Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

It is less difficult to understand the Greek harmony between the graver and brighter needs of the common life which added to the temples and treasuries of Delphi buildings for recreation and enjoyment. A club-house was erected by the rich Cnidians, where conversation, the favourite amusement of all Greeks, could be carried on. Centuries later Plutarch made it the scene of his dialogue on the decay of oracles. If the age of the Antonines showed a loss of faith, art at least held its own, and the talkers must have added to the pleasure of skeptical speculation a delight in the decorations which dated from the fifth century before Christ. They consisted of pictures by Polygnotus of the capture of Troy and Odysseus’s journey to hell. Now only bits of stucco painted blue betray their presence, and fragmentary stones alone are left of the splendid building. Little more is left of the beautiful colonnades which furnished protection from sun and rain to the frequent crowds. In fairly good preservation still is the Theatre, where, as in all the religious centres of Greece, dramatic representations added literature to the pageant of artistic gifts. Equally inevitable was a Gymnasium; but most important of all was the Stadium, in which the quadrennial games were held.

This Stadium lay far beyond the sacred precinct to the west, and occupied a lofty and magnificent situation. In what Pausanias calls “the highest part of the city” the slopes of Parnassus break sufficiently to leave a narrow shelf of flat ground. Every foot of this was used for the erection of the structure, the northern side being bounded by the precipices of the great mountain, the southern side being supported by a wall of polygonal masonry. Part of this wall is still left, and in the interior there are tiers of seats to tempt the dreamer. The marble with which Herodes Atticus is said to have faced them in the second century after Christ is now all gone. But one may yet sit on the original stone and see not only the valley of the Plistus far below, but westward a bright strip of the Corinthian Gulf. Here once gathered eager thousands to watch the foot races and the wrestling matches, and to hear the contesting flutes and the rival lyres. Originally, before the Crisæan war, the Pythian festival had occurred only once in eight years and had consisted of a contest in singing, to the accompaniment of the lyre, a hymn to Apollo. The early musical festival found its aftermath in the combination of musical with athletic contests in the more frequent “Games” instituted by the Amphictyons after they had taken Delphi under their common charge. This was a part of that general reorganization in the sixth century by which the Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean, and especially the Olympic games were thrown into high relief among the multitudinous festivals of Greece. At Delphi a hymn in honour of the god of the golden lyre continued to be an important part of the proceedings. Among the most conspicuous discoveries of the French are three fragments of such hymns, engraved on stone, two of them accompanied by musical notation. The hymns are late ones, of no especial merit, but their scores have furnished a key to that art which played so large a part in Greek education, literature, and philosophy, and which made the Pythian festival a reminder of the lord of music.

Of the hymns in honour of mortals victorious in the games we still have some of the greatest representatives in the Pythian odes of Bacchylides and Pindar. Pindar may well boast that his song of triumph was a splendour in the Pythian crown of Hiero of Syracuse; that he would come to him over the deep sea, a light shining farther than any heavenly star. For only through a victory at some one of the four great festivals of Greece was even a tyrant sure of any Panhellenic honour. The centrifugal forces of Greek life found an antidote in these expressions of common ideals. It has, indeed, been often said that the only other antidote lay in the political organization of Delphi itself. But this political unity was limited, and, if Delphi focused Greek interests in any way that even Olympia could not, the reason must be sought in facts that lay beneath a particular form of government. In the lofty Stadium men from cities whose disparate and jealous memorials lay below united in self-forgetful applause of all the victors.

Here the traveller may pause to grasp, amid the chaos of swift impressions, a picture of the Delphic life. In it religion and politics, art and amusement coalesced into a stream of almost illimitable influence. From month to month without cessation pilgrims sought the oracle. The store of information about public and private matters thus brought to the oracular seat gave to the priests a knowledge of political conditions which they could easily transmute into an apparently supernatural wisdom and a unique power in public life. Hand in hand with this political power went an ethical sovereignty due to the essential religiousness of the Greeks. And lastly, the more continuous influx of visitors, over against an infrequent and congested festival, may easily have rendered the artistic influence of Delphi more insistent than that of Olympia. Xerxes was better acquainted with what was worthy of note at Delphi than even with what he had left in his own house, for many of those about him were continually describing the treasures. Often the seed of such descriptions, or of actual sight, must have fallen on richer soil than an Oriental despot’s imagination. Who knows what village smithy in Thessaly or Arcadia was stimulated to a finer output by the iron stand made by Glaucus of Chios to hold the big silver bowl sent to Delphi by Crœsus’s father? Indeed, the wonderful animals and plants wrought in relief for the first time upon welded iron may have inspired many a designer in Athens and Corinth. And many a young sculptor must have taken home from his Pythian pilgrimage a knowledge of Phidias and Praxiteles and Lysippus.

