The sources report that the Pythian oracle made a strong opening play in the first act of this unfolding tragedy. When, in 432 BC, the Spartans consulted the Pythia on whether or not it would be better for them to go to war against Athens in response to what they saw as Athens breaking the terms of the agreement left over from the Second Sacred War, the oracle’s response was said to be, uncharacteristically, unambiguous: “if you go to war with all your might, you will have victory, and I Apollo will help you, both when you call for aid and when you do not.”37 During the following decade, Delphi was a crucially important strategic location for Spartan forces and its allies: it was probably almost constantly in the hands of the Peloponnesian league, to the extent that it was even suggested Delphi could contribute financially to Sparta’s campaign against Athens, and is reported as sanctioning a further strategic Spartan settlement from which “Ionians, Achaeans, and certain other tribes” were banned.38 And even though the Delphic oracle was said to have been involved in yet another case of Spartan bribery in 427–26 BC, this time helping to reinstate in Sparta a long-exiled king who was keener on peace with Athens than war, it seems that Athens’s disillusionment with Delphi, perhaps understandably, grew considerably during this period.39 Scholars have pointed to the rather bitter representation of Delphi in the Athenian tragedies of the time (particularly to Euripides’ Andromache, performed between 428–25 BC), and the searing sarcasm reserved for oracles in general in Aristophanes’ comedies (particularly Knights, performed 424 BC).40 And yet, perhaps because a thing lost is a thing missed most, it is telling that representations of Delphi in Athenian vase painting increased a lot in the same period: locked out of the sanctuary they had so recently dominated and claimed as their own, Athenians sought to visualize it in their every-day lives.41
When peace was agreed upon between Sparta and Athens in 423 and again in 421 BC, Thucydides makes clear the extent to which Delphi was center in the minds of both parties. In the agreement of 423 BC, the first clause ran as follows:
concerning the temple and oracle of the Pythian Apollo, we agree that whosoever wants shall consult it without fraud and without fear, according to the usages of our forefathers…. concerning the treasure of the god we agree to take care to find out all wrong-doers, rightly and justly following the usages of our forefathers.
And in the renewed agreement two years later, the first clauses again concerned Delphi:
with regard to the common sanctuaries [Delphi and Olympia], whosoever wishes may offer sacrifices and consult the oracles and attend as a deputy according to the customs of the fathers, both by land and sea, without fear. And the precinct and temple of Apollo at Delphi, and the people of Delphi shall be independent, having their own system of taxation and their own courts of justice, both as regards themselves and their own territory, according to the customs of the fathers.42
As a result of the privileged position at the heart of these treaties, it is possible to see Delphi as once again reaching out to a more varied crowd in the last twenty years of the fifth century BC. Its oracle was involved in encouraging the development of an Arcadian confederacy under Mantinea; in continuing its evolving role as arbitrator in a dispute between Thasos and Neapolis; in dealing boldly with Athens to insist Athens returned the Delian exiles to Delos after Athens had sought to purify the island by expelling its citizens; and in advising Athens about how to recover from plague (for which Apollo Alexikakos (the averter of evil) was henceforth worshiped in Athens).43
Yet, in reality, and especially for Athens, relations with Delphi were still strained. Thucydides’ rendition of the peace treaties evoked the need to convince all the separate parties to agree to the terms, which, in relation particularly to Boeotia, was difficult. Relations between Athens and Boeotia remained tense, with a treaty between them repeatedly agreed upon every ten days. The result, given that Boeotian land stood between Athens and Delphi, was that the sacred processional route from Athens to Delphi was only accessible with Boeotian permission. As Aristophanes lamented later in 414 BC: “if we wish to go to Pytho, we have to ask the Boeotians for passage through their territory.” That sense of ongoing frustration with Delphi continues to be palpable in Athenian tragedy, too, for example in Euripides’ Ion, where, despite the fact that the play is staged at Delphi, and Delphi continues to be represented as an interpretive space through which solutions for future actions could be found, Pythian Apollo is presented as something of an ambiguous villain.44
