Delphi

by Michael Scott

  The Emperor Caligula (AD 37–41) was even more honored with statues, this time not only by the Amphictyony (who also put up a statue of his sister Drusilla), but also by a koinon (a “community alliance”) of Achaeans, Boeotians, Locrians, Phocians, and Euboeans, who must have felt Delphi was the appropriate place for such a gesture.11 Yet it was under Claudius, who had returned Greece to the control of the Senate, that we first see sustained interest by the emperor in Delphi itself. A series of measures seems to have been undertaken by the senior Roman administrator, L. Iunius Gallio, at the emperor’s instigation, to help repopulate the town surrounding the sanctuary and restore its former territory. Claudius himself, in the spirit of the Roman generals and the senators who had written to Delphi during the second and first centuries BC, wrote about these measures in an open letter to Delphi, marking the beginning of an almost unbroken chain of correspondence between Delphi and the emperor from the time of Claudius right through to the rule of Gallienus in the second half of the third century AD. This correspondence with Claudius—after the splendid isolation of Delphi during the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula—clearly meant a lot to the Delphians. It was inscribed publicly in the sanctuary, not just anywhere, but rather as part of the first set of correspondence inscribed on the western end of the south wall of the temple of Apollo (see plate 2).12 Previously reserved for the records of the most serious moments in Delphic civic history, it now became the place for demonstrating the connection between Delphi and the emperor, not least because it was one of the most visible corners of the temple to visitors. Delphi was once again making sure that any greatness thrust upon it was as conspicuous as it could be.

  Claudius seems to have been seen, particularly by the Delphians, as something of a heroic refounder of the sanctuary and city, not least because he had planned the city’s repopulation and helped bolster its reputation as a place of importance even for the emperor. That gratitude is most evident in terms of dedications within the sanctuary. While no evidence for a statue of Claudius erected by the Amphictyony has survived, he was most certainly honored by the city of Delphi with a plethora of statues (including one set up 150 years after his reign). This makes sense: it was, after all, the city that benefited most from Claudius’s patronage. Claudius, in response perhaps to the city’s worship, even seems to have taken on the position of eponymous archon (chief magistrate) in the city, and by so doing he became the first Roman emperor to hold an honorific magistracy in Greece.13 The city of Delphi had managed to secure its own greatness and renown by attracting, involving, and holding onto Imperial attention and interest.

  It is perhaps to this period, too, that we should date something of a reshuffle and revival in Delphic organization and fortune. New officials, like the “secretary of the archives,” were appointed. The inscribed records of honors given out by the city of Delphi in this period also show Delphi once again playing to a much wider, more international and cosmopolitan field, especially courting those who were stars of the stadium or the theater. It was in this period, too, that the theater at Delphi seems to have been embellished with a new frieze representing a series of mythical events (see plate 2). And perhaps most innovative of all, it is in this period that the first records appear of women competing, not in their own separate games, but on a par with the men in the same competitions. In the 40s AD, a surviving inscription attests that a woman called Tryphosa had victories in the running races at Delphi and Isthmia, the “first of maidens to do so.”14

  The arrival of the Emperor Nero to the throne, and subsequently in Greece, and indeed, at Delphi after AD 54, must have been something of a shock for the sanctuary and its citizens, not least because he was most probably the first emperor actually to visit Delphi. Nero’s desire, many have argued, was to achieve the status of a periodonikes (a victor in at least four of the six “Panhellenic” festivals). To that end, he began a tour of Greece, during which, he entered competitions at several of the Greek periodos games, inevitably winning, even in contests that were specially inserted into the competitions just for him. At the end of his tour of Greece, in a speech at Corinth on 28 November AD 67, Nero is reported to have declared the freedom of Achaea from financial tribute to Rome. It was an action, which was said later by Plutarch to have won Nero a reprieve when being judged for his other harsh actions in the underworld, but was, in the world of the living, quickly revoked by his successor Vespasian in AD 69.15

