Kindle Notes & Highlights
Consulting the oracle over what they should do, they received this reply: “that they must fight against the Crisans day and night, and utterly ravage their country, enslave their inhabitants, and dedicate the land to Pythian Apollo, Artemis, Leto, and Athena Pronaia, and that for the future it must lie entirely uncultivated—they must not till this land themselves nor permit any other.”
the Amphictyony, spearheaded by particular members (Thessaly, Athens, and Sicyon), launched a war against Crisa, which was said to have lasted as long as the Trojan War.
Key changes did take place at Delphi in the first half of the sixth century.
The latest excavations show that all this changed in 575 BC, with the destruction of the maison rouge, and the building of the Apollo sanctuary’s first perimeter wall over it, to which time should also probably be associated the building of a temple to Apollo
This is to say, the sixth century BC would become the century for the development of pan-Greek community occasions and locations.
Coinage, too, first known at Ephesus c. 560 BC, began to diffuse across the Greek world during the course of the sixth century as an accepted style of financial interaction
More recently, scholarly consensus has characterized the Amphictyony as a multiregional but not Panhellenic, old-fashioned, and yet supple institution that lacked permanence and continuity and drifted in and out of usefulness and power as and when it suited the needs of various of its members.
available evidence suggests there were regular fluctuations in the management structure.
They had dictated, particularly with the demand for noncultivation of the fertile land below Delphi, that the fate and survival of Delphi’s inhabitants was entirely tied to that of the oracle and the sanctuary. And they had formulated a management system for the sanctuary that in part thanks to its flexibility was open to manipulation and likely to cause tension in centuries to come.
In Solon’s constitution for Athens, the chief magistrates of the city were required, upon entering office, to take a public oath in the Agora that, if they transgressed the laws, they would dedicate a life-size golden statue at Delphi.
The one recorded consultation by Cleisthenes, on how to strengthen his rule at Sicyon by removing the bones of the Argive hero Adrastus that were acting as a focal point for his opposition, met with a stern rebuke from the oracle, who told Cleisthenes he was a mere skirmisher whereas Adrastus had been a king.
In contrast, the inhabitants of the island of Naxos in the Aegean chose to dedicate c. 570 BC one of the sanctuary’s most famous monuments, the Sphinx (see plate 2, fig.
Given the presence of the continually burning sacred fire inside, and the regular use of the larger altar outside for burning sacrificial offerings, it’s easy to see how such a fire may have been an accident.
What the Amphictyony envisaged was a construction scheme on a par with, if not surpassing, any that had been seen in Greece.
We should not underestimate the enormity of the project that the Amphictyony conceived of at Delphi in the mid-sixth century BC. Temple building was the largest and most complex economic and management project the Greek world undertook at this time.
The ancient sources tell us that the estimated total cost for this rebuilding was three hundred talents, which is the approximate equivalent of 3,600,000 days’-worth of wages for an Athenian juryman, or 1,800,000 days’-worth of wages for a skilled hoplite soldier.
Yet, despite their on-off appearances in Athens, the Alcmaeonids were also increasingly present at Delphi and the surrounding area in the middle and second half of the sixth century BC.
Alcmaeonid largess toward Delphi came at the same time as the Athenians were becoming more and more resentful of the Peisistratid tyranny over their city and particularly their current tyrant, a descendent of Peisistratus, called Hippias.
And it was also at this time that Herodotus records how the Spartans, every time they came to consult the oracle at Delphi on any matter, were told by the Pythian priestess that, before they did anything else, they must free Athens.20 Alcmaeonid generosity had coincided with the Pythia’s active support for regime change in Athens, a change that could not but benefit the Alcmaeonids.
And material from the old sanctuary boundary walls was also utilized to create the Apollo sanctuary’s new perimeter walls, expanded to the south, east, and west by an exact 13.25 meters to create a perimeter some 3 kilometers long (making the Apollo sanctuary alone equivalent in size to a small polis, see plate 1
As a result, Delphi grew in international appeal during this period, and seems also to have expanded not only the number of gods within it, but also the respect with which they were worshiped.
In addition, the many festivals associated with them, and that created a packed sacrificial calendar for the city of Delphi (it was a well-known joke in ancient Greece that Delphians always had a sacrificial knife in their hands),
Just to the west, in line with the new Sicyonian treasury up against the sanctuary’s new perimeter walls, was the offering of a dedicator new to Delphi. The tiny island of Siphnos
In the last quarter of the sixth century BC, Croton (a regular consulter of the oracle in this period) likely offered a treasury, as did the Megarians, the Clazomenians, the Etruscans, and possibly the Potidanians. Having a permanent presence at Delphi now mattered, and keeping that presence up to date, it seems, mattered just as much.
One of Cleisthenes’ reforms was to organize the Athenians into ten tribes, each named after an Athenian hero. In 508/7 BC, Cleisthenes submitted the names of one hundred Athenian heroes to the oracle at Delphi, and the Pythia picked ten.
Delphi was increasingly a place not only in which to worship a variety of gods, and particularly Apollo, but also to advertise and proclaim wealth, military victory, deference to the gods, diplomatic relations, family and civic pride, and membership in the Greek world.
Cleomenes utilized a local Delphian contact, Cobon, who in turn persuaded/bribed the Pythian priestess Periallus to confirm (in response to a question put forward by a Spartan on Cleomenes’ request) that Demaratus was not the legitimate son of his father (the Spartan king Ariston), hence rendering him unfit to continue in office.
490 BC, one year after the Pythia’s corrupted response, the Persians landed at Marathon, accompanied by none other than Hippias, the exiled tyrant of Athens who cherished hopes of being reinstated as master
The Greeks, torn as they were by city rivalry, rarely referred to themselves as Greeks. This monument, here at Delphi in the early fifth century BC, would represent perhaps the first time the Greeks had publicly described themselves as such.