Perhaps because of the ongoing difficulties of access to Delphi, and the perceived reception waiting for them when they did get there, the Athenians do not seem to have consulted to the same degree as they did during the Persian Wars in the run up to launching their infamous Sicilian expedition in 415 BC. Indeed, if anything, the sources indicate that the oracle was supporting the Spartans once again as conflict resumed in the aftermath of that campaign.45 Visitors to the sanctuary over the last decade of the fifth century would be left in no doubt either about how the war was going. Neither Athens nor its allies dedicated monumental offerings at Delphi during this period, but their enemies most certainly did. Over the course of the Peloponnesian War, almost all of Athens’s proud monuments from the first half of the fifth century were opposed—spatially, artistically, and architecturally—by monuments constructed by its enemies: the Acanthians, the Syracusans, the Megarians, and, of course, in the aftermath of 404 BC and Sparta’s final victory over Athens at Aegospotamoi, the Spartans. The latter made their new ascendancy particularly clear: at the southeastern entrance to the Apollo sanctuary, where Athens had constructed its second group monument to Marathon and positioned it so as to be the first seen on entering the sanctuary, the Spartans now trumped that position with a group comprising thirty-eight statues in two rows: in total, three times the size of the Athenian offering on a base eighteen meters long (fig. 6.2). On the opposite side of the entrance path, they built a stoa that towered over the entrance, and whose construction required heavy engineering to ensure its stability on the mountainside; in it, valuable offerings were placed by the Spartans and their victorious general Lysander.46
The changing tide of Greek history had once again been written into the Delphic complex in marble, stone, and bronze. But if Plutarch, writing in the first century AD, is to be believed, this was also the moment when monuments at Delphi began not only to represent the victories of their dedicators, but their fates as well. Not simply in the sense that they were eventually upstaged, opposed, and overshadowed, but, more powerfully, in the sense that the monuments themselves crumbled as their dedicators crumbled. As the Athenians set off on their fateful Sicilian expedition in 415 BC, Plutarch records, the brilliant bronze palm tree topped by a golden statue of Athena dedicated by the Athenians on the temple terrace in 460 BC (see fig. 1.3) was pecked at insistently by crows, till it was disfigured.47
According to some later (and doubtful) sources, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, victorious Sparta and her allies asked the Pythian priestess whether Athens should be destroyed; she replied that the victors should spare “the common hearth of Greece.”48 But as the Greek world slowly shook itself free of the dust that had settled in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, how would the Delphians have taken stock of their position in the Greek world? It is telling that at this point in Delphi’s story, one of its most enduring legacies comes into focus. By the end of the fifth century BC, somewhere on the architecture of the pronaos (the front section) of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the now-famous maxims of Delphi had been inscribed and were viewable by all who came to the sanctuary. Gnothi sauton—“know thyself”; meden agan—“nothing in excess”; and the less well-known eggua para d’ate—“an oath leads to perdition.”49 The statements of wisdom inscribed on the temple at Delphi were—from the fifth century BC—ascribed to the Seven Sages, a group whose existence was much noted in the ancient sources from the early sixth century BC onward. Some argued that the Delphic maxims were actually responses from the oracle to
the Seven Sages, while other later authors attempted to assign each of the Delphic maxims to a particular Sage (and adopted four more sayings so that each of the Sages could have their own).50 But whoever came up with them, it is almost certainly without accident that it was during this time of crisis and uncertainty in the Greek world that they came to have such public renown.
At the end of the century, if the Delphians had contemplated what drew people to the oracle, they would have recognized its role as a central resource of advice for issues affecting individuals and city-states across the Greek world, and yet, that it was also a place inaccessible to some thanks to political and/or military conflict. If they contemplated their sanctuary, they would have seen something that had survived intact the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, and was now groaning under the weight of dedications, many of which testified to the tensions, ambitions, and animosities that had shaken Greece to its core. And at the same time, they would have felt a sense of irony about the Delphic ideals of “know thyself” and “nothing in excess,” which were now emblazoned across their temple. Here was a religious complex that screamed excess, and one that, while often tripping up others who had failed to know themselves and understand the words of the oracle properly, was itself part of a wider world whose identity was anything but known, certain, or stable.
When I stood up, everything rose with me, and the whole
of great Delphi accompanied my movement.