  At Delphi, Nero had been honored with a statue of himself by the Amphictyony in the sanctuary in the first year of his reign, and his mother, Agrippina Minor (who had been the fourth wife of Claudius) was similarly honored with a statue by the city of Delphi. The Amphictyony’s move to honor Nero seems to have paid off, as he reorganized the Amphictyony, returning it to its “ancestral order,” in particular giving the presidency and a majority of seats back to the Thessalians. On his visit to the sanctuary, Nero entered the athletic and musical competitions at the Pythian festival, and, not surprisingly, won. He was also said to have consulted the oracle. The Pythia’s response, according to later sources, was said to have warned Nero to beware the seventy-third year. In return for this oracular advice, Nero gave ten thousand sesterces to the sanctuary, probably the largest sum given for an oracular consultation since King Croesus of Lydia had showered the sanctuary with gifts in return for his oracle responses in the sixth century BC. And just as that response had not turned out to be so straightforward (or indeed positive) for Croesus, so it was to be with Nero and, in part, for Delphi. It was not Nero’s seventy-third year that turned out to be the difficulty. Rather it was his rival’s, Galba’s, who, in his seventy-third year, revolted against Nero and became his successor. Once again, it seems, the oracle’s ambiguous response to Nero had been “proved” right. But any increase in the oracle’s reputation must have been marred by the fact that Galba also reclaimed for Rome the ten thousand sesterces originally given by Nero to Delphi.16

  Yet whatever Nero had given (or tried to give) with one hand, he had taken away with the other. He sent veteran soldiers to live on the Cirrha plain, on what had been for centuries land sacred to the god Apollo. He also took, according to Pliny, some five hundred statues from the sanctuary at Delphi to adorn his Golden House in Rome. In some cases this action simply led to the removal of dedications from the sanctuary altogether—as if they had never been there. In others, it left a forlorn reminder of the removal and a confused, if not meaningless, role for the remainder. Nero, for example, was said to have taken a shine to one of the statues from the group of Scylla and Hydna, dedicated by the Amphictyony after the sea victory against the Persians at Artemisium in 480 BC. Now, over five hundred years later, Nero chose to remove the statue of one of these mythological heroines, leaving the other behind.17 The damnatio memoriae that took place after Nero’s death only placed emphasis more strongly on the negative aspects of Nero’s interaction with Delphi. Later sources speak of a further series of oracular responses to Nero: that the oracle had told Nero it would prefer some poor man’s meager offerings to the emperor’s lavish gifts, and that it had alluded to Nero’s murdering of his own mother (whose statue stood in the sanctuary) by saying “Nero, Orestes, Alcmaeon, all murderers of their mothers.” In response, according to these later sources, Nero’s uncontrolled fury led him to attempt to block the mouth of the cave (from which vapors emerged to inspire the Pythia) with the bodies of slaughtered men.18

  Delphi fell into a lapse again after Nero’s self-serving (or victimizing) attentions, symbolized more broadly by the reyoking of Greece to the Roman cart following Vespasian’s reversal of Nero’s declaration of freedom. In fact, scholars have pointed out that Nero’s desire to compete in Greek games was unusual not least because he was one of very few ethnic Romans (as opposed to Greeks under Rome or who were given Roman citizenship) who chose to compete at Delphi. Most ethnic Romans who chose to compete in Greek games (and there were never many) chose Olympia rather than Delphi. Delphi’s games—though continuing in thei
r popularity—were popular, it seems, only with the inhabitants of the wider Greek world, not its Roman masters.19

