Kindle Notes & Highlights
The gymnasium, on the other hand, was built nearer the Castalian fountain, next to the Athena sanctuary, on land mythically considered the location where Odysseus had been wounded in the thigh by a boar
He occupied Locris, punished Amphissa as per his original agreement with the Amphictyony, and faced Athens and Thebes on the battlefield at Chaeronea, just on the other side of the Parnassian mountains from Delphi. It was a cataclysmic event in Greek history: the forces of Athens and Thebes were decimated, leaving Philip triumphant and in charge of mainland Greece.53
At the same time, Philip reinforced the importance of Delphi in Greek affairs by making it one of the sanctuaries in which his Hellenic league would be based, and through which it would act.
At the same time, however, it does seem that Alexander was both suspicious and respectful of Delphi.
Yet Athens now celebrated its return to competition at the Pythian games with statues and precious dedications in honor of its victors, and as active dedicators in the Athena sanctuary.
in 332 BC, its failure to pay a fine on behalf of its athletes who had cheated at Olympia was taken up by the oracle at Delphi, with the result that the Athenians were instructed by the Pythia to set up six golden statues of Zeus at Olympia as recompense.
Moreover, despite the fact that Herbert Parke and Donald Wormell have argued that in the fifty years after Alexander’s death, there is no evidence for the oracle’s being consulted on anything but local matters, it is clear that the sanctuary was not abandoned in this period.
is reported in the ancient sources that Rome’s first consultation at Delphi dated back as far as its last king, Tarquinius Superbus; and we know that two centuries later, Rome consulted Delphi during the fourth century BC in regard to its military expansion into northern
In time, Rome would come not only to consult the oracle, but to “free” Delphi—and Greece—from its “oppressors,” and eventually (not to mention ironically), to turn Greece into the Roman province of Achaea.
council. By 280 BC, Aetolian control over Delphi was strong enough to precipitate a war to free Delphi in the spirit of the four Sacred Wars already fought over the sanctuary during its history. The king of Sparta rallied a group of city-states to repel the Aetolians, claiming that the sacred land around Delphi, which should not be cultivated, had been occupied.
But the following year, in 279 BC, Greece faced a much bigger threat: an invasion of Gauls from the North.
But they also ensured their victory was represented among the growing monumental history book of Delphic dedications. Stretching out from the west side of the Apollo sanctuary is Delphi’s biggest single structure bar the temple of Apollo, the West Stoa, occupying a 2,000 square meter terrace (see plate 2). Its origins are uncertain, and scholars have been unable to precisely date its construction. Yet, it is certain that in the years immediately after 279 BC, this structure became a focus for the commemoration of the Aetolian victory over the Gauls.
The Ptolemies of Egypt were absent from Delphi, so were the Seleucids, so too the kings of the Black Sea, as well as Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, despite his constant campaigns against the Romans.
Rome also returned to dedicate during the First Punic War (when it was itself fighting the Gauls in northern Italy), with one of its generals, Claudius Marcellus, copying the act of his predecessor Camillus in the previous century and sending a golden mixing bowl to Delphi as a symbol of the plunder taken in the battle.37
The Attalids modeled themselves on Athenian artistic and architectural supremacy. They built in Athens and copied Athens in Pergamon, so it was only natural that they should dedicate where once Athens had been so dominant.
Likewise, it is a sign of how much Delphi had been reopened to the wider world that in 211 BC, the city agreed to act as a proxenos for visitors from Sardis in Asia Minor wishing to consult the oracle (rather than the normal practice in which it was the responsibility of an individual Delphian who was known to those wishing to consult the oracle to act as proxenos) because, as the inscription records “the men of Sardis have not been able to come to the oracle for a long time.”49
Rome was once again engaged in conflict with Carthage in the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), during which it sent numerous questions to the Pythian oracle.
In fact, its consultations at Delphi during the Second Punic War marked the last official civic consultation of the Delphic oracle by the Romans,
In the final analysis, it was actually fear of losing Delphi that pushed the Aetolians to desert their Roman allies and sue for peace directly with Philip in 206 BC, for which they were forced to give up large areas of territory.