—Amendée Ozenfant (1939: 394–96)
7
RENEWAL
In the years immediately following Sparta’s great victory over Athens at Aegospotamoi in 405 BC, as Athens was forced to submit to the humiliation of being stripped of its fleet and even the very walls that had for so long protected its city, a young Athenian by the name of Xenophon came to consult the oracle at Delphi. His mind was fixed not on the conflict at home, but on an opportunity presented by a conflict abroad, in Persia. The throne of the Persian empire was up for grabs, and he had been invited to join the army of the man intending to usurp it: Cyrus. Journeying to Delphi on the advice of his friend Socrates (the man whom no one was wiser than, according to the Delphic oracle), Xenophon asked the oracle which gods he should sacrifice and pray to so that he might best and most successfully perform the journey he had in mind and, after meeting with good fortune, return home safely. The Pythia responded, and Xenophon returned home to perform the appropriate sacrifices. Socrates, however, pointed out that he had not asked the key question: Should he go? Xenophon had consulted the oracle with his mind already made up.1
Within five years, Xenophon would have returned from his campaign, having heroically led his men out of Persia following Cyrus’s defeat and death, and Socrates would have been put to death by the city of Athens as it sought to come to terms with political revolution and instability. In thanks for his lucky escape, Xenophon promised a half tithe (percentage) of the spoils of his campaign to Delphi, which he placed in the treasury of the Athenians. Yet within another thirty years, Xenophon would have transferred his allegiance to Sparta and moved to live near that city, even enrolling his own children in the Spartan education system, and Sparta, preeminent in the years after Aegospotamoi, would have fallen from power, crushed in battle by the combined forces of several Greek city-states.2
The Greek world was turned on its head more than once in the first decades of the fourth century BC, and Delphi could not hope to be immune to this tectonic movement. Several scholars have argued that the effect of such world change was to decrease interest in the Delphic oracle. With very few exceptions, questions about colonization cease at Delphi in the early fourth century BC, no appeals for arbitration are known after 380 BC (when Delphi was called in to arbitrate a dispute between Clazomenae and Cyme over the island of Leuke), and even questions about fighting wars came to a halt after the middle of the century. Parke and Wormell go further and claim that the Spartan consultation about whether to go to war against Athens back in 432 BC was the last time the Pythia was consulted on a major question of policy not connected with cult or ritual in Greek history.3 Yet such checklist approaches only highlight one aspect of Delphic business and gloss over the various critical ways in which Delphi was still immersed in the fabric of Greek society at this tumultuous time, acting both as a reflector, but also as a cultivator, and even occasionally as an instigator, of the changes that so fundamentally shook the Greek world.
Partly because Sparta had been banned by the city of Elis from Olympia for the last decades of the fifth century BC (as a result of a disagreement between them), Delphi had received the brunt of Sparta’s monumental dedications following its victory over Athens. These dedications, thanks to the plethora of Athenian monuments at Delphi, were able to artistically, architecturally, and spatially oppose and outdo those of the Athenians. In the following years, as Spartan power was projected across the Greek mainland, Delphi continued to benefit. King Agis of Sparta set up a dedication paid for with money from his plundering in central Greece: it was placed high on top of a tall column to ensure its visibility and prominence inside this increasingly crowded sanctuary. Yet Sparta was soon troubled by the zealous empire-building of one of its most successful generals, the architect of victory over the Athenians, Lysander. It was later said that Lysander had designs on the kingship of Sparta and sought constitutional change to alter the kingship to election rather than family right (with the ultimate aim of taking the title himself). To do so, he was said to have turned to the one authority with the power to convince Spartans of the need for such dramatic change—the Pythia—seeking to bribe her with vast sums of money. But, for once, his advances were rejected, and a second plan, to employ Delphi as the legitimator of a scam involving a supposed son of Apollo, was thwarted by Lysander’s death in battle in 395 BC.4
