Kindle Notes & Highlights
many scholars disagree over whether this statue is of Titus, or of his successor, Domitian, who also held the archonship at Delphi. The latter’s investment in the sanctuary has long been recognized. Indeed it is unavoidable. A gigantic inscription, measuring 4.75 meters by 0.65 meters, etched into stone plaques, has been found at Delphi. It can be dated to between 6 January and 13 September AD 84, and testifies to Domitian’s undertaking of the refurbishment of the temple of Apollo at his own expense
and in AD 86, it seems Domitian introduced the Capitoline games to Rome, which were themselves based on the model of the Pythian games at Delphi.21
large house was erected at the end of the first century AD, 100 square meters, with an ionic colonnaded courtyard at its center. Known as the “peristyle house,” it has been interpreted as either the new home of the Pythian prietess (we know from inscriptions that the epimelete of the period, Tiberius Flavius Soclarus, built a new home for the Pythia), or as the new prytaneion council house for the city of Delphi (see the “Roman house” in plate 2).24
The city of Gortyn made their only dedication at Delphi in the sanctuary’s history around AD 100: to commemorate a victor in the Pythian aulos competition from their city.
after offering several explanations motivated by logic, metaphysics, and mathematics, that there is no certain interpretation of the symbol.
first century AD. Most important, Plutarch’s dialogues show us that there were a steady stream of visitors to Delphi, and that Delphi still acted in some ways as the center of the world (the meeting point of a man coming from Britain and another from the Red Sea).
There were enough people coming to Delphi to ensure the need for guides to lead tours, even if those guides are characterized by Plutarch as being fairly ignorant and unwilling to engage in serious philosophical discussion.
The guides present at the sanctuary by the end of the first century AD seem to have had a set tour that always started with the Spartan monument to victory at Aegospotamoi
In short, Delphi, had begun to feel a little like the commercial theater it does today, where tours also often start with the Spartan monument for Aegospotamoi.
Plutarch himself discusses doubts over the association of the ritual with the serpent, and that some thought the hut represented the palace of a king.45
Some coins even featured the mouth of the Corycian cave, suggesting its return to prominence and its full inclusion in the standard tour guide of the sanctuary and its religious landscape.
This cult, whose location in the Apollo sanctuary is uncertain, was the recipient of a stunning 1.8 meter–high statue of Antinous in Parian marble, which is one of the masterpieces on display in the Delphi museum today
Hadrians lover
Though not all the letters between Hadrian and Delphi have survived in full, we know that regular correspondence continued through to Hadrian’s death in AD 138, with Delphic praise for the emperor becoming more and more overt.
Hadrian’s Panhellenion was, it seems, always, in Hadrian’s mind at least, a separate entity that would in fact be centered around Athens, and that led, in Athens, to the creation of a sanctuary of Hadrian Panhellenius, Panhellenia athletic games, and the embellishment of the nearby sanctuary at Eleusis.
What you see today when you visit the site is largely the work of Herodes Atticus
At the end of the second century AD, with the arrival of Septimius Severus as emperor (AD 193–211), Delphi once again sent ambassadors to congratulate him on his military victories over rivals (that had brought him to power), and, no doubt, to ask him to reconfirm the liberty and autonomy of the city and sanctuary in accordance with his predecessors. This he did, and the Delphians duly wrote up his response on the walls of the temple of Apollo.
AD 268, there seems to have been a massive exportation of the Pythian games, at the command of successive emperors, to twenty-seven cities in the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Syria.
The statue set up to Gordian III is the last known statue in Delphi’s history set up by the dual authority of the Amphictyony and the city of Delphi. While the city would continue to set up statues of later emperors, the Amphictyonic record is much more hazy.
Its final known dedication in the sanctuary is that of a statue of Philiscus, a governor of the Roman province of Thessaly (created by Emperor Diocletian at the turn of the third–fourth centuries AD). But that came 150 years after the last surviving
A surviving inscription from AD 319 attests to the generosity of L. Gellius Menogenes, president for life of the college of the damiourgoi (and also a man with important roles in the religious life of the city of Athens), who handed over 500,000 coins (of an unknown denomination) for the cleaning of the Delphic baths, a donation matched by a woman: Aurelia Julia Sotia.
In the aftermath of Constantine’s death, however, in AD 337, and as a result of the more settled (if new) Roman order, the city of Delphi erected not one but two statues to Constantine.
The response (if indeed the sources have not been confused and Julian actually consulted the oracle at Daphne rather than Delphi) is the last recorded oracular response from Delphi and is (as one might expect) dramatically (and perhaps too suitably) final: “Tell the king the fair wrought hall is fallen to the ground. No longer has Phoebus a hut, nor a prophetic laurel, nor a spring that speaks. The water of speech even is quenched.”54 In
Today, tourists visiting the sanctuary are guided through it by the zigzag stone pathway leading up to the temple terrace (see plate 2, fig. 0.1). Most maps of the sanctuary highlight this pathway, and it is often labeled the “sacred way.” Yet it is entirely the creation of the final phase of Delphi’s life: a pathway constructed out of reused pieces of stone from around the Apollo sanctuary to service the town that grew up in the abandoned confines of Apollo’s precinct.
And in the early seventh century AD, Delphi’s luck finally ran out. A new series of invasions from the north by the Slavs caused huge devastation across Greece.
But it was not to be. The final layer of the city of Delphi shows signs of destruction and wholesale abandonment.12 We hear little from Delphi for over eight hundred years, apart from the occasional inference that small pocket communities were living in among the ruins during the medieval period.
The appearance of the Italian merchant Cyriac of Ancona in the Parnassian mountains of Greece for six days from 21 March AD 1436 must have caused quite a stir among the sparse local population.13 Cyriac is the first foreigner visitor we know of who went searching for Delphi after the site was abandoned in the early seventh century
It is one of the most humbling facts in Delphi’s long history that even with its important and glorious past it could be forgotten and lost—even by those who lived on top of it.15
Cyriac’s visit to Delphi was an exception. We have no record of any one else making this journey for over two hundred years after this, until the English mathematician Francis Vernon made his way there on the 26 September 1675, by which time the village of Castri had grown, and the sanctuary of Delphi had sunk further into the ground.
“had to stop there and be satisfied with what we could learn from books of the former wealth and grandeur of the place: for nothing remains now but wretched poverty and all its glory has passed like a dream.”
He was overwhelmed and sobered that a place as famous and as wonderful as Delphi could disappear. For Spon, Delphi was the ultimate warning about what could occur as the result of human hubris.
By 1748, just as Pompeii was being uncovered, the English architects James Stuart and Nicholas Revett found willing ears to their call that “unless exact drawings can be speedily made, all [Athens’s] beauteous fabricks, temples, theatres, palaces will drop into oblivion,
Some even went so far as to drink from the water of the Castalian Spring, famed in the surviving literature as the bathing place of the oracular priestess (see fig. 0.2
Yet Byron also happily engraved his name on ancient stones at a number of ancient sites, including on a column from the gymnasium at Delphi
His work won great acclaim with Catherine the Great in Russia, who meddled in Greek politics in the 1770s, persuading the Greeks that Russia would support them if they rose up against the Turks.
archaeology and for German scholarship in Greece. In 1829, Greek authorities had permitted a small excavation at Castri, which revealed the extraordinary sarcophagus of Meleager (now on display in front
35 Twelve hundred years since its abandonment in the early seventh century AD, Delphi was officially back on the map.
