian invasion of Greece in the late 480s, the Athenians, determined to oppose the Persians, prepared a full embassy to be sent, with all the proper rites and rituals, to consult the oracle at Delphi just before the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. Having entered the temple, but before they could even ask their question, the Pythian priestess, Aristonice (the replacement for the disgraced Periallus), was said to have addressed them advising them to give up and escape. The ambassadors were appalled and reluctant to return home with such a response. Instead they took the advice of a Delphian, Timon, who suggested they return as religious suppliants of Apollo to ask for a second oracular response. Praying to Apollo, they asked for a “better oracle about our land” and begged the god “to respect these emblems of suppliants which we have come bringing into your presence, or else we will not leave the shrine, but remain here thus even unto death.” The Pythia’s response this time is infamous: that they should trust in their wooden walls.53 Much scholarly ink has been spilled regarding the veracity of this response, but it has all the hallmarks of a traditionally ambiguous Delphic reply, in that it required the ambassadors to return to Athens and submit it for further discussion and debate among the Athenians. Some took it to mean building a wooden palisade around the Acropolis. Themistocles, the Athenian general who had convinced the Athenians some years before to build up their fleet, argued it meant to take to the sea and fight the Persians from their wooden triremes. His proposed interpretation was accepted, and, according to an inscription surviving from the third century BC from Troizen, which purports to be a copy of the decree passed at that fraught assembly in which Themistocles won the day, the assembly agreed, “beginning tomorrow,” to evacuate the city and take to their ships.54
In responding to the Athenians, the oracle is shown to have initially kept to its line of non-opposition but, when pressed, to have offered a traditional response that motivated deliberation and decision. More-over, it is clear that Delphi continued to matter to the Greeks.55 Herodotus records that those fighting against Persia took a roll call of all those who had submitted to Persian authority, and made an oath promising to destroy the Persians and bring a percentage of the booty extracted from those who had submitted to be dedicated to Apollo at Delphi.56 The Athenians also returned to consult again just before the final showdown against the Persians at the battle of Plataea asking which gods they should pray to in order to secure victory.57 And in the aftermath of those battles, which led to the legendary stories of the Spartan stand at Thermopylae, the Athenian sea victory at Salamis and again at Plataea, as Robin Osborne puts it: “‘what did this city do in the Persian wars?’ [became] the first historical question whose answer mattered that could be asked of all Greek communities.”58 It is no surprise, then, that stories later circulated about a divinely led defense of the Delphic sanctuary, no surprise that every city, whatever its stance and role in the war, was keen to immortalize (and often realign) the part they had played, and even less a surprise that Delphi, whatever suspicions some may have harbored about the sanctuary, was to be the place where that commemoration would be felt more keenly than anywhere else.
Lord of Lycia, O Phoebus, you who rule over Delos
and who loves Parnassus’ Castalian spring,
willingly take those things to heart and make this a land of brave men.
—Pind. Pyth. 1.38–40
6
DOMINATION
As the Persians retreated from Greece during 479 BC, the victorious cities turned to Delphi to consult the oracle on the right way to celebrate their triumph. The response integrated Delphi more than ever into the fabric of the Greek world. The Pythia instructed the cities to erect an altar to Zeus Eleutherios (the liberator), but not to sacrifice anything on it until they had extinguished every fire in the land (as the altars had all been polluted by the barbarian invaders) and taken fresh fire from the sacred hearth at Delphi to relight the hearths and pyres of Greece. Euchidas of Plataea is said to have offered to run to Delphi and bring back the sacred flame to his city, completing the return journey in a single day, after which tremendous achievement he promptly dropped dead and was buried in the Plataean sanctuary of Artemis “of Good Repute” with an epitaph to commemorate his journey to Delphi.1
As a result, Delphi became—literally—the common hearth of Greece, the origin of its fire, the center of its world. Any notions that Delphi had strayed to the Persian side before and during the conflict were forgotten, and the victors set about commemorating their victories at different sanctuaries across Greece, but most especially at Delphi (they had, after all, sworn an oath to dedicate at Delphi a percentage of spoils taken from those who had betrayed Greece for Persia). First to commemorate the Persian Wars were the Amphictyony, the governing council at Delphi, who not only set up a monument at Thermopylae to commemorate the famous Spartan stand, but also established at Delphi a statue group of two mythical heroes who were supposed to have helped the Greek fleet at the near-simultaneous sea battle, which had taken place at Artemisium. The council also put a price on the head of Ephialtes, the man who betrayed the Spartans at Thermopylae.2
