Yet Aetolian dominance was to be short-lived. In 221 BC a more effective king, Philip V, came to the throne in Macedon, and just a year later, the Aetolians found themselves at the receiving end of a new campaign to “free” Delphi, the likes of which had not been seen since 280 BC. The campaign—the War of the Allies—did not change Delphi’s status, which remained resolutely under Aetolian control, but now much nearer the Aetolian front line than it had been. A warning bell had been sound, and Delphi was once again much more open to outside influence and interest, symbolized by the fact that Sicyon, a member of the Achaean league (an alliance resembling the Aetolian league but mainly centered in the Peloponnese), which had fought against Aetolia during the war, was able to consult the Delphic oracle in 213 BC on how to bury the recently deceased Achaean general Aratus, and to which Delphi not only replied but proclaimed him a hero. Likewise, it is a sign of how much Delphi had been reopened to the wider world that in 211 BC, the city agreed to act as a proxenos for visitors from Sardis in Asia Minor wishing to consult the oracle (rather than the normal practice in which it was the responsibility of an individual Delphian who was known to those wishing to consult the oracle to act as proxenos) because, as the inscription records “the men of Sardis have not been able to come to the oracle for a long time.”49
Yet just as this War of the Allies came to an end, a player critical in the future history of Delphi and Greece appeared back on the scene: Rome. Rome was once again engaged in conflict with Carthage in the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), during which it sent numerous questions to the Pythian oracle. Quintus Fabius Pictor, for example, was sent to consult Delphi on the proper ritual by which to secure victory in 216 BC. Delphi duly responded with a traditionally mysterious set of instructions, added to which was a request that they return and thank Apollo (in the form of a costly dedication) when the situation improved. In 207 BC, after a resounding victory over the Carthaginians, the Romans returned to Delphi with gifts and were greeted by another oracle who indicated they could soon expect an even greater victory.50
Yet Roman interest was not only in the West. Increasingly, Rome was also being drawn into affairs in the eastern Mediterranean. In fact, its consultations at Delphi during the Second Punic War marked the last official civic consultation of the Delphic oracle by the Romans, presumably because it made no sense to consult an oracle belonging to what was increasingly becoming an enemy to be conquered.51 The process by which Rome came to see Greece as its enemy, however, was a complicated one. Philip V of Macedon, buoyed by his recent successes against the Aetolians, formulated a plan for much greater Mediterranean domination which led him to make an alliance with Carthage, which was still in bitter conflict with Rome. As a result, the kingdom of Macedon was now an enemy of Rome, and Aetolia, in its weakened state, saw an opportunity to bolster its position. In September 212 BC, Aetolia concluded an alliance with Rome against Philip V of Macedon (unsurprisingly, Attalus of Pergamon also joined), in what became known as the First Macedonian War. Yet, more surprisingly, the combined forces of Aetolia and Rome did not swiftly bring an end to Philip’s plans. In fact, the Aetolians were so worried about their ability to hold on to their “capital”—Delphi—that troops from as far away as Messenia in the Peloponnese (another Aetolian ally) had to be sent twice in 207–206 BC to Delphi for its protection.52
In the final analysis, it was actually fear of losing Delphi that pushed the Aetolians to desert their Roman allies and sue for peace directly with Philip in 206 BC, for which they were forced to give up large areas of territory. At Delphi, it was once again time for a delicate and diplomatic game of ensuring good relations with all the major players as an uncertain future lay ahead. The surviving inscriptions reveal the city of Delphi returning to its game of giving honors to both Aetolia and her enemies, but also indicate that the city increasingly had to take over what had been Amphictyonic and therefore Aetolian responsibilities as Aetolian control and interest in the sanctuary slackened in the face of an increasingly stiff fight for its own survival.53 By this time, Delphi had been under the Aetolian thumb for almost a century, the longest period in its history without independence. But freedom was, once again, just around the corner.
Plate 1. A watercolor reconstruction of the ancient city and sanctuaries of Delphi with main areas labeled (aquarelle de Jean-Claude Golvin. Musée départemental Arles antique © éditions Errance) 1 Parnassian mountains. 2 Stadium. 3 Apollo sanctuary. 4 City of Delphi. 5 Castalian fountain. 6 Gymnasium. 7 Athena sanctuary.