  Yet Delphi’s isolation did not continue for long. The Emperor Titus, who came to power in AD 79, followed in Claudius’s footsteps and became the eponymous archon of the city of Delphi, for which he too seems to have received a statue from the city of Delphi in the sanctuary. This “seems” qualification is necessary because many scholars disagree over whether this statue is of Titus, or of his successor, Domitian, who also held the archonship at Delphi. The latter’s investment in the sanctuary has long been recognized. Indeed it is unavoidable. A gigantic inscription, measuring 4.75 meters by 0.65 meters, etched into stone plaques, has been found at Delphi. It can be dated to between 6 January and 13 September AD 84, and testifies to Domitian’s undertaking of the refurbishment of the temple of Apollo at his own expense (the restored inscription can be seen in the Delphi museum today). Scholars are undecided whether this inscription was placed upon the eastern architrave of the temple, or set up on the ground by the temple. There has also been recent significant debate about exactly what refurbishments Domitian undertook. Traditionally, they have been thought to be those needed for well over one hundred years, since the temple of Apollo was damaged during the barbarian raids on Delphi in 84 BC. Yet, more recently, the argument has been made that the damage Domitian undertook to repair was caused more recently, perhaps during the earthquake that struck Greece in AD 77 and which, we know, caused significant damage at Corinth. It is, however, telling that at least one of the plaques onto which the inscription was placed had a series of older inscriptions on the reverse side. The plaques had, it seems, been appropriated from a former dedication thought by some to be the Cnidian treasury originally built in the sixth century BC (see plate 2), which, by this period, may well have fallen into disrepair and thus been seen as a convenient source of material. Domitian may well have restored the temple, but he made his motivations clear, it seems, by taking material from monuments he chose not to restore.20

  Both Titus’s and Domitian’s reengagement with Delphi may have been part of a bigger picture of a return to more earnest ancestral religious observance as a result of a string of the disasters that befell Rome and Italy: there had been fire and an outbreak of plague in Rome in AD 80, and Pompeii and Herculaneum had been destroyed by Vesuvius in AD 79. Furthermore, Domitian’s interest in the sanctuary did not end with the restoration of the temple. He was involved in the sacred procession festival between Athens and Delphi, renamed the Dodekais, as indicated earlier, to honor Augustus in the last years of the first century BC. He engaged in correspondence with the city of Delphi when they asked him about the organization of the Pythian festival, and his response belies something of the importance he attached to traditional religious observance: “it is naturally right and pious to keep to the appointed time of the Pythian contest in accordance with the Amphictyonic laws and not to tamper with any part of the ancestral customs.” This letter, like all Imperial letters, was inscribed publicly at Delphi, and in AD 86, it seems Domitian introduced the Capitoline games to Rome, which were themselves based on the model of the Pythian games at Delphi.21

  Yet, at the same time as he likely imported the Delphic model to Rome, his influence at Delphi seems to have started a process of returning the Delphic games to Greek control. Since the time of Augustus, alongside the introduction of an emperor’s overseer (the epimeletai) attached to the Amphictyony, it is indicated that the position of an agonothetes (president of the games) was created. Yet it was during and after the time of Domitian that this role began more regularly to be filled by Greeks, and particularly citizens of Hypata, chief city of the Ainianians (part of Thessaly). This coincided also, from the time of the Flavian dynasty onward (Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian), with the appointment of more and more Delphians as epimeletai.22 Delphi, under the Flavians, is reputed to not only have been physically restored, engaged with, and encouraged to uphold its ancestral customs, but also to have had its games actively copied in Rome, and their organization and management restored to more local groups.

  Domitian was also likely honored with a statue erected alongside the temple he restored (and that mirrored in style and placement the monument of Aemilius Paullus from 168 BC) as well as perhaps with a second statue set into a niche created in the northern wall of the Apollo terrace (see fig. 1.3).23 Perhaps this gratitude was more well deserved than we have already recognized. Delphi itself also seems to have been the beneficiary of much other new construction during Domitian’s reign and in the period immediately afterward. The gymnasium, for example, was given a new bathhouse in the later first century AD/early second century AD; a library and a dining room were added to the gymnasium complex under the auspices of the epimelete Tiberius Flavius Soclarus, and the covered running track (the xystos) was also given a new colonnade (see fig. 7.3). Too, just outside the sanctuary of Apollo, along its eastern boundary wall, a large house was erected at the end of the first century AD, 100 square meters, with an ionic colonnaded courtyard at its center. Known as the “peristyle house,” it has been interpreted as either the new home of the Pythian prietess (we know from inscriptions that the epimelete of the period, Tiberius Flavius Soclarus, built a new home for the Pythia), or as the new prytaneion council house for the city of Delphi (see the “Roman house” in plate 2).24