In quick succession a second monument was established at Delphi to commemorate the Greek victory at Salamis. This, we know from the ancient sources, was a giant statue of Apollo six meters high, a trireme in his hand, placed on the temple terrace directly facing the great Chian altar and temple front (see plate 2, fig. 1.3). And while no trace of the statue now remains, French archaeologists have argued that the base survives, complete with its dedicating inscription, which, however, is damaged, leaving a tantalizing puzzle for modern scholars, for the one word missing from the dedicating inscription is the name of the dedicator. But thanks to the sentence structure and grammar, along with the neat alignment of letters on different lines, we know we are looking for a name that is eight letters and in the plural. The most tempting possibility is “Hellanes”—“the Greeks.” If correct, this would mark an exceptional moment in Greek history. The Greeks, torn as they were by city rivalry, rarely referred to themselves as Greeks. This monument, here at Delphi in the early fifth century BC, would represent perhaps the first time the Greeks had publicly described themselves as such. This dedication thus encapsulates the recognition and display of a community forged in the heat of battle, set up at the sanctuary that was the mythical center of the ancient world and now literally the common hearth of the Greeks.3
Those contributing to the dedication of the Salamis Apollo asked the Pythia if Apollo was satisfied with the monument established in his honor. The reply wa
s ambiguous: he was, but he required more from the Aeginetans. Aegina, as we saw in the previous chapter, had most certainly wavered at the approach of the Persians and had been frequently accused of Medism (“having Persian sympathies”) by other Greek cities. Yet, in reality, this request for a second monument from the oracle provided the Aeginetans with a useful opportunity. Delphi was quickly becoming the place in which to commemorate one’s role in the Persian defeat and, as a result, an excellent place in which to stake a claim not to what actually happened, but rather to what the dedicator would prefer to remember as having happened. The Aeginetans certainly took the opportunity not only to make their presence felt, but also to make a strong statement of their (now) pro-Greek credentials. They offered a bronze palm tree with golden stars to be placed on the temple terrace.4 And while this offering was specifically requested by Apollo, other cities also actively chose to emphasize their role at Salamis by putting up their own monuments to commemorate their own role in that same victory, and all of these were placed on the terrace area in front of the Apollo temple, turning it into an unmistakable “Persian Wars zone.”5
Yet it was in the commemoration of the battle of Plataea, the final land victory against the Persians in 479 BC, that Delphi’s key role in commemorating the Persian Wars became clearest. Whereas at the sanctuaries of Zeus at Olympia and Poseidon at Isthmia, the alliance of Greeks offered yet another Zeus and Poseidon statue (they had done the same to celebrate Salamis at these sanctuaries), at Delphi a unique monument was born, one that would come to epitomize Delphi itself: three bronze serpents coiled together into a column standing nine meters high with the serpent heads (partly made in gold) supporting the legs of a golden tripod (see fig. 1.3). The symbolism of the serpents (referring to Apollo and his fight with the serpent Pytho) and the tripod (the Pythia’s tripod) is clear. This was a monument designed for Delphi that sought to evoke Delphi: the ultimate expression of victory and of the Greeks’ close relationship with their gods, especially Apollo. It stood on the temple terrace, towering over the Salamis Apollo and other monuments around it. Thucydides would later report that the Spartan commander, Pausanias, tried to hijack the monument and have it inscribed as if it were a dedication from him alone. But he was punished, and instead, the names of all the Greek cities—not just those that fought at Plataea, but those that had any involvement in the fight against Persia at any stage—were inscribed on the serpent coils of the column.6 As a result, an evocation of a more comprehensive Greek community evoked by the Salamis Apollo (potentially the “Hellanes”), paid homage to Apollo and to Delphi as the common hearth of Greece. Yet swiftly, the serpent-column monument was surrounded by other offerings from individual cities that sought to commemorate their own particular role in the battle at Plataea, or, more often, to recast that role. The Carystians offered a statue of a bull for victory at Plataea, even though they had fought on the Persian side, and Alexander I of Macedon, who was keen to establish his credentials as having been on the Greek side the whole time, offered an enormous golden statue of himself.7
Yet, despite this overwhelming deluge of monuments and oracular consultations, which not only embedded Delphi more strongly at the center of the ancient Greek world, but also highlighted its role as a space in which to tell, and perhaps more importantly retell, history, some notes of the trouble to come were also being sounded. Themistocles, the Athenian general, after bringing his dedications to Delphi, was told by the Pythia to remove them from the sanctuary: the only instance in Delphic history of the oracle refusing a dedication. At the same time, Sparta proposed that the Amphictyony should become an anti-Persian league, excluding every city that had not fought actively against the Persians. Themistocles, whose dedications had been refused, argued against this proposition claiming it would shift the balance of power within the Amphictyony toward two or three main cities rather than its current wider representation.8 The proposal was dropped, but it sounded a note of disquiet that was all too familiar to the citizens of Delphi and was, in part, to define their future over the next two centuries. As Delphi and its council became more important and valuable, more people came to have designs on dominating them.
