Delphi

by Scott, Michael

  We hear little about Delphi in the remaining years of the 180s and early 170s BC. On receipt of a gift of 3,520 drachmas from the Calydonian Alcesippus the sanctuary was happy to establish a festival celebration called the Alcesippeia.18 The Rhodians were called in to arbitrate on a question of land border dispute between Delphi and Amphissa in 180–79 BC.19 Aetolian use of the sanctuary seems to have petered out after 179 BC, and, in 178 BC, the Amphictyony unusually called itself, in the inscribed list of delegates for that year’s meeting, “a union of the Amphictyons from the autonomous tribes and the democratic cities”; this was thought to be not only a celebration of Delphi’s newfound independence, but also a dig at the Amphictyons’ former enemies, particularly the Aetolians and Macedonians.20 A question to the oracle about an issue of colonization by the island of Paros in 175 BC represents a distant echo of Delphi’s almost continuous role in these processes back in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Also in 175 BC the father of the Delphian Eudocus erected a statue of Eudocus in the sanctuary, in honor of the latter’s athletic victories.21

  Yet, at the same time, pressure was again building in the wider Greek world that would change Greece’s, and Delphi’s, future for good. In 179 BC, Philip V of Macedon, having waged war against and then alongside the Romans, died. He had been slowly and successfully rebuilding Macedonian power within the constraints of burgeoning Roman influence. Yet in his last moments, he seems to have attempted to stop his son from succeeding him. Perhaps it was for fear of what his son, Perseus, would attempt once on the throne.22

  Taking control despite Philip’s final efforts, King Perseus of Macedon initially walked a careful diplomatic line, pacifying Rome and flattering Greece. Delphi too was flattered, as one of the sanctuaries chosen as the place of publication for Perseus’s call for the return of all exiles to Macedonia, and for his treaty of friendship with the Boeotians.23 Yet in 174 BC, Perseus crushed a tribal rebellion against him in Macedonia and subsequently set off on a leisurely tour with his army through central Greece, which brought him to Delphi. His arrival was timed to coincide with the celebration of the Pythian games, Perseus grandly sweeping in to sacrifice at the sanctuary as part of the festival.24 Perseus continued to use Delphi as a place for acts of public propaganda. He consulted the oracle in what was to become (although he could not know it at the time) the last ever consultation by an independent monarch of the oracle at Delphi.25 Yet Perseus also used Delphi as the location for his more cutthroat activities, including the attempted murder of his enemy, and longtime Delphic supporter, King Eumenes II of Pergamon, who had, in 172 BC, traveled to the Roman Senate to warn them of the threat Perseus posed to Roman interests. With the help of Praxo, the wife of an eminent Delphian who later became a priest of Apollo, Perseus set up an ambush on the road leading from the port of Cirrha up to Delphi. Eumenes’ party was slain and Eumenes himself left for dead.26

  By 171 BC, Rome had awakened to the threat Perseus posed to Roman interests in Greece. Delphi, in part because it had been a focus for Perseus’s propaganda, in turn acted as a primary focus for the Roman articulation of Perseus’s wrongdoings. In particular, the Romans focused on Perseus’s armed participation at the Pythian festival in 174 BC at a sanctuary whose independence was, at the end of the day, guaranteed by the Roman Senate. In addition, they focused on his attempted murder at Delphi of Eumenes II, a friend of Rome, as well as his wider alliances with the same barbarians who had invaded Greece and sacked the temple of Apollo at Delphi just over a century before. These grievances were inscribed and publicly displayed in the sanctuary at Delphi.27