And even the oracle, according to Parke and Wormell, can be shown to have had only one genuine consultation in the entire second century BC, despite the fact that the Delphians during that time, in a single inscription, granted proxenia to the citizens of 135 different cities in
The surviving lists of those whose gave hospitality around the Greek world to the theoroi—the messengers sent out from Delphi to announce its athletic and musical games—grow longer than ever in the second century BC,
At the same time, far away at the Greek settlement of Ai Khanoum in modern-day Afghanistan, a man named Clearchus was in the process of erecting a monument telling of his journey all the way to Delphi and back. The monument spelled out the purpose of his journey: to copy with his own hand the words of the Seven Sages inscribed on the temple of Apollo, so that his fellow citizens could benefit from their public display at home.
But all this was about to change. In 200 BC, as Delphi became less and less subtle in its call to be freed from its Aetolian “oppressors,” Rome was once again drawn into Greek affairs.
In 189 BC, Antiochus was finally defeated by a combined Macedonian, Pergamene, and Roman force at the battle of Magnesia, with Eumenes II of Pergamon personally leading the cavalry charge that was crucial in bringing victory.
Later that same year, Delphi sent two more ambassadors to Rome, this time to announce the creation of a new Delphic festival, the Romaia, in honor of Rome, and also to bring to Roman attention the murder of the previous ambassadors and point the finger at those responsible.
Glabrio’s statue, which was fast becoming the central notice board in the sanctuary for the developing relationship between Rome and Delphi.
Taking control despite Philip’s final efforts, King Perseus of Macedon initially walked a careful diplomatic line, pacifying Rome and flattering Greece.
Perseus continued to use Delphi as a place for acts of public propaganda. He consulted the oracle in what was to become (although he could not know it at the time) the last ever consultation by an independent monarch of the oracle at Delphi.
28 On 22 June 168 BC, Paullus crushed Perseus at the battle of Pydna, a victory that was commemorated most pointedly at Delphi.
Perseus had been in the process of building himself another ten-meter-high statue at Delphi, intended as a victory monument in which a golden statue of him on horseback would stand atop a marble column, and be located on the temple terrace. It was unfinished when his hopes were crushed at Pydna. In a brilliant piece of propaganda, Aemilius Paullus chose to complete the monument, putting a statue of himself on horseback in place of that of Perseus, and adding a sculptured frieze around the base depicting his victory at Pydna
Yet the victory at Pydna also marks a critical moment in the nature of the freedom that Rome offered Greece. Rome abolished the Macedonian monarchy, replacing it with a series of republics.
In previous Greek conflicts, it had subsequently completely withdrawn. But after 168 BC, there was to be no withdrawal. Greece’s “multipolar anarchy” of the Hellenistic world was replaced by Roman unipolarity, which would be imposed on the country in an ever increasingly forceful manner.
At the end of 146 BC, Mummius defeated the league in the battle of Corinth and in punishment plundered and burned the city of Corinth to the ground. Every Greek city that had been part of the league was put under direct Roman control.35
Indeed, the language used in these inscriptions is not only testament to the strength of relationship between Delphi and Athens, but also, more widely, to Athens’s increasing reputation as a cultural powerhouse. In its public inscription of 125 BC, the Amphictyony honored the “people of Athens, who are at the origin of everything that is good in humanity, and who brought mankind up from a bestial existence to a state of civilisation.”
In 87 BC, the Roman general Sulla, having marched on Rome only the year before, was on campaign in Greece against the forces of Mithridates, the latest threat to Roman control of the eastern Mediterranean. In part thanks to his precarious relationship with Rome, Sulla found himself in need of money.