For the time being, however, the hum of tension over Delphian ownership was most probably drowned out by the increasing popularity the city and sanctuary enjoyed in the first half of the fifth century BC. And none more so than among the Greeks of the western Mediterranean world of Magna Graecia. Gelon (the tyrant of Gela and now Syracuse in Sicily, who had refused to help the Greeks during the Persian invasion) now sought not only to establish a permanent marker of his power at Delphi, but to put his own military victories against the enemies of the Greek world to the west (especially the Carthaginians) on a par with the great victories against the Persians to the east. Where better to do this than at the sanctuary where the Persian Wars had been so insistently commemorated? On the temple terrace, near the Salamis and Plataean monuments, Gelon erected a tall column and tripod monument (see fig. 1.3). The likeness of its style to that of the Plataean serpent column was supposed to underscore the similar magnitude and importance of Gelon’s victory (and no doubt cover his own refusal to contribute to the fight against the Persians).9
Nor was he the only western Greek dedicator anxious to find a place in Delphi’s growing collection of monuments. The city of Croton, a long-term user of the oracle, set up a similar enormous tripod dedication on the temple terrace, and even represented Delphi on its coinage in this period. Rhegion, too, put up offerings in the sanctuary, as did the Etruscans. Most famous, however, were those of Gelon’s successor, Hieron, and the latter’s successor, Polyzalus. Hieron not only dedicated monuments to military victory (similar to those of Gelon and the Plataean serpent column), but also to his own victories in the Pythian games. The Delphi charioteer, discovered buried in the ground in the first years of excavation at Delphi and now holding pride of place in Delphi’s museum, is part of Hieron’s athletic victory monument (plate 6). Placed just beside the temple of Apollo, originally composed not only of the charioteer, resplendent as he is in bronze, silver, and precious metals, but also of a life-size representation of the entire chariot and horses, this would have been an awesome offering (see fig. 1.3). So much so that Polyzalus decided not to try and top it for his athletic victories, but instead simply rededicated the statue in his own name. Theirs was not the only chariot dedication at this time: Archesilaus IV, king of Cyrene, also dedicated his winning chariot and placed it on the temple terrace in honor of his victory in the late 460s BC.10
This investment in the commemoration of victory in the Pythian games emphasizes the continued, if not growing, importance of these games in the wider fifth-century Greek world. The games, lasting for five days, were held during the Greek month of Boucation (sometime between our mid-August and mid-September), beginning on the seventh day of the month (events were often scheduled on the seventh day of a month at Delphi because, as has been said, this was thought to be the day of Apollo’s birthday). The Amphictyony and the city of Delphi devoted huge resources into their organization. They sent out Delphic citizens as theoroi (ambassadors) six months before the games on pre-agreed routes to announce the games and call for competitors to come to the events. They prepared the facilities at Delphi for the competitions (it is around the middle of the fifth century BC that the area of the later stadium may have first been used for contests—see plate 1). They ran the games themselves, which involved undertaking large-scale religious rituals (over a hundred animals were sacrificed and their meat roasted for consumption at just one of the rituals on the first day of the games), and coped with the sheer practical needs of so many spectators in one place for a week.11 In 484 BC, the Amphictyony expanded the competitions to include a running race in full armor (the hoplitodromoi), and in the mid-fifth century BC, a contest for painting appears to have been introduced, which complemented the important and ancient musical competitions that had always been part of Apollo’s games (a dance competition was added
in the fourth century BC and, later, competitions in acting, mime, and pantomime).12
The first day of the Pythian festival was dedicated to religious sacrifices and a re-enactment of the mythical clash between Apollo and the serpent, the second day to communal banquets, the third day to musical and artistic competition, the fourth to athletics, and the final day to chariot racing. This last was the day perhaps more than any other on which all eyes were focused, especially as it was the richer and more powerful individuals of the Greek world who were competing against one another through the horses they owned and entered into the competition, each chariot in turn driven by a professional charioteer. It is no accident that most of the surviving odes to athletic victory at Delphi written by the praise-poet Pindar during the fifth century BC are for chariot victories (he can’t have been cheap to hire): Hieron of Syracuse, Archesilaus IV of Cyrene, Xenocrates of Agrigentum, Megacles of Athens all paid for praise odes from Pindar for their chariot victories at Delphi between 490 and 462 BC.13