Plate 2. A watercolor reconstruction of the Apollo sanctuary at Delphi with main structures labeled (aquarelle de Jean-Claude Golvin. Musée départemental Arles antique © éditions Errance) 1 Theatre. 2 Cnidian lesche. 3 Stoa of Attalus. 4. Temple of Apollo. 5 Temple terrace. 6 West Stoa. 7 Naxian Sphinx. 8 Roman baths. 9 Athenian treasury. 10 Aire. 11 Athenian stoa. 12 Corinthian treasury. 13 Cyrenean treasury.14 Roman house. 15 Cnidian treasury. 16 Theban treasury. 17 Siphnian treasury. 18 Sicyonian treasury. 19 Argive statues. 20 Post-548 BC sanctuary boundary wall. 21 Roman agora.
Plate 3. A watercolor reconstruction of the Athena sanctuary at Delphi with main structures labeled (aquarelle de Jean-Claude Golvin. Musée départemental Arles antique © éditions Errance) 1 Fourth century BC temple of Athena. 2 Tholos. 3 Treasury of Massalians. 4 Doric treasury. 5 Sixth century BC temple of Athena. 6 Altars.
Plate 4. The Priestess at Delphi as painted by John Collier 1891 (© John Collier, Britain 1850–1934, Priestess of Delphi 1891, London oil on canvas, 160.0 x 80.0 cm, Gift of the Rt. Honourable, the Earl of Kintore 1893, Art Gallery of Southern Australia, Adelaide).
Plate 5. The remains of a Chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue dedicated in the Apollo sanctuary at Delphi, and subsequently buried in the sanctuary (Museum at Delphi).
Plate 6. The Delphi Charioteer (Museum at Delphi).
Plate 7. A view of Castri/Delphi painted by W. Walker in 1803 (© Benaki Museum).
Plate 8. The still very visible remains of a rockfall at Delphi in 1905 at the temple of Athena in the Athena sanctuary (© Michael Scott).
PART III
Some have greatness
thrust upon them
“ Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”
“ Reader, if you are looking for something monumental, look around you.”
—Epitaph for the Delphic scholar Pierre de la Coste Messelière (1894–1975), which is on display at the French dig house at Delphi. The same wording was famously first used by Sir Christopher Wren in (his) St. Paul’s Cathedral, London (1723).
9
A NEW WORLD
At the dawn of the second century BC, the Delphians found themselves in a curious limbo. On the one hand, their sanctuary was overwhelmingly still under the thumb of the Aetolians, who interfered in Delphic civic life, dominated many aspects of the sanctuary and its business, and even appointed informal “overseers” (epimeletai) to keep an eye on things in the city. The Delphians were at pains to honor the overseers (who seem to have been given rights even to keep herds of cattle on Delphic public land) on a regular basis.1 At the same time, visitors to parts of the Delphic complex—particularly the Corycian cave in the Parnassian mountains above—were beginning to decline. And even the oracle, according to Parke and Wormell, can be shown to have had only one genuine consultation in the entire second century BC, despite the fact that the Delphians during that time, in a single inscription, granted proxenia to the citizens of 135 different cities in the ancient world.2
And yet, on the other hand, the territory this small city controlled was larger than that of a number of central Greek cities. The surviving lists of those whose gave hospitality around the Greek world to the theoroi—the messengers sent out from Delphi to announce its athletic and musical games—grow longer than ever in the second century BC, testifying to the importance and popularity of Delphi’s contests. In 200 BC, one of the winners, Satyrus of Samos—victor as an auletes (flute player)—was apparently so delighted wit
h his win that he immediately played two impromptu concerts in the stadium at Delphi as a gesture to the gods and spectators. At the same time, far away at the Greek settlement of Ai Khanoum in modern-day Afghanistan, a man named Clearchus was in the process of erecting a monument telling of his journey all the way to Delphi and back. The monument spelled out the purpose of his journey: to copy with his own hand the words of the Seven Sages inscribed on the temple of Apollo, so that his fellow citizens could benefit from their public display at home. As well, the Amphictyony had recently given the go-ahead to a near four-meter-high bronze statue of the people of Antiocheia, as well as to a statue of similar height for Antiochus III (to complement another statue of this king atop a horse already dedicated in the sanctuary), both of which were placed in a prime position to the west of the temple of Apollo.3 As the century began, then, Delphi was not independent but increasingly cosmopolitan, in decline and yet never more popular.