Sparta, despite its powerful position in Greece, was by no means the only consulter of the oracle at this time: it was claimed in the fourth century AD by the pagan emperor Julian that Athens had been instructed by Delphi at the end of the fifth century BC to build a temple to the Mother of the Gods (the foreign deity Cybele) to ease her anger at the city; this structure became the Athenians’ archive house in the city’s agora.5 Also, it is from this period, the end of the fifth century and the first half of the fourth century BC, that two of the crucial inscriptions for evidence regarding the costs of consulting the oracle (that we met in the first chapter) seem to have been set up as part of public statements of the close relationship between the oracle and different city-states across the wider Greek world. The inscription of Phaselis (in Asia Minor) set out the tariffs for public and private consultations, and that of Sciathus (in the Aegean) set prices for both public and private consultation of the oracle, and perhaps, as well, for the lot oracle available at Delphi.6 In the same period, inscriptions were also set up at Delphi to record the privileges granted to particular associations. The most well-known is that for the Aesclepiads (a religious association tied to the god of healing Asclepius), who set up their own inscriptions to publicize their Delphic honors in the sanctuary. Nor was Sparta the only dedicator in the sanctuary: Pythian victors (including those from Athens) represented their victories with statues in the Apollo sanctuary, and individuals increasingly celebrated their close relationship with Delphi (e.g., their status as proxenos) with statues, or were honored for their abilities with statues put up by others (e.g., the orator Gorgias of Sicily was honored in this way with a statue on the temple terrace).7
Despite this plethora of individuals and associations, it was impossible to ignore the presence of Sparta at Delphi in the first three decades of the fourth century BC, and increasingly impossible to ignore Sparta’s rather heavy-handed projection of power across Greece. King Agesilaus of Sparta dedicated a percentage of the hundred talents’-worth of war booty extracted from his campaigns in Asia Minor at the occasion of the Pythian games in 394 BC. He also manipulated the oracular network to assure divine approval for his attack on Argos during a religious festival. Ages
ilaus first went to the oracle of Zeus at Olympia (which was now much more firmly under the Spartan thumb than it had been in the last decades of the fifth century BC) to ask for approval for the attack, then traveled to Delphi, an oracular shrine with more international weight than that of Olympia (but less under the thumb of Sparta), where he asked simply if the son agreed with his father. Apollo, son of Zeus, could hardly not agree with his father, king of the gods, and by implication, the response Agesilaus had extracted from the oracle of Zeus at Olympia. Agesilaus had manipulated the system to perfection.8
Such stories underscore the irony of Delphi’s position in the Greek world. It was a well-respected oracle, with centuries of authority behind it, in the midst of a lavish sanctuary filled with hundreds of monumental dedications from across the Mediterranean world; it was a host of international athletic and musical games that were respected throughout Greece; and it was managed by a pluri-regional association of cities and states. Yet it was also a small community living by its wits, clinging to a mountainside in central Greece. It is estimated that Delphi had one thousand citizens (with a total population, including foreigners and slaves, of perhaps five thousand) in the early fourth century BC. The population was not divided into demes spread out over the landscape as at Athens and the territory of Attica: the very nature of the Delphic landscape (the sanctuary and city surrounded by the 150–200 square kilometers of sacred land that had to remain uncultivated) meant that citizens of Delphi had to live in, or in the immediate vicinity of, Delphi itself (see map 3, plate 1). Moreover, the overwhelming success of the sanctuary in the preceding centuries had warped the population to such an extent that most other settlements in the surrounding area had withered away; Delphi was extraordinarily isolated for such a small and yet powerful community.9 The surviving inscriptions do indicate that it had some control over areas of land beyond the sacred “no-man’s” land, from which it could draw income. As well, surveys of the land immediately around the city show that it was cultivating its own cereal crops, as well as maintaining sheep on the mountain plateau around the Corycian cave (see map 3, fig. 0.2).10 But, to all intents and purposes, Delphians were dependent for their livelihood on the sanctuary, as the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, composed approximately two centuries before, had forecast they would be. This was reflected in the fact that the city’s key civic structures—the meeting place of the civic assembly, the council chamber (bouleuterion), and the prytaneum (smaller executive council chamber)—were all located within, or very close to, the sanctuary of Apollo itself.11 The very success of Delphi had provided its small community a living, but it had also left its citizens isolated within the wider landscape, and tied their fortunes tightly to that of the sanctuary. As a result, Delphi’s identity was always not only that of independent authority, but also of vulnerable prize as well as of tool susceptible to manipulation.
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