Delphi
Page 29
It was not to be. In fact, the negotiations took another ten years, an amount of time, as French scholars are fond of pointing out, equal to the length of the Trojan War. The delay was not due to a lack of interest in archaeology—in fact, quite the opposite. Foreign interest continued to build: in 1882 the American School of Classical Studies was opened, and in 1885 the British School. At the same time, the Greek Archaeological Society had become better funded and more sure of itself, so much so that it objected to Koumoundouros’s plan to give the French the right to excavate Delphi, instead requesting to undertake the job itself.41 The real problem, however, was still the inability to agree on a price or a process for moving the village of Castri. In the days before the planned signing of the 1881 agreement, the Greek government realized the ridiculous sums it would have to pay (Captain Frangos, remember, had secured nine thousand drachmas for a property worth perhaps one hundred). The deal was delayed, pending the passing of a law that would force the villagers to accept a market value for their property.
In the meantime, on 2 February 1882, a convention was signed between the French and Greek governments on the terms of the excavation. On 12 March, however, Koumoundouros resigned in the wake of elections following the annexation of Thessalia and Arta as part of Greek territory. He died just under a year later. In his place, Charilos Tricoupis was asked by the king to form a new government. Tricoupis took a very different approach to the negotiations, one centered on Greek currants. Since the 1850s, the latter had been the principal export of Greece. England imported large quantities for all its rich puddings, and the French began importing larger quantities after a disease killed off many French vines in the 1870s. Production of Corinthian currants rose, as a result, from 104,000 kg in 1878 to 162,000 kg in 1888. France alone, by 1889, was importing 69,500 tons a year. Greek currants were big business, and France needed them in the 1880s. Tricoupis saw an opportunity to link business to archaeology, and inferred that it was impossible to give France the honor of Delphi until France gave Greece a cut in French import taxes on Greek currants. The standoff continued into 1883, Tricoupis, floating the notion that the French might also have to help pay the costs of moving the locals, until such a stalemate was reached that everyone stopped talking about currants and Delphi.42
We hear little more about negotiations for Delphi until June 1886, when the same positions resurfaced. However, by 6 November 1886, the French had agreed to a commercial deal on currants. On 31 December 1886, negotiations over Delphi sprang back to life, and on 4 February 1887, a new agreement about Delphi was signed, limiting Greek expense for moving the inhabitants to 60,000 drachmas. On the Greek side, the renewed enthusiasm to push for both bills made sound economic sense, and was helped by the fact that the minister for foreign affairs at the time, Stephanos Dragoumis, had visited and enjoyed Delphi a decade before. But what caused this French willingness to compromise? In part, new principal actors. Le Comte de Moüy had been replaced by le Comte de Montholon, a canny political operator. But more important, the French realized they were not the only ones interested in Delphi. In 1884 the German archaeologist Hans Pomtow had undertaken (in somewhat clandestine fashion) excavations at Delphi. A Franco-German enmity, in evidence in archaeology from the time of Winckelmann in the 1750s, and not helped by the Franco-Prussian War in the early 1870s, was now in full evidence regarding the honor of excavating Delphi. Nor were they the only countries interested. It was clear by 1887 that the Americans, willing to bear all the costs themselves, were also interested in Delphi.43
There was never any official link between the bill to reduce import tax on Greek currants and the convention to give the excavation of Delphi to the French, despite that both were adopted by the Greek parliament on the same day: 19 March 1887. But both bills failed to pass the last hurdle. The French Senate didn’t ratify the French Parliament’s currants bill, and, as a result, Tricoupis was “unable” to secure the Greek king’s signature on the Delphi convention before its mandate passed. In the meantime, Hans Pomtow returned to Delphi in 1887 to conduct further, likely unauthorized, excavation.