But all this was about to change. In 200 BC, as Delphi became less and less subtle in its call to be freed from its Aetolian “oppressors,” Rome was once again drawn into Greek affairs. King Philip V of Macedon, this time seeking to expand his territory by annexing parts of the Greek world belonging to the Ptolemaic (Egyptian) ruling family, had set his sights on the island of Rhodes, as well as on the city of Pergamon (see map 1). Pergamon was the seat of Attalus I, friend of Rome, Aetolia, and Delphi. Initially reluctant to fight Philip again, having just emerged from the Second Punic War against Carthage, Rome at first counseled peace to Philip. But soon enough, particularly after Philip had also set his sights on taking Athens, in October 200 BC, Rome went to war again against Philip V of Macedon.
The resulting victories of Rome were based on the slogan “liberty for the Greeks.” Macedon was forced to withdraw back into its own kingdom. In May 196 BC, at the Isthmian games, the herald proclaimed that the Roman Senate and consul Titus Quinctius Flamininus, had defeated Philip V, leaving “free without garrisons, without tribute, governed by their ancestral laws, the Corinthians, Phocians, Locrians, Euboeans, Achaeans, Magnesians, Thessalians, and Perrhebians.” Flamininus celebrated the victory, or rather liberation, at Delphi. He sent his own shield along with shields of silver and a crown of gold, decorated with a series of poetic inscriptions, as dedications to Apollo. The Delphians in return later put up a statue of the general in the Apollo sanctuary.4 Yet, almost as soon as the Romans had liberated Greece, they were gone. Despite staying in contact with the city of Delphi (as witnessed by a series of proxeny decrees for Romans inscribed in the sanctuary), by 194 BC, there was not a single Roman solider left in Greece.5
What brought them back was their one-time ally, the fading Aetolian league who were still—barely—masters of Delphi. In 193 BC, just a year after the Romans had left Greece, the Aetolians rallied their allies, including king Antiochus of the Seleucid empire in the East (the same king who had recently been honored by the Amphictyony with an enormous statue of himself in the sanctuary). In October 192, Antiochus landed in mainland Greece with ten thousand men, five hundred cavalry, and six elephants. The king came to Delphi to offer sacrifice, and, in the spirit of the place which had, twice before, been the scene for defeats of forces invading Greece (the Persians and the Gauls), Antiochus proclaimed himself champion of Greek freedom against Roman domination (despite the fact that the Romans had proclaimed the freedom of Greece just four years earlier and subsequently left).6
This declaration of war against Rome was a threat the Romans could no longer tolerate. Landing in Greece almost immediately after Antiochus’s sacrifice at Delphi, the Roman forces, under the control of Manius Acilius Glabrio, dislodged those of Antiochus and the Aetolian league from the their stronghold at the infamous pass at Thermopylae, the “bottle-neck” of Greece. It is testament to the fast-changing nature of alliances in this period that Philip V of Macedon, defeated by the Romans in 197 BC, now fought, just six years later in 191, with the Romans against Antiochus. Equally so is the fact that Philip also fought alongside Eumenes II of Pergamon, who had become king on the death of his father Attalus I in 197 (Philip had tried to conquer Pergamon less than a decade before, nearly capturing Eumenes’ father several times in the process). Within months of the onslaught from this Roman, Macedonian, and Pergamene force, the Aetolians sued for peace. Antiochus remained to be dealt with.7
To the Delphians, having seen Antiochus’s proud arrival followed in such a short space of time by news of Glabrio’s victory, the world must have seemed a very uncertain place. But they did know for sure now where their allegiances needed to be.8 Between September 191 BC and March 190, Glabrio not only seems to have turned over a series of confiscated Aetolian properties in the vicinity of Delphi to the “city and the god,” and made a series of changes to the boundaries of Delphi’s sacred land, but also wrote a letter to the Delphians, saying he would support in Rome the sanctuary’s return to its ancestral ways of governance and the autonomy of the city and sanctuary.9 In response, the city of Delphi not only welcomed their “liberation” by the Romans, but engraved Glabrio’s letter on the base of the statue they set up in his honor, along with a list of all the people—mostly Aetolians—they promptly chucked out of the city.10
