Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World
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Anyone who has visited Delphi will recognize the reality behind the priest’s description, and particularly the way in which any sight of Delphi is denied to the visitor until the very last moment of their journey, as if the mountains themselves were protecting the city and sanctuary from view
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The consultants had waited perhaps months, traveled perhaps thousands of miles. Now they waited patiently for their turn, each likely entering the home of the god with a great deal of trepidation as to what he might be told.
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First, because, incredibly for an institution so central to the Greek world for so long, there has survived no straightforward, complete account about exactly how a consultation with the oracle at Delphi took place, or about how the process of bestowing divine inspiration upon the Pythian priestess worked.
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As several scholars have remarked, it is thus one of Delphi’s many ironies that the Pythian priestesses—the women central to a process that was supposed to give clarity to difficult decisions in the ancient world—have taken the secret of that process to their graves and left us instead with such an opaque view of this crucial ancient institution.
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The oracle at Delphi was a priestess, known as the Pythia. We know relatively little about individual Pythias, or about how and why they were chosen.5
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The Pythia had to be a Delphian, and Plutarch tells us that in his day the woman was chosen from one of the “soundest and most respected families to be found in Delphi.”
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Plutarch’s Pythia had “always led an irreproachable life, although, having been brought up in the homes of poor peasants, when she fulfils her prophetic role she does so quite artlessly and without any special knowledge or talent.”
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Plutarch laments that while in previous centuries the sanctuary was so busy that they had to use three Pythias at any one time (two regular and one understudy), in his day one Pythia was enough to cope with the dwindling number of consultants.7
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The Pythia was available for consultation only one day per month, thought to be the seventh day of each month because the seventh day of the month of Bysios—the beginning of spring (our March/April)—was considered Apollo’s birthday. Moreover, she was only available nine months of the year, since during the three winter months Apollo was considered absent from Delphi, and instead living with the Hyperboreans (a mythical people who lived at the very edges of the world). During this time, Delphi may have been oracle-less but was not god-less; instead the god Dionysus was thought to rule the ...more
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Such a system of alternative consultation may also have been supplemented by a “dice” oracle performed at the Corycian cave high above Delphi (see figs. 0.2, 1.2), which from the sixth century BC onward, was an increasingly popular cult location for the god Pan and the Muses, and a firmly linked part of the “Delphic” itinerary and landscape.11
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He recounts the story of how a goatherd noticed that his goats, approaching a particular hole on the mountainside, started to shriek and leap around. Goatherds began to do the same when they approached, and also began to prophesize. The news of the spot spread and many people started leaping into the hole, so “to eliminate the danger, the locals appointed one woman as prophetess for all. They built her an apparatus [the tripod] on which she could be safe during her trances.”32
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Testing both the travertine (itself a product found only in active fault areas) and the water beneath the temple at Delphi, they found ethane, methane, and ethylene, which had been used as an anaesthesia in the 1920s, thanks to its ability to produce a pleasant, disembodied, trancelike state. They postulated that the geology of Delphi could thus have produced enough of these potent gases to, within an enclosed space like the adyton, put the Pythia into a trancelike state.45 The ancients may not have been lying after all.
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“Why was it that the sane, rational Greeks wanted to hear the rantings of an old woman up in the hills of central Greece?”
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In addition, there was a host of wandering chresmologoi or manteis (“oracle-tellers” or “seers”) who could be engaged on the street in any major Greek city for consultations, which could be conducted in a variety of ways, from the reading of appropriate
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Lampon was a seer in the fifth century BC but also a friend of the famous general and statesman Pericles and responsible for the foundation of Thurii in South Italy.
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The questioning of the Pythia in the sixth century BC by King Croesus of Lydia in Asia Minor is often thought, because it is so well known, to be typical of how consultants put their questions to the oracle.
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This is to say, consultants presented problems to the Pythia in the form of options, or rather sought guidance for how their goals might
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come about, rather than asking directly what would happen in the future.
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this means that we need to understand the Pythia at Delphi not as providing a “fortune-telling service,” but rather as a “sense-making mechanism” for the individuals, cities, and communities of ancient Greece.
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Pausanias (10.5.9–13) insists on four consecutive temples—the first made of laurel, the second of birds’ feathers and beeswax, the third of bronze, and the fourth of stone—the last of which was burned down in 548 BC. Pindar’s fragmentary eighth Paean, in contrast, attributes the bronze temple to different builders, and disagrees with Pausanias over the manner of its disappearance (for Pindar, it was swallowed up by the ground after a lightning strike).20
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Conflict about the origins of Delphi and about the violent seizure of its sanctuary by Apollo mirror a series of fights for Delphi both in myth and history over its ancient lifetime, as it came time and time again to be the subject of hostile takeover.
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Apollo as the god who brought knowledge to mankind, as well as the one who imposed order over chaos.
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This duality of order and violence in the character of Apollo Pythios at Delphi, as expressed through the sources relating to Delphi’s origins, is an important feature of the way the Greeks conceptualized the role of Delphi and Apollo Pythios in their world, and it mirrors the duality of centrality and conflict that is the mainstay of Delphi’s story in ancient history.34
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It is ironic that the oldest object to have so far been found in the sanctuary of Apollo was discovered during the big dig, but aroused no interest from the excavators at the time. It is now recognized as a lion’s muzzle, which formed the lower decorated edge of a Minoan rhyton drinking vessel, dated to between 1600 and 1450 BC.
