Delphi

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The pilgrim’s road to Delphi climbs. Out of the Pleistos valley, silver-gray with olives down to the Gulf of Itea, it rises onto the southern flank of Mount Parnassus to a shelf of rock more than five hundred meters up, beneath the twin cliffs called the Phaedriades, the Shining Ones. At their foot the Castalian spring breaks from the rock; whoever came to consult the god washed there first, and so did the woman who would answer. Beyond the spring lay the walled precinct of Apollo, where the Sacred Way zigzagged uphill past the treasuries of the cities — Sicyon’s, the carved jewel-house of Siphnos, Athens’s raised after Marathon — past the Stoa of the Athenians with its trophy cables from Xerxes’ pontoon bridge, through dedications so thick the first thirty-five meters carried over a hundred statues. The Way ends on the temple terrace above its polygonal wall; the theater is cut into the slope higher up, and above that the stadium. Every step of the climb led toward the middle of everything. Zeus released two eagles, one from the sunrise and one from the sunset, and where their paths crossed he fixed the spot with a stone — the omphalos, the navel of the world. The stone sat at Delphi.

The ground had its powers before Apollo held it. In the succession Aeschylus sets out at the opening of the Eumenides, the first prophet here was Gaia, the Earth, then Themis and the Titaness Phoebe, before the seat passed to Phoebus Apollo; Mycenaean figurines carry the sanctuary’s prehistory back into the second millennium BCE. The young god took the place by killing the serpent Python that guarded it — the deed gave the site its old name, Pytho, and his priestess her title — and in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo he recruited his first clergy by boarding a Cretan ship in the form of a dolphin. Beneath the myth the record runs continuous: cult activity on the spot from around 860 BCE, sanctuary and oracle taking their historic shape in the eighth century, just as the cities of ancient Greece began sending out colonies — ventures customarily laid before the god for sanction, so that half the Greek map carried Delphi’s blessing.

What the pilgrim climbed for was a voice. On the seventh of the spring month Bysios, Apollo’s birthday — later on the seventh of every month except the three of winter, when the temple belonged to Dionysus and Apollo was away among the Hyperboreans — the god was in residence and answered. The inquirer paid the pelanos, the sacrificial fee, offered the preliminary victim, and waited in the order fixed by promanteia, precedence granted to favored cities and men. Inside the temple, in the sunken adyton, the Pythia — purified at Castalia, having drunk of Kassotis and chewed laurel — mounted the tripod above the cleft from which the pneuma rose, and spoke for the god. Plutarch, priest of Apollo here from about 105 to 126 CE, records the sweet odor that filled the inner shrine on days the power ran full. Answers came in hexameters, in plain speech, or by the casting of lots; what made Delphi the supreme seat of divination among the Greeks was not the machinery but the source. Dodona in Epirus, where Zeus answered through the rustling of his oak, held the deeper antiquity by tradition; Delphi held the god whose proper office was prophecy.

The temple itself instructed before the priestess said a word. In the fore-temple Pausanias read the maxims of the Seven Sages, “useful for the life of men,” dedicated by the sages to Apollo: gnothi seauton, Know thyself, and meden agan, Nothing in excess — the whole Delphic theology compressed into four words, a god who tells man what he is by telling him what he is not. Beside them stood the enigmatic letter E, which Plutarch turned over in an entire dialogue without exhausting.

Delphi initiated no one. It kept no secret rite for the consultant and conferred no new condition on the soul; what was shown under seal at Eleusis or Samothrace belonged to the mystery cults, while Delphi’s business was transacted in the open air of Greek politics. That business made it rich, and fought over. In the First Sacred War the Amphictyony, the league of twelve peoples of central and northern Greece, destroyed the town of Krisa around 590 BCE for taxing pilgrims; the sanctuary passed into Amphictyonic care under a council of twenty-four hieromnemones, and the Pythian Games were reorganized as a festival of all the Greeks — tradition set the first of the new games in 586 BCE. Held every four years, second in prestige only to Olympia, they kept musical contest at their core, for the games commemorated Apollo’s victory over Python; the victor’s crown was laurel, and Pindar wrote twelve Pythian odes for victors here. Three more Sacred Wars followed, the third letting Philip II of Macedon into the center of Greek affairs.

The temple burned in 548 BCE and was rebuilt by the exiled Athenian house of the Alcmaeonids; an earthquake threw it down in 373 BCE, and the Doric temple whose ruins stand today, six columns by fifteen, rose in its place by the 330s. Through all of it the god kept answering, and the answers steered the Greek world. Croesus of Lydia tested the oracles of his day, found Delphi truthful, and was told that by crossing the Halys he would destroy a great empire; he crossed, and the empire was his own — Herodotus built the opening of his history on the lesson. Athens, facing Xerxes, received the answer that the wooden wall alone would stand, and Themistocles’ reading of it — the wall was the fleet — won Salamis. When Chaerephon asked whether any man was wiser than Socrates, the answer was that no one was; Plato’s Apology hangs Socrates’ career of questioning on his effort to learn what the god meant. When Xerxes’ column came for the treasure in 480 BCE, the god defended his own house: Herodotus reports crags breaking from the Phaedriades onto the attackers.