  In the years that followed, Roman troops flooded back, this time under the command of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, to fight in what has become known as the Third Macedonian War.28 On 22 June 168 BC, Paullus crushed Perseus at the battle of Pydna, a victory that was commemorated most pointedly at Delphi. Perseus had been in the process of building himself another ten-meter-high statue at Delphi, intended as a victory monument in which a golden statue of him on horseback would stand atop a marble column, and be located on the temple terrace. It was unfinished when his hopes were crushed at Pydna. In a brilliant piece of propaganda, Aemilius Paullus chose to complete the monument, putting a statue of himself on horseback in place of that of Perseus, and adding a sculptured frieze around the base depicting his victory at Pydna (figs. 9.1, 1.3). In addition he erased the Greek inscription already carved in anticipation of Perseus’s victory and replaced it with his name, titles, and a short but pointed explanation in Latin: “de rege Perse Macedonibusque cepet” (“[that which] he took from King Perseus and from the Macedonians”).29 Apollo is absent from Paullus’s declaration: this monument is not about thanking the gods for victory, it is about making a political statement of that victory in the most public and forceful way possible. This new monument stood on the temple terrace of the Apollo sanctuary at Delphi in the area where the major monuments to Greek victory over foreign invading enemies had stood for centuries (see fig. 1.3). Yet this time it was a Roman general commemorating his victory over a Greek force, and in so doing preserving what Rome had guaranteed: Delphian independence and Greek “freedom.”

  Yet the victory at Pydna also marks a critical moment in the nature of the freedom that Rome offered Greece. Rome abolished the Macedonian monarchy, replacing it with a series of republics. More widely, 168 BC represents the tipping point for Greece (and the rest of the Mediterranean) in what political scientists call “unipolarity”: the arrival of Rome as the only political and military force in the Mediterranean. Rome had emerged victorious from the wars at the end of the third and beginning of the second centuries BC against Carthage, Macedon, and the Seleucid Empire. In previous Greek conflicts, it had subsequently completely withdrawn. But after 168 BC, there was to be no withdrawal. Greece’s “multipolar anarchy” of the Hellenistic world was replaced by Roman unipolarity, which would be imposed on the country in an ever increasingly forceful manner.30 Delphi had not only, once again, been an important factor in the events that had brought Greece ever more closely under Roman control, it had also been the place in which to make that transition clear through the dedication of the remarkable victory monument of Aemilius Paullus. But to what extent would and could Delphi’s freedom continue in this new phase of Roman unipolar dominance?

  Figure 9.1. A reconstruction of the column, frieze, and statue erected by Aemilius Paullus following his victory over King Perseus of Macedon at the battle of Pydna (© Dietrich Reimer-Verlag [Front Cover image, H. Kähler Der Fries vom Reiterdenkmal des Aemilius Paullus in Delphi]

  The great survivors of this sea change in Greece’s history were old friends of Delphi: the Attalid ruling family of Pergamon and particularly its current ruler Eumenes II. He had fought with Rome against Antiochus of Syria, informed against Perseus of Macedon to the Roman Senate (in part following Roman suspicions of him being a Perseus supporter), been left for dead after being ambushed on the road to Delphi by Perseus’s operatives, and now lived to see the downfall of Macedon and the rise of Roman power.31 In 159 BC, Eumenes II finally passed away and was succeeded by his brother Attalus II. At Delphi in that year, celebrations were held in honor of Eumenes II and Attalus II on the back of a huge financial donation to the sanctuary by the Attalid rulers themselves. New festival celebrations and sacrifices, the Eumeneia and the Attaleia, were initiated at Delphi on a huge scale. Fifteen hundred liters of wine were prepared for the festival banquet, and financial sanctions imposed on those who failed to carry out their appointed roles in the celebration.32 The Delphians went further and erected a statue of the new Attalid ruler in the sanctuary right by the sacred processional area in front of the Athenian stoa in the Apollo sanctuary (see plate 2). Attalus II was clearly in awe of the variety and standard of artistic accomplishment at Delphi. He sent painters to Delphi to make copies of its many monuments, and especially the paintings by Polygnotus from the fifth century BC Cnidian lesche building. Delphi, in return, not only accommodated Attalus’s art
istic mission, but honored his artists in inscriptions engraved onto the monument of Eumenes II erected in his honor earlier in the century.33

  The Amphictyony did not, however, fare quite so well following Roman victory at Pydna. The French epigraphist Georges Daux argues that there are only two certain instances of Amphictyonic action in the entire period 166–46 BC, that of their participation in the arbitration of a dispute over the city of Lamia between Sparta and the Dorians of the Metropolis (an Amphictyonic tribal grouping); and that of their honoring of an Athenian. This lull is perhaps to be associated with a further rearrangement of the Amphictyonic council conducted around 165 BC to reflect the altered political map of Greece following Roman victory.34