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In the Corycian cave, 1,400 meters above sea level, and 800 meters above Delphi, traces of Neolithic occupation have been discovered dating to 4300–3000
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Throughout the early and middle Helladic periods (c. 2800–1550 BC), there is material evidence for the development of settlement in different parts of the (modern-day) Itean plain below Delphi.
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thanks to the most recent excavations at the Apollo sanctuary. Now, almost continuous habitation can be demonstrated in the area of the Apollo sanctuary between the eleventh and ninth centuries
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The most recent excavations have shown how, in the region of the later “pillar of the Rhodians” dedication to the east of the temple of Apollo (see fig. 1.3), the existing habitation, which seems to have existed on the natural incline of the mountain, was reorganized substantially by the construction of leveled terraces at that time. On
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Soon after 800 BC, the predominant Thessalian-influenced pottery is replaced by imported high-quality Corinthian pottery,
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Though Delphi clearly sees a change and increase in investment from the beginning of the eighth century BC, it is by no means on the scale of other sanctuaries such as at Samos or Perachora, or even nearby Kalapodi.
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Delphi, it seems, had become part of Corinth’s broadening interest in the region, and part of its expanding trading network (a particular type of Corinthian pottery, known as Thapsos ware, which was reserved for export by Corinth, is found at Delphi from the middle of the eighth century BC onward).
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role. It was not born into success as the center of the Greek world, but struggled, for centuries, to be anything more than a small and isolated community clinging to the Parnassian mountains.
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Delphi, which around 800 BC, had been a local and isolated settlement, was, by the last quarter of the eighth century (725–700 BC), seemingly (also) becoming a location serving the demands of (particular) emerging states and their elites.
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The increasingly strong trading network with Thessaly and the North, fueled by Corinthian interest and facilitated by the development of new settlements along the route, acted as a catalyst for Delphic growth.
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Did Delphi’s position in a trade network help bring the settlement to the attention of more long-distance civic centers that in turn began to deposit increasingly rich offerings at the sanctuary’s hitherto local (and still very much unelaborated) cult center? Or should we see the two as relatively independent, with Delphi’s increasingly international cult activity more the result of the growing fame of, and need for, its (perhaps long-established or perhaps only recently instituted) oracle?
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That is, the oracle at Delphi—whether a longtime local practice or a recent institution—came into focus and importance at this time because it provided a new solution ideally suited to the particular and unfamiliar circumstances created by Greek social and political
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the first communities posited in the literary sources (and which we can be fairly sure are historical) to consult the oracle were all in regions that were in some way exceptional in the pace and nature of their development and the circumstances they had to confront: Sparta, Corinth, and Chalcis in Euboea.
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Herodotus (6.57.2) tell us that Sparta had special advisors to its kings, called pythioi, who were responsible for the relations between the city and the
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Its adoption by Sparta, according to the later evidence for oracular consultation, was directly linked to approval from the Delphic oracle
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Thus, Malkin suggests, Delphi managed to become a force for change and innovation in social and political issues, and, because it always seemed to be on the “right” side, to eventually gain a reputation as a sort of elder statesman, thereby becoming a guarantor and arbiter of social order.26
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The involvement of the oracle at Delphi with this process of “colonization,” during the eighth–sixth centuries BC, has been the subject of more intense discussion than perhaps any other aspect of the oracle’s business
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What is indisputable, however, is that, by the last third of the eighth century, the pace of Greek cities and individuals establishing settlements around the Mediterranean had increased substantially. In southern Italy and Sicily during this period, a new settlement was founded about every other year.
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In the sixth century BC, for example, intercolonial rivalry had developed to such an extent that colonies competed to have grander, older foundation stories and closer involvement with what was, by then, the prestigious institution of the oracle at Delphi.
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On the other hand, scholars like the historian George Forrest and the archaeologist Anthony Snodgrass have argued that the oracle acted from its inception as a clearing-house for the dissemination of geographical and political information to the widest possible audience, and was fundamental to the process of colonization.
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In 734 BC, a shrine to Apollo Archegetos (Apollo “the Founder”) was established in the colony Naxos in Sicily. By the fifth century at the latest, this shrine was recognized (see Thucydides 6.3.1) as the place where all Sicilian cities were supposed to worship before setting out on their adventures.
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yet, there is no evidence for any form of permanent temple of Apollo at Delphi for most of this time. The earliest possible date for such a structure at Delphi (the evidence for which is a few surviving roof tiles, and a couple of stone blocks) is 650–600 BC,
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Third, it acts as crucial evidence for the generally late elaboration of sanctuaries, which would eventually become “Panhellenic”—sanctuaries common to all Greeks. These sacred spaces were less elaborate than sanctuaries within defined political territories because they were not the sole responsibility and territory of one community.
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In contrast to Corinth, Attica (and, at its heart, Athens) had a slow start at Delphi.
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Yet Crete was fundamentally tied to Delphi from the late seventh century through the Homeric Hymn to Apollo as Cretans became the first priests of Apollo’s temple.
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The dominant players at Delphi by the end of the seventh century seem to have been Sparta, Corinth, Lydia in the east, and increasingly Attica.
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