  The end of the first century and beginning of the second century AD were an important time for Delphi. The writer and orator Dio Chrysostom (Dio “the golden-mouthed”), while in an exile forced on him by Domitian for his overzealous support of the emperor’s rivals, visited the sanctuary and undertook a consultation of the oracle in the period AD 82–96. The Emperor Nerva, who would eventually end Dio’s exile, received a statue from the city of Delphi, as did Trajan from the Amphictyony, and several other dedications by the Amphictyony and the city of Delphi suggest the sanctuary was both well plugged in to the wider political world, and the beneficiary of a number of visitors, especially its games. The Amphictyony honored the proconsul of Asia, T. Avidius Quietus, with a statue in AD 91–92, and the city of Delphi honored his successor Caristanius Julianus in the same way in AD 99.25 The Amphictyony honored an agonothete from the city of Nicopolis (who just happened to be a member of the Amphictyonic council as well), and the city of Delphi also honored the wife of one of the epimeletes in this period, as well as two of the Greek-born (Hypatian) agonothetes and a grammarian. But Delphi also attracted new dedicators in this period. The city of Gortyn made their only dedication at Delphi in the sanctuary’s history around AD 100: to commemorate a victor in the Pythian aulos competition from their city. In addition, Hypata, whose citizens were increasingly involved with the games as agonothetes, offered a statue of Trajan in the sanctuary, and a group of sophists dedicated a set of statues to different individuals at Delphi at the same time. And in the early second century AD, a certain Memmia Lupa, seems to have made a large enough contribution to the sanctuary to receive no less than ten reserved seats in Delphi’s theater, each inscribed with her name, as well as a statue in her honor (see plate 2).26

  The Emperor Trajan responded to a number of Delphic letters during his reign, including accepting their request for him to reconfirm Delphi’s status as an independent city and sanctuary during his reign. Yet he also seems to have been responsible for sending in a series of financial administrators to ensure the books were balanced.27 At Delphi, this cor-rector, as he was known, was C. Avidius Nigrinus, and in AD 116–17, he, according to inscriptions engraved onto the temple of Apollo, arbitrated yet another series of disputes over land boundaries between Delphi and Ambryssus, Amphissa, and Anticyra, with the resulting decisions inscribed in both Latin and Greek.28 Nigrinus however seemed to have fallen foul of the new emperor, Hadrian, soon after he came to power in AD 117: he was executed on a charge of conspiracy.29

  Yet Nigrinus is not the only individual we know of at Delphi from this period. Much better known, in fact, is Plutarch, son of Autobul
us, from the city of Chaeronea, not far from Delphi, and famous for being the site of a series of decisive battles in Greek history. It was where Philip of Macedon won hegemony over the Greeks by beating the Athenians and Thebans in 338 BC; and the place in which the Roman general Sulla defeated Mithridates in 86 BC. The inhabitants of both Delphi and Chaeronea were often close friends. Plutarch’s grandfather Lamprias had been good friends with a doctor called Philotas, who had settled and practiced in Delphi, and an inscription was even set up at Delphi during the first century AD to commemorate the homonoia (the “equality”) between the two cities. Plutarch himself was born in AD 47 and later became a Roman citizen, thanks to being recommended for the honor to Trajan by his close friend the Roman L. Mestrius Florus, from which Plutarch took his Roman name: Mestrius Plutarchus. Plutarch was well educated and traveled extensively across Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Italy, and his philosophy and learning was widely respected. He was well connected to powerful men in both the Greek and Roman worlds: he was friends with Sosius Senecio, a friend of the Emperor Trajan and consul in AD 99, 102, and 107; and he was also friends with the son of Plutarch’s brother, who became a stoic philosopher and was a tutor to the future Emperor Marcus Aurelius.30