Your lips guarding well, that in silence refrained,
Or with words that are good, you interpret his voice
Unto those who his counsels would follow.
While I’ll serve at the tasks which from childhood are mine
And with consecrate wreaths and with branches of bay
I will make the ways pure to Apollo within.
For a motherless child and unfathered I dwell
As a ministrant here in the fostering care
Of the temple of Phœbus Apollo.”
This unstudied rapture is interrupted by the worldly women, exclaiming over the wonderful sculptured metopes of the temple. Euripides, with the usual license of the Greek dramatists, put before his legendary characters the works of art that he himself might have seen in the latter part of the fifth century before Christ, when a rich civic and artistic life was occupying the stage of the vast theatre into which, as Strabo observed, Nature had moulded the site of Delphi. The semicircular valley opens only on the east, and from it terraces, like tiers of seats, rise from the Plistus to Parnassus. The ancient city of Delphi lay in two portions along the base of the Shining Rocks. The modern highroad approximately marks the division between the upper terraces, which held the sacred precinct, and the lower, where were the houses and business buildings of the permanent inhabitants, and also, east of Castalia, a few temples and other public structures. It is the upper terraces, west of Castalia, which enchain our attention, although all that is left even here, save for the small reërected Treasury of the Athenians, made of Parian marble, are remnants of walls, low-lying foundations, traces of pavement, broken bases, and pieces of graven stone. But they represent sacred ways and buildings, monuments and statues which made glorious one of the richest centres of Greece, from long before the time of Euripides to the destructive epoch of Nero and beyond. Delphi became the pride of the Macedonians as it had been of the Athenians and the Spartans, and under their sovereignty the Delphic Amphictyony continued and the oracle was the centre of the new widespread Hellenic world. The Gauls attacked Delphi in the third century B. C. as vainly as the Persians had attacked it in the fifth century. Even the ruthlessness of Rome brought no immediate destruction. Æmilius Paulus, the final conqueror of Macedon, set up near Apollo’s temple, in the most conspicuous place of the entire precinct, a monument to his victory. Even Nero seems to have wished to repair the temple, but the story that he afterwards tore it down because of an oracular response which reflected upon his moral character is at least ben trovato. He divided the Crisæan plain among his soldiers and carried off an enormous number of statues from Delphi. But a still greater number was left, and the glory of the god’s dwelling place had not vanished. Under Hadrian, the imperial apostle of culture, new treasures were added, and a little later Pausanias saw more than he could describe. It was not until two more centuries had passed that the oracle itself with one last cry became dumb forever. To the ambassador of Julian the Apostate, who was seeking advice in his wars with the Persians, the message was given:—