51 Up to this point, Delphi had been the recipient of Roman dedications to Roman victories, even those over fellow Greek cities. Now Delphi had become the bankroller for the destruction of Greece (ostensibly of course in the name of saving Greece from Mithridates).52 When Sulla laid siege to the city of Athens between the summer of 87 BC and 1 March 86 BC, some Athenian citizens fled to Delphi and asked the oracle whether Athens had finally met its fate. All the oracle could do was repeat the words it had supposedly said to the Athenians hero Theseus centuries before: “be not too distressed
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We know that Cicero, an ambitious young man, came to consult the oracle in 79 BC to ask about how he might win fame and was given the response that he make his own character his guide in life (Cicero comments in one of his writings that the oracle had by now stopped giving its answers in verse form).
In the midst of the war between Caesar and Pompey, Julius Caesar, in the lead up to the battle of Pharselis in August 48 BC, records Delphi simply as another Greek town occupied by one of his lieutenants, Q. Fufius Calenus, several months before the battle.
The Pythia replied, in typically enigmatic fashion, that the war did not concern him (he fell ill and died before he had to take a side).
And at the same time, Augustus reengineered the composition of the Amphictyonic council at Delphi to give his new city a seat in this ancestral grouping; he also formally instituted a bureaucratic position in the Amphictyonic hierarchy—the epimeletai, “overseers”—effectively the emperor’s agent attached to the Amphictyonic council.
Alongside the wise maxims said to have been inscribed on the pronaos of the temple of Apollo at Delphi (“Know thyself,” “Nothing in excess,” “Give an oath and face perdition”) was the mysterious letter “E.” Plutarch, who, in the early second century AD, was a priest of Apollo at the temple, recorded an entire discussion about the meaning of this letter, about which none of his friends could agree. But he relates the fact that the original letter “E” had been made in wood and attached to the temple, that the Athenians had replaced this wooden letter with one in bronze, and that Livia, in turn,
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Now, just over a century later, under Augustus, the Athenians chose to rename the Pythaïs the Dodekais. In so doing, they linked the sacred procession to the date of the new emperor’s birthday, the twelfth day of the Athenian month Boedromion. By extension, because the month of Boedromion was also Apollo’s birthday, the Athenians were able to underscore the Apollonine nature of the emperor (who liked to think of himself as under the protection of Apollo) and to link the emperor to both Athens and Delphi.
Others have argued that Delphi, despite its fantastic collection of art and architecture, lacked the one thing that always fascinated a Roman world obsessed with Greek cultural achievement: a chryselephantine (ivory and gold) statue made by a famous sculptor, like the statue of Zeus made by Pheidias at Olympia, which captured the imaginations of a host of Roman writers.4
More crucially, it also highlights what would be a continuing misunderstanding within the Roman world of what the Amphictyony was supposed to represent. The Amphictyony had never, in its history, represented all of Greece, but instead had always been a partial representation composed of a mixed assembly of some of Greece’s oldest tribes, more recent poleis, occasional Macedonian rulers and the Aetolians, and nearly always been dominated by cities and states from northern Greece.
Indeed, rather than Delphi occupying a meager role in Imperial history, thanks in part to the Roman confusion over Delphic and Amphictyonic history, the sanctuary was set to play a much bigger role than even the Delphian authorities could have hoped for or anticipated. Delphi, thanks to a Roman misunderstanding, was to have greatness thrust upon it.
Claudius himself, in the spirit of the Roman generals and the senators who had written to Delphi during the second and first centuries BC, wrote about these measures in an open letter to Delphi, marking the beginning of an almost unbroken chain of correspondence between Delphi and the emperor from the time of Claudius right through to the rule of Gallienus in the second half of the third century AD. This
And perhaps most innovative of all, it is in this period that the first records appear of women competing, not in their own separate games, but on a par with the men in the same competitions. In the 40s AD, a surviving inscription attests that a woman called Tryphosa had victories in the running races at Delphi and Isthmia, the “first of maidens to do so.”14
He was also said to have consulted the oracle. The Pythia’s response, according to later sources, was said to have warned Nero to beware the seventy-third year.
He also took, according to Pliny, some five hundred statues from the sanctuary at Delphi to adorn his Golden House in Rome.
Delphi’s games—though continuing in their popularity—were popular, it seems, only with the inhabitants of the wider Greek world, not its Roman masters.19