Nothing more was done until 1889, and then, once again, the goad was foreign competition. The Americans in January 1889 began to ramp up their campaign to raise money for the excavation of Delphi. On 11 May 1889, the Archaeological Institute of America set out its official call for donations (their stirring words on Delphi provide the epigraph for this book). The French immediately wrote to the American secretary of state demanding assurances that the Americans would not gazump the French “right” to excavate the site. On 19 March 1890, the American secretary of state replied in diplomatic but firm terms that the Americans would not move unless they believed the French could not afford it, and that, given so much time had already elapsed, it seemed clear they couldn’t. The race was on.44
On 28 April 1890 Tricoupis informed the French that the expropriation of the Castri village would cost 450, 000 francs, of which the Greeks would give only 60,000. On 11 June the French government made it clear they had the money. But in November 1890, Charilos Tricoupis lost power in Greek elections to Theodoros Deliyannis. At the same time, the long-suffering director of the French School in Athens, Foucart, who had spent the best part of a decade trying to secure the French excavation of Delphi, retired and was replaced by Theophile Homolle. These new players galvernized the pace of negotiations, not least because Deliyannis did not insist on linking Greek currants to Delphi since French vines had recovered and imports of Greek currants had declined substantially by 1893 to just 3,100 tons. Following some cosmetic changes to the deal (the French Parliament grumbled at paying so much to expropriate Castri and preferred to vote more money for the “excavation,” which would, in reality, be used to move the village), the bill to make money available for the excavation passed in the French Parliament by 337 votes to 61 on 16 February 1891, was ratified by the Senate (despite grumbles that it made the French little better than “truffle hunters”) on 4 March, and was signed into law on 8 March 1891. In Greece the agreement was signed by the king on 13 April and published on 6 May.45
But France’s “Trojan War” was far from over. Homolle, the director of the French School, put his finger on it when claiming “the conquest of the polygonal wall will take three times as long and will cost no fewer assaults, labourers and schemes than the conquest of the walls of Troy.”46 The first problem, as ever, was the village of Castri (see fig. 12.3). Homolle had started gathering supplies for the excavation the moment the deal was published in Greece, and even set off to Delphi to mark out the excavation area that very month, in May 1891. But the Greek government was slow to put in place a commission to agree on prices with the locals. Athenian officials—thought to be less influenced by family ties than the local Phocian officials—were brought in, but the price still pushed at the ceiling of the 450,000 francs originally voted by the French Parliament. The villagers detailed further concerns about their new homes, but these were deftly sorted with small direct-cash payments (effectively, bribes) by the French administrator sent to oversee the move. His actions were deplored officially in France, but he, very realistically, understood there was no other way to keep the wheels in motion. Then the Greek election cycle got in the way in summer 1892. Tricoupis took back power and inaugurated his new government on 22 June 1892. The change of government meant there was a further delay in the payment of the Greek share of the expropriations. When Homolle went to start excavations in September 1892, he wrote, “as soon as the workshop was opened, the villagers assembled and the most excitable threw themselves at the workmen, took their tools out of their hands, claiming that, till they were paid, no work was allowed.” A gendarme, along with eleven armed soldiers, had to be provided to protect the workmen as they established the main arterial road to the site. A continued army presence, to protect the excavators, is visible in the photographs of the initial excavations (see fig. 12.5), and today’s inscription depot at the site is still affectionately known as the “stath
mos,” because it occupies the site formerly used as the soldiers’ headquarters.47
Figure 12.5. A photo of the discovery of one of the Argive twins (propped up in the background), along with excavators and a uniformed soldier for their protection in the first years of the excavation (© EFA [La redécouverte de Delphes fig. 82])
The first payment to villagers went out on 11 October 1892, four days after the inauguration of the excavation. It was a small, but solemn affair. Homolle outlined the honorable task ahead of them. A representative of the village of Castri/Delphi affirmed the village’s now positive feelings about the excavation. French and Greek flags flew over the first wagons of earth carted away from the site. “The excavation would be,” Tricoupis later wrote to Homolle, “époque making in the history of archaeology.”48 He was not wrong.
At noon, in the museum, I look again at the Charioteer…. You
try to hold on to the details. Then the analysis bothers you; you
have the impression that you are listening to a language not spoken
anymore…. We have worked like ants and like bees on these relics.
How close have we come to the soul that created them? I mean
this grace at its peak, this power, this modesty and the things that
the bodies symbolise. This vital breath that makes the inanimate
copper transcend the rules of logic and slip into another time …”
—George Seferis, Dokimes, vol. 2 (1981), trans. C. Capri-Karka
EPILOGUE: Unearthing Delphi
Ten years of discussion over negotiations to excavate Delphi gave way in 1892 to almost ten years of excavation. The “Trojan War” for Delphi, as the French like to label their long-lasting negotiations, now was to become an epic Odyssey for its discovery. “La Grande Fouille,” the “Big Dig,” lasted from 1892 to 1901 and would play a major part in a key era of discovery about the ancient world. The French excavators wrote down the day-to-day records of their quest in a journal that can be consulted today (and now online) and that provides incredible insight not only into the highs and lows of the excavations, nor simply into the careful ways in which the original excavators pieced fragments of finds together as they were discovered sometimes days and weeks apart, but also into how, thanks to copious notes in the margins, subsequent generations of researchers have added to this compendium, continually improving and refining our understanding of the site.1