Themistocles, the Athenian general, after bringing his dedications to Delphi, was told by the Pythia to remove them from the sanctuary: the only instance in Delphic history of the oracle refusing a dedication. At the same time, Sparta proposed that the Amphictyony should become an anti-Persian league, excluding every city that had not fought actively against the Persians.
It is in the fifth century BC—and specifically with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which have survived into our time, starting with Aeschylus’s Persians in 472 BC—that we begin to gain an insight into how the Athenians conceptualized the Delphic oracle, its origins and its role in Greek society.
But they also show us the extent to which Delphi was conceived of in this period as an enforcer of civic values, a place that was on the path toward conflict resolution and active justice: although the actual resolution and justice are themselves (perhaps unsurprisingly) eventually always to be found in Athens
In short, the value of having a permanent and obvious presence that advertised one’s military and cultural prowess in this sanctuary complex—firmly embedded at the very core of the Greek world, and to which more and more people were coming—was as attractive and useful as the oracle’s ability to provide guidance at moments of difficult decision.
Yet no one monopolized the Apollo and Athena sanctuaries in the period 479–460 BC more than the Athenians.
Sparta sent troops to Delphi to champion the cause of the city, remove its Phocian overlords, and return Delphi to its (historic) independent state.
Yet, before long, Athens, under the leadership of Pericles (another Alcmaeonid—their involvement with Delphi never ceased), went back to Delphi with its own military force so as to return Delphi to the Phocians once more. In response, the Athenian accepted a grant of promanteia from the Delphians (as if the Delphians had any choice but to offer it) and inscribed their acceptance of this honor on the same bronze wolf dedication that had recently been inscribed with the same honor for the Spartans.
For it was during the 440s and 430s BC that not only did Sparta begin to dedicate in the sanctuary, but many other mainland Greek cities and states also returned to dedicate to Apollo.
Yet, at the same time, the new ascendency, and physical presence through its dedications, of Sparta at Delphi meant that the sanctuary was now an attractive place in which to hammer home military victories over that city too.
During the following decade, Delphi was a crucially important strategic location for Spartan forces and its allies: it was probably almost constantly in the hands of the Peloponnesian league, to the extent that it was even suggested Delphi could contribute financially to Sparta’s campaign against Athens, and is reported as sanctioning a further strategic Spartan settlement from which “Ionians, Achaeans, and certain other tribes” were banned.
Not simply in the sense that they were eventually upstaged, opposed, and overshadowed, but, more powerfully, in the sense that the monuments themselves crumbled as their dedicators crumbled.
By the end of the fifth century BC, somewhere on the architecture of the pronaos (the front section) of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the now-famous maxims of Delphi had been inscribed and were viewable by all who came to the sanctuary. Gnothi sauton—“know thyself”; meden agan—“nothing in excess”; and the less well-known eggua para d’ate—“an oath leads to perdition.”
Parke and Wormell go further and claim that the Spartan consultation about whether to go to war against Athens back in 432 BC was the last time the Pythia was consulted on a major question of policy not connected with cult or ritual in Greek history.
As a result, Delphi’s identity was always not only that of independent authority, but also of vulnerable prize as well as of tool susceptible to manipulation.
First and foremost, the sanctuary was in need of drastic renovation. The temple, it seems, was so badly affected by the earthquake that the oracle was unable to function: no oracles are known certainly to have emanated from Delphi between 372 and 262 BC, although later tradition supplies several examples, especially after the 340s, not least the “discovery” of a number of century-old oracles that seemed to prophesize the Spartan downfall at Leuctra.
In spring 363 BC, this internal rift came to a head: Astycrates and ten other Delphians were condemned, by a decree of the Amphictyony (proposed by the Thessalians), to permanent exile, and their property was confiscated. This band of eleven refugees fled the sanctuary and was given refuge in Athens.
In 356 BC, the Phocians decided to gamble everything: they moved in with their troops, under the leadership of their general Philomelus, to occupy the sanctuary, and they asserted their ancient claim to Delphi. About a century after the Athenians had pushed the Phocians to take over the sanctuary in the middle of the fifth century BC, precipitating the Second Sacred War, the Phocians tried the same tactic again. Their actions would begin the Third Sacred War in Delphi’s history.28
And they had even begun to build fortress-like protective walls across the crags of the Parnassian mountains around Delphi to defend their position from attack (the remnants of which can still be seen today).30
The list of fabulous dedications destroyed during the years 356–46 BC is heart-rendering: the gold tripod cauldron from the serpent column of Plataea; the crater of Alyattes, the sixth century Lydian king; what had survived from the 548 BC fire of Croesus’s golden lion; his gold and silver mixing bowls along with most of the rest of his dedications; the statue of Nike from the Sicilian tyrant Gelon along with other offerings from Sicilian rulers and probably the golden statue of Alexander I of Macedon offered after the Persians Wars.
The temple construction, interrupted by the different wars of the fourth century, would finally be completed in the 320s BC. The new pedimental sculptures adorning it were the work of Athenian sculptor Praxias and finished (probably by c. 327 BC) by another Athenian, Androsthenes. Made in Pentelic (Athenian) marble, the east pediment displayed Apollo, hunched on his tripod, while the west pediment portrayed an Apollo-like Dionysus, playing the lyre
the Athenians were boycotting its games, offering no civic dedications in the sanctuary, and refusing to contribute financially to the reconstruction of its temple. Yet the Athenians were active as part of the commission tasked with overseeing the rebuilding (as naopoioi), and as craftsmen and suppliers for it.
