Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

“Say to the King now that levelled to earth is the temple of splendour,

Phœbus no more has a roof for his head nor the laurel prophetic;

Gone is the voice of the fountain and dried is the chattering water.”

Theodosius put a formal end to the Delphic cult as well as to the Olympic games.

From Apollo’s slaying of the earth-born dragon to the Byzantine emperor’s destruction of the oracle is a long stretch of centuries. Within them fell the brilliant epochs which filled Delphi with the opulence of all the arts. As Greek and barbarian brought hither their well-wrought schemes and passionate desires, so they brought also, in offerings to the god, their best skill in architecture and sculpture and painting, their rarest workmanship in marble and bronze and gold and silver. Ghostly proofs of the existence of some of these offerings the French excavators have within twenty years evoked from the reluctant soil. Gallic precision and insight have even made of ruined walls and broken stones an orderly array easily perceived by the traveller who is patient enough to follow his guidebook. The Museum supplements the ground foundations by several important sculptural details.

There were many localities and objects made holy by legendary associations, like the tomb of Neoptolemus, Achilles’s red-haired son, whose murder is described by Euripides and whose quadrennial worship brought crowds of Thessalians to Delphi; or like the marble Omphalos, or navel stone, flanked, in Pindar’s day, by golden eagles which marked the meeting place of the winged explorers sent east and west by Zeus in search of the exact centre of the earth. But of paramount importance in the religious life of Delphi was the Temple of Apollo, built above the deep cleft in the ground that held the sacred spring of prophecy. The Priestess sat upon a tripod in the adyton or holy of holies, directly over the fissure from which a natural vapour issued, and her ravings were transmitted by the priests in ambiguous hexameters. The site of the first primitive temple was preserved, but upon it rose successive structures. The temple that was seen by Herodotus and Thucydides, by Pindar, by Æschylus and Euripides was built in the latter half of the sixth century to replace an older one destroyed by fire. In the fourth century an earthquake necessitated still another, and it is to this one that the existing foundations are attributed, although fragments of the other are not wanting. Owing to the shifting history of the fourth century, this temple was long in building and was not yet completed when Demosthenes thundered out his scorn that the barbarian of Macedon had assumed the “honours of the temple,” to which even all the Greeks could not pretend. The work had been undertaken by an international commission, and inscriptional records of the contributions are richly suggestive of the private life of the times. Many individuals and some states promised first fruits. An actor and a physician of Athens sent a tithe of their earnings. Among individuals the Peloponnesians were the most pious, although contributions straggled in from Attica, Bœotia, Northern Greece, the islands, Africa, and Sicily. Collectors went from house to house, and by far the larger number of contributors gave no more than a drachma. Doubtless in many cases this modesty was due to poverty rather than to indifference, and the religious sentiment prompting the gifts must often have been comparable to that which reared the arches and illuminated the windows of the Cathedral of Chartres. For the sake of such contributors one could wish that after the Roman restorations the Delphic temple had not been allowed to crumble under earthquakes, corroding rains, and the tread of the unnumbered years. Of adyton and oracular chasm the excavators have found no smallest trace, and not even one column rises from the low foundations to give evidence of things unseen. But, at least, unlike the Parthenon and many another great shrine, it was never converted into a church of an alien faith.

Secular buildings followed in the wake of the religious importance of Delphi. The Amphictyonic Council had a hall for its meetings to the west of the sacred precinct, on or near the site now occupied by the little chapel of St. Elias. Here, in sight of the Crisæan plain, the incendiary speech of Æschines had its full effect. Within the precinct, safe from attack in times of war, public treasuries were erected by Asiatic kings and Greek tyrants, by Greek states in Asia Minor and colonies in Italy, and by sovereign cities like Athens and Thebes.

The erection of a treasury often followed upon some public success, but other monuments and statues also rose at the feet of Apollo to mark the tidal flow of national fortunes. A study of all such memorials, known to have existed at Delphi, would be equivalent to a detailed study of Greek history. The repulse of the Persians from the mainland and of the Carthaginians from Sicily, and the stemming of the later invasions of Gallic barbarians required thank-offerings to the Delphic god. The rise of Athens, the struggle of Ionian and Dorian, the victory of Sparta, the late hegemony of Thebes are here commemorated; and with these the lesser quarrels of Sparta with Argos and Arcadia and of Athens with Megara, and the petty warfare of Phocians and Thessalians.

A myriad of statues and monuments commemorated personal interests or feeling. From a haul of tunny fish to the discovery of stolen goods, no event was too prosaic to inspire an offering from island or village. And, throughout Greece, from Macedonia to Crete, towns delighted to express their reverence by gifts of marble and bronze. Midas from Asia Minor sent a chair of state and Crœsus sent a golden lion and silver bowls. Arcesilas of Cyrene in northern Africa, in the fifth century, celebrated a Pythian victory by the gift of a sculptured chariot and charioteer. The statue still remains, the most famous single object discovered at Delphi. Dominating one room in the Museum, he seems in his bronze dignity as untroubled by the chilling silence of to-day as was his living prototype, in the hippodrome in the plain below, by the noise and tumult of the day of victory. The description by Sophocles of the Delphic chariot race in which Orestes was supposed to be killed reproduces the excitement against which many a charioteer must have had to steady his nerves.[^[27]]

Of statues of mortals dedicated by themselves or by their admirers there was no end. Among these persons were the great rhetorician Gorgias, to whose teaching Greek prose owed its first artistic development, and Phryne, the famous courtesan of Thespiæ. With her statue, seen by men of Demosthenes’s age between the figures of the Spartan king Archidamus and Philip of Macedon, we may surrender the effort to distinguish the links in the mighty chains which, as in Plato’s vision, bound the Greek earth to a heavenly throne.