  Yet the Amphictyony and the city of Delphi survived much more successfully than other parts of Greece. In the early 140s, Roman forces were back in action at Pydna, this time to dispatch a pretender to the Macedonian throne. Two years later, in 146 BC, in the same year in which the Romans won their historic victory over Carthage and destroyed that city, a league of Peloponnesian cities, known as the Achaean league, which had been on good terms with Rome, turned against Rome. The Roman general Lucius Mummius, with approximately 23,000 men including forces from Crete and Pergamon, marched on the league in what has become known as the Achaean War. At the end of 146 BC, Mummius defeated the league in the battle of Corinth and in punishment plundered and burned the city of Corinth to the ground. Every Greek city that had been part of the league was put under direct Roman control.35

  The destruction of Corinth in 146 BC marked another turning point in Rome’s relationship to Greece and, along with the destruction of Carthage in the same year, a new phase in Roman domination of the Mediterranean. Mummius celebrated his victory in part by sending dedications to Delphi: ironically the sanctuary was increasingly becoming the location for the commemoration of Roman victories over Greece. But as a result, perversely, Delphian interaction with the wider Greek and Mediterranean worlds seems to have shrunk. The surviving accounts of proxeny decrees—honors offered by the city of Delphi to individuals from elsewhere—show that in the first half of the second century BC, Delphi was welcoming and forming relationships with people from all over the Greek world. But from 146 BC onward, that circle shrinks considerably, to almost only its immediate neighbors and mainland Greece (although Delphi continues to honor Romans—almost a prerequisite given the increasing Roman control of Greece), with an almost total absence of the Aegean islands, Asia Minor, and Africa.36

  The one benefit of this closer-to-home focus after 146 BC seems to have been the renewed presence of Athens at Delphi. An inscription on the wall of the Athenian treasury at Delphi records Athenian involvement in 140 BC as arbitrators in a local dispute over the extent of Delphian territory. In 138 BC Athens revived the Athenian Pythaïs festival, which had not occurred since the late fourth century BC and was intended to celebrate Apollo’s arrival at Delphi thought to be via the Athenian territory of Attica. The heart of the festival was a procession along the sacred road from Athens and Delphi and a return to Athens bringing fire from the sacred hearth of the Apollo temple. The festival was intended to stress the close historical, religious, and geographical links between Athens and Delphi; and its renewal, at a time in which both, given recent Roman actions toward other Greek cities, felt the need for mutual support and comfort, is particularly understandable. The Pythaïs, which had been an irregular event undertaken only in relation to particular divine signs (like lightning) was now turned into a regular festival, celebrated every eight years, with the event recorded each time in inscriptions on the walls of the Athenian treasury, which tell us not only that there had been many oracles in the past prescribing the festival, but also that some three hundred to five hundred people were involved in the sacred procession. It was also on the occasion either of the first Pythaïs in 138 BC, or a decade later in 128 BC, that the Athenians composed and then inscribed on the highly visible southern wall of their treasury at Delphi not only the words but also the musical notations for two hymns to Apollo (see plate 2, fig. 5.4). These hymns, which have been fundamental to the study of ancient music, and were discovered early on in the initial excavation of the sanctuary at the end of the nineteenth century, record the celebration of Apollo through sacrifice, song, and prayer.37

  Yet this (re)blossoming of the relationship between Athens and Delphi did not stop here. In 134 BC, the Amphictyony, having received five ambassadors from Athens, appear to have confirmed the privileges accorded to the Dionysiac guild members of Athens back in the third century BC. On the treasury of Athens in Delphi, as well as in the theater of Dionysus in Athens, the record of both the original honors and their restatement over a century later were inscribed and published. Crucially, though, the Amphictyony highlights in the inscription that their confirmation of such privileges is contingent on Roman approval (a smart and perhaps necessary move in the wake of increasing Roman control after the destruction of Corinth in 146 BC).38 These privileges were later augmented, after the actors’ star performance at the Pythaïs of 128 BC, with a series of further rights in 125 BC, and would be restated again after the Roman Senate had also commented on Athenian prowess in 112 BC.39 Indeed, the language used in these inscriptions is not only testament to the strength of relationship between Delphi and Athens, but also, more widely, to Athens’s increasing reputation as a cultural powerhouse. In its public inscription of 125 BC, the Amphictyony honored the “people of Athens, who are at the origin of everything that is good in humanity, and who brought mankind up from a bestial existence to a state of civilisation.”40