The sanctuary outlasted classical Greece by centuries. The Gauls under Brennus reached it in 279 BCE and were thrown back — the Aetolians founded the Soteria festival to mark the deliverance. Roman power replaced Aetolian in 191 BCE; Sulla plundered the precinct in 86 BCE; Nero carried off some five hundred statues; and still the tripod was mounted through the centuries of the Roman empire. Plutarch labored at the sanctuary’s revival during his priesthood; Pausanias walked the Sacred Way around 170 CE and found it worn but still crowded with masterpieces. Constantine stripped monuments for his new capital — the bronze Serpent Column dedicated from the spoils of Plataea in 479 BCE stands in the Hippodrome of Istanbul yet. Under Theodosius I the cult was legislated out of existence: the oracle fell silent in the late fourth century, the last Pythian Games were held in 393/4 CE, a Christian settlement grew over the terraces, and in time the village of Kastri sat directly on the buried sanctuary, its houses floored with the temple’s stones.

The Grande Fouille and the gas beneath the temple

For ten years the modern age dug for what the ancient one described. A Franco-Greek convention of 1891 awarded the excavation to the French School at Athens; Kastri was expropriated and its people moved west to the present town of Delphi — not quietly: digging in mid-October 1892 opened amid villagers’ protests over unpaid compensation. Under Théophile Homolle the Grande Fouille ran from 1892 to 1903 with its own debris railway, and its harvest furnishes the site and museum still: the bronze Charioteer, dedicated by Polyzalos of Gela for a Pythian chariot victory of 478 or 474 BCE; the Siphnian Treasury frieze; the archaic twin kouroi Kleobis and Biton; the Sphinx of the Naxians; the inscribed Delphic hymns to Apollo, with some of the earliest substantially preserved Greek musical notation; thousands of inscriptions, among them over seven hundred acts of manumission cut into the polygonal wall; and the omphalos stone itself. Michael Scott’s Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World (Princeton, 2014) carries the whole arc from the first dedications to the French spade; the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987.

One thing the excavators did not find was the chasm. Diodorus’ tale of the goatherd whose flock convulsed at a cleft, Strabo’s pneuma rising in the adyton, Plutarch’s failing exhalation — the French trenches exposed no gaping fissure beneath the temple, and for most of the twentieth century scholarship wrote the vapors off as fable. Geology reopened the file. After Luigi Piccardi documented active faulting through the sanctuary in 2000, the geologist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, the archaeologist John Hale, and the chemist Jeffrey Chanton published new evidence in Geology in 2001: the temple sits at the intersection of the east–west Delphi fault and the Kerna fault, and analysis of the spring waters found methane, ethane, and ethylene — a sweet-smelling gas once used as a surgical anesthetic, whose low-dose euphoria and dissociation answer Plutarch’s description point for point. The rehabilitation did not stand unchallenged. A reappraisal led by Giuseppe Etiope in Geology in 2006 confirmed gas seepage at Delphi, chiefly methane with carbon dioxide, but judged significant ethylene emission geologically unlikely there; the critique of Foster and Lehoux in Clinical Toxicology in 2007 found the intoxication hypothesis resting on “problematic scientific and textual evidence,” its measured concentrations far below psychoactive thresholds; the original team replied in 2008, and there the dispute stands — the faults are real, the seeping gas is real, and what reached the adyton in antiquity, at what strength, remains open. Lisa Maurizio had already entered the deeper caution in 1995, reading the mantic session through the comparative anthropology of spirit possession: the Pythia was no fume-addled mouthpiece tidied up by priests but the speaker of the responses herself, and no assay of the air she breathed settles what she did with it.

The last consultation on record came from an emperor. In 362 CE Julian, restoring the altars of the old gods, sent his physician and quaestor Oribasius to rebuild the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and the verses that the Artemii Passio and the chronicler Kedrenos transmit as the reply — defended as authentic by Timothy Gregory in 1983 against a long suspicion of Christian invention — run: “Tell the emperor that the Daidalic hall has fallen. No longer does Phoebus have his chamber, nor mantic laurel, nor prophetic spring, and the speaking water has been silenced.” Whether or not a Pythia ever pronounced them, they are the epitaph the place earned: an oracle exact to the end, reporting its own ruin in the god’s meters. The omphalos, meanwhile, came back out of the earth in the Great Excavation — a sculpted copy of Hellenistic or Roman date, worked over with the knotted woolen net called the agrenon that dressed the original — and stands now in the Delphi museum, a few hundred paces from the terrace. Two eagles flying from the ends of the earth crossed once over this shelf of Parnassus, and the stone that marked the meeting marked the middle of the world; under the Phaedriades it keeps the navel’s place still, the point the whole earth was measured from.

→ Related: Dodona · Olympia · Apollo · Python · Divination