Thus was the world forever pouring itself into Delphi and again, like a retreating wave, bearing something of Delphi away with it, something larger and richer even than the golden honours that were symbolized by the crown of laurel so eagerly borne home by the victors in the games. And yet there was a further significance in the fragile wreath itself, however infrequently realized by athletes and spectators, which pointed beyond the artistic and moral power of the Pythian God. The wreath was made of leaves brought from, the Vale of Tempe, where Apollo had plucked his own crown of victory, when, as lord of light, he had vanquished the powers of darkness and had been purified from the evil which the struggle had entailed. Laurel (or bay) trees grew in the valley of Delphi itself, lingering on until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the last one is said to have drooped and died in the little garden of the church of St. Nicholas which, before Kastri was removed, stood in front of the spring of Cassotis. This spring, not yet exhausted, was the feeder of the oracular chasm and watered the grove of Apollo, “freshening with an ever-living stream the undying gardens” from which Ion gathered his laurel broom. Not only did the acolytes use laurel in their simple tasks, but the Priestess fumigated herself with burning boughs before she sat upon the tripod, and chewed laurel leaves before she delivered her prophecies. But the meaning of Apollo’s crowning, from which the sacred uses of the laurel sprang, was beyond the reach of Ion, untroubled “worshipper within the Temple’s inner shrine.” Nor to moderns is the revelation likely to come until the Shining Rocks grow pale and night obliterates the lively daylight of the spring. Into the dark void left by the withdrawal of Apollo swings the moon, no longer compassionate but majestic. Suddenly upon the receptive imagination descends the Delphic awe. The almond trees slip into shadowy insignificance. The hills stand out dark and brooding, while their ravines deepen unfathomably. And through the fearful silence sounds the prophetic voice of an unseen god vaster than the consciousness of the race which created him. The quality of sublimity and awfulness now apparent in the landscape explains the influence of that ideal of omnipotent righteousness which, among a singularly intellectual people, gradually formed for itself a living centre. For an understanding of such a god at Delphi one must turn to Æschylus. To him Apollo was a god “who knew not how to do unrighteousness,” in whose hands were loosed the tangled skeins of human sin. Sophocles, in his dramas of Œdipus’s life, represented the folly and wrong-doing of a noble nature forgiven by the Pythian god after the willing endurance of a just punishment. But Æschylus, in the “Eumenides,” deals with a much subtler aspect of divine law. That its opening scene is laid at Delphi is appropriate to the overshadowing importance of its religious meaning. Orestes had been told by the oracle to kill his mother, as a divinely ordained punishment for her murder of her husband. But there is no slaying that does not involve guilt, as Apollo himself knew when he slew the foul dragoness. The awful Furies hound Orestes from Argos to the altar in the innermost shrine of the Delphic temple. Here is laid the Æschylean scene. The Furies, with their hair of coiling snakes, mutter in a savage sleep, ready at a signal to fall once more upon the wretch who has obeyed the god against the human conscience. The suppliant Orestes, doubting and hopeless, crouches at the altar steps. And towering over them all stands the saving God who had once, in a fair vale of purification, put upon his own head the crown of victorious goodness. He promises Orestes no easy rescue from the earthly consequences of his god-directed act. He must be pursued once more by the hateful spawn of Darkness over the sea and through sea-girt cities. But at last he shall come to Athens, a suppliant of Athena, and Apollo himself will come and gain for him freedom and the forgiveness of his kind, and justice among men shall be forever established. This is no mere praise, however splendid, of the wisdom and the justice of Athens. It is rather the embodiment of the idea which to the Greeks shone as a “far-off heavenly star” above all the expedients of practical religion, or all the necessities of worldly power. Among the hills and cliffs of Delphi dwelt a god whose ways were past finding out, whose commands led to terror but whose service led to peace.

Thus with the lengthening of day into night rises the flood tide of fragmentary realizations of ancient thought. But the tide ebbs with the sinking moon. The cold night air draws the dreamer back to the waiting fires and hospitable copper lamps of Kastri. As he makes his homeward way through the low dark ruins, which are all that the intrepid archæologists could summon from the grave of centuries, he is moved to wonder whether Delphi, save for its natural beauty by day and by night, has any place in modern thought. The ancient interpretation of its importance was by no means only a religious one. The Greeks cannot be understood only through an Æschylus of profound spiritual insight, or an Herodotus of intelligent piety. Thucydides, amid the bustle of its life, was as rationalizing in his ideas about Delphi as we can be amid its dead ruins. To him as to us, its oracular power was a matter of superstition. He would have attributed Socrates’s faith in it to his goodness rather than his knowledge, and doubtless anticipated the modern explanation of the wisdom of the priests. And yet Thucydides accepted without question the political and civic value of such a centre for the Greek world. Now that that value has disappeared with the world it served, we are left to find a new value in the imperishable human thoughts which were inspired by Delphi and have outlived its marbles, its silver and gold, its laurel crowns and echoing lyres. For any subsequent religion has but created, mutatis mutandis, the differing types of men through whom we know the pagan god. If the oracle is dumb, and Apollo but an antique fable, yet men of the twentieth century may still find in the poets and thinkers of Greece expressions of their own faith or their own doubt. They may find also that blending in one mind of belief born of idealism with unbelief born of experience which is familiar to the modern world. Pindar’s piety was such that “at Delphi they kept with reverence his iron chair, and the priest of Apollo cried nightly as he closed the temple, ‘Let Pindar the poet go in unto the supper of the god.’” And yet he uttered the universal lament:—

“Much tossed, now rise, now sink the hopes of men, the while they cleave the waves of baffling falsity, and never yet hath any one on earth obtained from God a token sure of anything to come. Blind is the verdict of the future.”

CHAPTER XII
FROM DELPHI TO THEBES

“Ye triple pathways, shrouded crypt of woodland vale,

Coppice, and narrowing pass where three roads meet! O ye