  At the very same time, however, as the city of Delphi and the Amphictyony were honoring Athens in such fulsome terms, Delphi itself was embroiled in scandal. Traditionally dated to 125 BC, but perhaps occurring as late as 117 BC, the Amphictyony were called to an emergency session, the only one in their history for which the inscribed list of attendees named both the official representatives, the hieromnemons, and their advisors, the pylagores. In the aftermath of the event, the entire dossier of documents relating to the affair was inscribed on the side of the temple of Apollo, and it tells a story not only of conflict at Delphi, but of continuing Roman interest in the sanctuary.41 It appears that a group of Delphians linked to the son of Diodorus had usurped a series of objects belonging to Apollo for their own purposes, breaking one of the fundamental tenets of the sanctuary and of Greek religious belief (and for which in the past the punishment had been death). Thirteen Delphians in return, led by Nicatas, son of Alcinus, reported on their actions in the first instance to the Amphictyony, but, fearing for their lives while the slow wheels of Amphictyonic bureaucracy turned, fled from Delphi to Rome. There, they appeared before the Roman Senate pleading for its support. The Senate decided to take up the case and, through the Roman proconsul of Macedonia, put pressure on the Amphictyony to deal speedily and properly with the situation, thus precipitating the Amphictyony’s emergency session. Following their investigation, serious mistakes were found in the sacred accounts thanks to objects wrongly appropriated and the need to redefine the boundaries of Apollo’s sacred land.42 Elite Delphians were charged with taking sacred treasures, and were forced to make good the god’s financial loss.43 The total fines imposed came to fifty-three talents and fifty-three mines. Yet at the same time as this scandal appears to show equally Delphian misbehavior, Amphictyonic action, and Roman willingness to engage in the minutiae of Delphic management, it perhaps also indicates a certain reluctance on the part of the Amphictyony to acquiesce beyond the necessary to the will of Rome. The engraving of an inscription recording praise from the Amphictyony for the thirteen brave Delphian whistle blowers was actually left unfinished, and, despite the large fine supposedly imposed, those responsible for the sacred theft seem to have suffered little more than a rap on the knuckles: some of them appear as priests of Apollo in the sanctuary a few years later.44

  One of the downsides of the Roman defeat and subsequent carving up of Mac
edon during the course of the second century BC was that mainland Greece was left without a well armed and coordinated buffer zone between it and the “barbarian” tribes to the north. As a result, raids by northern tribes became more frequent during the second half of the century and into the first twenty years of the first century BC.45 Delphi—as it had been in the past—was an obvious target, given its large collections of precious dedications and minimal armed protection. In 107 BC, the Delphians honored M. Minucius Rufus for protecting Greece against barbarian raids. The threat, and resultant gratitude, was obviously very real. The Delphians offered one statue with a Greek inscription and another with a Latin inscription, the only known occurrence of such bilingual honors in Delphic history.46 Surviving texts from Delphi also attest to Roman concern for safe passage around the wider Mediterranean at this time. An inscription from 100 BC, carved into the base of the victorious monument of Aemilius Paullus, relates a Roman law (translated into Greek) asserting the rights of Romans to safe passage across the seas and urging all Greeks not to give aid to pirates. In the same year, the threat to local Delphians was also made clear. Kidnappers were reported operating in the vicinity of the sanctuary.47

  Yet it is also apparent that despite these threats, the sanctuary continued to enjoy a good deal of patronage, especially at the time of the Pythian games. At the turn of the first century BC, the stadium seems to have undergone a refitting; in 97 BC the city of Delphi honored an Athenian comic poet Alexandrus with a statue in the sanctuary, and the eastern Locrians honored their Pythian victor Aristocrates with a statue. In 90 BC we hear that Antipatrus of Eleuthernai was invited by the Delphic polis to play the water organ for two days during the Pythian games, as paid entertainment for visitors, in addition to the musical and athletic competitions.48 It is also during the first century BC that we first hear of a cult at Delphi in honor of Dionysus Sphaleotas and the establishment of an official cult shrine in his honor near the terrace of Attalus at Delphi. The surviving inscription claims that this cult dated back to the Trojan War, and that the cult would go on to be respected into late Antiquity.49