Glabrio’s initiatives probably engendered some regional hostility—particularly his changing of land boundaries, which brought Delphi into conflict with its long-term local rival, the city of Amphissa (see map 3). His offer to the Delphians may well also have begun (or indeed been responding to) a tussle for power at Delphi between the city (which some sources intimate attempted to push Glabrio to give them sole control of the sanctuary and shut out the Amphictyony entirely) and the Amphictyony, who wanted Glabrio and the Roman Senate to restore the traditional Amphictyony/city divided system of control over the sanctuary.11 But, for the moment, Glabrio had a more important enemy to deal with: Antiochus III. In 189 BC, Antiochus was finally defeated by a combined Macedonian, Pergamene, and Roman force at the battle of Magnesia, with Eumenes II of Pergamon personally leading the cavalry charge that was crucial in bringing victory.12
In 189 BC, just as Antiochus was defeated, Delphi sent three ambassadors to Rome to confirm Glabrio’s offer of the city and sanctuary’s independence. Spurius Postumius Albinus wrote in response to Delphi to confirm the Roman Senate’s official decision to uphold Glabrio’s offer. As a result, Delphi’s Amphictyonic council was reformed so that, for the first time in its history, the Delphian representatives now chaired its meetings.13 But on their way home, the Delphian ambassadors were murdered by Aetolians. Later that same year, Delphi sent two more ambassadors to Rome, this time to announce the creation of a new Delphic festival, the Romaia, in honor of Rome, and also to bring to Roman attention the murder of the previous ambassadors and point the finger at those responsible. The Senate commanded M. Fulvius Nobilior to search for the culprits, and G. Livius Salinator wrote to Delphi to confirm the Senate’s acceptance of the new festival in Rome’s honor, the text of which was inscribed publicly at Delphi on the base of Glabrio’s statue, which was fast becoming the central notice board in the sanctuary for the developing relationship between Rome and Delphi.14
In 189 BC, therefore, Delphi was once again in a very different sort of limbo from that in which it had found itself at the beginning of the century. On the one hand, it had a degree of liberty—guaranteed by the Roman Senate—it hadn’t had since the Aetolians had taken control of the sanctuary in the early third century BC, and indeed perhaps a degree of liberty it hadn’t had in its entire history. On the other hand, it was still a small city without an army; it was in only partial control, with the Amphictyony, of the sanctuary. Its civic ambassadors had been murdered by Aetolians, it was surrounded by Aetolian communities or those in sympathy with Aetolia; and its livelihood—the sanctuary—was still to some degree dependent on Aetolian business. That position became even more precarious when the Romans, having again asserted their interests in Greece, decided again to leave. In 188 BC, they withdrew, leaving b
ehind no troops, veterans, garrisons, governors, political overseers, or indeed even any diplomats. Delphi—whatever the Roman Senate had promised and Delphi had inscribed on its walls—was once again on its own.15
Delphi did have one clear ally, Eumenes II of Pergamon. Like his father before him, and unlike other Hellenistic rulers, Eumenes II happily pumped money into the sanctuary. In the 180s BC he sent slaves to help with the construction of Delphi’s theater, another testament to the continuing popularity of the sanctuary’s musical competitions at this time in that Delphi now had need of a dedicated stone-built structure in which to house the competitions and spectators.16 In response, the Amphictyony were happy to recognize the status of asylia for the sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros in Pergamon and the Nikephoria games set up by Eumenes. In addition, Eumenes II was honored with statues in the sanctuary, one by the Amphictyony and one by the Aetolians, testament to their lingering presence at Delphi, especially since the statues were placed center stage on the temple terrace of the Apollo sanctuary.17
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