The first task had been to move the village of Castri, which was spread over much of the Apollo sanctuary and further up the mountainside toward the stadium (see fig. 12.3). Théophile Homolle, director of excavations and director of the French School in Athens, calculated there were one thousand building plots with three hundred owners, all of whom had to be moved to new homes on a site chosen about a kilometer to the west (see fig. 0.2). It must have been an odd sight as, on each side of the rocky crag of the Parnassian mountains that stretches out on Delphi’s west side hiding it from the world, simultaneously one community was constructed and another demolished. Some inhabitants cried as they left the homes their parents and grandparents had lived and died in; others were surely happy at their good fortune—to be paid for their old homes and gifted the value of their new ones as well. But those initial years were not easy for the local inhabitants. The new village school was delayed, and so the children were taught by the local priests using the church that oversaw the village graveyard as a school.2
Figure 13.1. A photo of the excavation in full progress, with the train tracks and wagons in use as the entrance to the Apollo sanctuary is cleared (© EFA [La redécouverte de Delphes fig. 77])
And the task of excavation was enormous. Homolle was assisted by a small team of archaeologists; by the most competent of work managers, Henri Convert; and by over two hundred workmen. Eighteen hundred meters of train track were laid crisscrossing the site on which fifty-seven wagons took the earth away as it was excavated (fig. 13.1). The tracks were laid at such a gradient that, when full of earth, a single workmen could use gravity to push them easily by hand away from the excavation toward the dumping area, and then packs of mules were used to pull them empty back up to the excavation area. In 1895 alone, 160,000 wagonloads of earth were excavated (see fig. 13.2).3
Figure 13.2. An early photo of the excavation in progress with the Athenian stoa and temple terracing wall emerging from underneath the modern village of Castri (© EFA [La redécouverte de Delphes fig. 66])
The initial finds were impressive, even compared to some of the famous sculptures that had already come to light in earlier trial excavations (like the sarcophagus of Meleager discovered in 1842 or the Naxian Sphinx discovered in 1861). In the first two months of excavation, crucial inscriptions had come to light. In the first full season of 1893, the altar of the Chians; the rock of the Sibyl; and the treasury of the Athenians with its carved metopes, inscriptions, and recorded musical notation for the ancient hymns to Apollo were found. In 1894 the beautiful statue of the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s onetime lover and treasured companion, Antinous (see fig. 11.1), was uncovered, as were the treasuries of the Cnidians and Sicyonians. These discoveries were headline news in a world hungry for more from the ancient world. The hymns from the Athenian treasury were played for the Greek king and queen on 15 March 1894, at the Odeon in St. Petersburg on 11 May, as far as Johannesburg later that year, and even at the conference organized by Pierre de Coubertin in 1894 at which it was decided to restage the ancient Olympic games. Plaster casts of finds such as the Naxian Sphinx and the statue of Antinous quickly made their way to exhibitions in Paris, engendering continued amazement at the quality, skill, and sheer beauty of ancient sculpture. Such reactions were further fueled by the discovery, on 28 April 1896, of the famous bronze Charioteer that is now the centerpiece of the modern Delphi museum (see plate 6).4
But not every day produced such finds. In 1895, despite moving 160,000 wagons of earth, nothing major was found. Nor did conditions at the site make excavation easy. Heavy rain frequently interrupted excavation, and considerable time at the end of each season had to be dedicated to constructing strong barriers to protect the site from rain, mud, and rockfalls. Winds so strong that they created dust storms could also blow up. The Greco-Turkish War interrupted excavation almost entirely in 1897. The journal bears witness also to a degree of exasperation among the French archaeologists that the local workmen claimed so many religious festivals as holidays, and the French correspondence shows ongoing difficulties in agreeing with members of the Greek Archaeological service present at the site about what constituted important finds and what could be ignored. The increasing number of VIP visits did not help the progress of the excavation, nor did the continued criticisms levied by journalists and other archaeologists, particularly the German archaeologist Hans Pomtow. Pomtow had already published his own book on Delphi following his early trial excavations during the ten-year-long negotiations for the site. Now he continued to doubt French ability to undertake the task; criticized Homolle’s hands-on style; and when, despite all this, the French team published a significant number of results in 1898, his review in the Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift indicated that scholars should forgive Homolle his inaccuracies given the mass of work he was attempting to cover.5
By 1901, however, the main areas of the site had been uncovered. The wagons were shipped off to other French excavations on Delos in the Cyclades, and subsequently Thasos in the northern Aegean (although two can still be seen at Delphi today). The museum at the site that housed the finds, paid for by a Madame Iphigeneia Syngros, was inaugurated on
2 May 1903, and a big party was held to celebrate the end of the excavations. Five warships, three French and two Greek, were present in the harbor below; ten thousand locals were present in the area around the stadium; and a plethora of diplomats bore witness to the event in as fine an array of fashion as could be seen on the Champs Élysées. Homolle subsequently left, elevated to the position of director of the Louvre in France, and the dig ho
use fell silent. Only the opening of the grand hotel “Apollo Pythia” in the new nearby village by 1906 gave an indication of the transformations still to come.6
When Homolle and his team left the dig site, their plan was to prepare its “definitive” publication in five volumes along the lines already established for Olympia (Olympia: History, Architecture, Inscriptions, Statues, Small Objects).7 On the one hand, their excavation had been an incredible success: an extremely difficult dig that had returned to light the remains of one of the most important sanctuaries in the ancient world and produced some extraordinarily fine pieces of ancient sculpture alongside important architectural discoveries and endless inscriptions. Yet, on the other hand, there was a lingering feel of disappointment, which was in part inevitable. The excavation had been conducted with ancient literary descriptions of the site literally in hand, and its progression had intentionally mirrored that of Pausanias’s second-century AD tour-guide visit to the sanctuary to ensure the highest probability of identifying all the monuments he mentioned. When all the wondrous objects Pausanias alluded to—particularly the temple sculpture and, even more disappointingly, the apparatus of the oracle (also the subject of other authors like Plutarch and Diodorus)—were not uncovered, naturally there was disappointment, and not only among the excavators.8 As one critic grumbled in response to the 1901 Delphi display at the Universal Exhibition, “the impression is sad, the reality a long way from any concept of beauty, and there is nothing to do but rely on one’s imagination.”9