Delphi Read online

  All three aspects of this identity were on display during first decades of the fourth century BC. In Plato’s detailed analysis of an ideal state, Delphi was to occupy a prominent role. All legislative affairs relating to the establishment of shrines, sacrifices, and other form of cult for gods, daimones and heroes, as well as the graves of the dead and the services to be performed for the spirits of the dead, were to be overseen by the oracle at Delphi. Such a prominent role for Delphi would also be echoed in Plato’s later work: Delphi was to be master of all laws about divine matters, final arbiter in the appointment of interpreters of the sacred laws, and consultant about all public festivals and sacrifices.12

  Yet at the same time as Delphi’s importance was being firmly established, both civic and Amphictyonic bodies at Delphi seem to have felt the need to bolster and restate their own importance. It is most probably during this period that one of the phratries (civic units) of Delphi, the Labyadai, chose to reinscribe and publicize in the sanctuary of Apollo their traditional rules, regulations, and oaths (an older version of which could be seen on a different side of the same stone that carried the new updated fourth-century inscription). A similar desire to update and redisplay seems to have motivated the Amphictyony in 380 BC to bring together their regular responsibilities with those regarding special events like the Pythian games and have them inscribed on steles not just at Delphi but also in other cities. Our surviving copy comes from Athens, and in it, the Amphictyony claim responsibility for inspecting the sacred land, for carrying out the necessary repairs before the Pythian games (including to bridges along the roads to Delphi in each of the Amphictyonic members’ respective territories), and for taking the opportunity to set out a potpourri of their own legislation about behavior in the sanctuary. This is not the only set of Amphictyony laws that was updated and displayed at this time. In the first half of the fourth century BC, a number of Amphictyonic laws and decrees seem to have been similarly treated at Delphi and elsewhere.13

  This is perhaps part of a bigger picture: some scholars, as we saw in a previous chapter, have argued that it was in this era—particularly the 380s and the 370s—that we should locate the creation of the stories surrounding the First Sacred War over Delphi, the very event that brought the Amphictyony into relation with the sanctuary. And this need to restate, publicize, and even invent particular roles, rules, and perhaps even historical events, among key Delphi players was furthermore motivated by the fact that this was a period during which Delphi began to feel increasingly vulnerable about its position in the wider world. In 385 BC it was whispered that the warlord tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse had designs on the sanctuary and that his treaty with the (not very distant) Illyrians was merely a precursor to launching an attack on Delphi itself. In 373 BC the Athenian general Iphicrates intercepted and captured a ship bringing gold and ivory statues to Delphi and Olympia, thus denying the sanctuaries their latest dedications. In the same year, Delphi fell victim to a serious earthquake and rockslide, which seems to have devastated the Apollo and Athena sanctuaries and their temples. In 371 BC, Sparta, master of Greece for the previous thirty years, finally fell from power, crushed in pulverizing defeat at the battle of Leuctra. In its place was the city of Thebes, not far from Delphi. And most worryingly, by 371 BC, a man called Jason from the city of Pherai in Thessaly had risen to such extraordinary heights of power that he was able to claim mastership of northern Greece, and to act as a strong supporter of Thebes in its challenge to Sparta. In 370 BC, as the sanctuary of Delphi lay in tatters following the earthquake, Jason of Pherai planned to preside over the Pythian games, bringing with him an immense army of sacrificial animals—one thousand oxen and ten thousand other animals—collected from all his dominions. What the Delphians feared most was the rumor that he came not simply to celebrate the games, but to lay claim to the sanctuary itself.14

  The Delphians were able to dodge the bullet in 370 BC, because Jason of Pherai—however correct the rumors had been about his intentions—was assassinated earlier in the year before he could preside over the Pythian games at Delphi. Yet the repercussions of events in the last years of the 370s would be felt at Delphi for the rest of the century. 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. We know also, from later inscriptions detailing repairs, that parts of the north and south boundary walls, or else (depending on how you read the inscription) the entire east wall of the Apollo sanctuary had collapsed (see plate 2).15 The question was, who would lead the charge in fixing it? Scholarship has long been divided about where the germ of the massive reconstruction project that dominated Delphi through until 310 BC began. For some, it was the brainchild of the organization that had led the previous redevelopment of Delphi: the Amphictyony, who, despite their low profile in the fifth century BC, had recently demonstrated publicly their role and power at Delphi. For others, however, the initial plan may have been formulated among the individual city-states at the several peace conferences that, eventually, failed to prevent the seismic military clash on the plain at Leuctra in 371 BC, with the Amphictyony taking over the project only in the years immediately afterward.16

  Yet at the same time as the temple and sanctuary reconstruction project gathered momentum, the sanctuary was also playing host to commemorating the victory over Sparta at Leuctra. Just as Athens had proved a tempting target because of the number of monumental dedications at Delphi for Sparta, so too now Sparta found itself spatially, artistically, and architecturally confronted (see fig. 6.2). The Argives erected a semicircular statue group (directly opposite the similar semicircular monument they had offered in the fifth century) that stood next to the Spartan stoa, which had been built to commemorate victory over Athens, at the very entrance to the Apollo sanctuary. But the Argives did not simply build their monument next to the Spartan monument: theirs physically cut into, and cut off access to, the stoa. This was Delphic monument war in a whole new phase: dedications to victory inflicting wounds on dedications of their enemies. No wonder stories of dedications “dying” at the same time as their real-life dedicators cluster around the monuments of this period: Sparta’s dedicated golden stars were said to have crashed to the ground at the time of the battle of Leuctra, the statue of Lysander to have fallen apart, and another to have crumbled.17

  The visibility of the Spartan stoa was further reduced in 369 BC when the Arcadians, celebrating the development of their new confederacy, placed an imposing statue group directly in front of it (see fig. 6.2). The dedicating inscription on the monument read “for victory over the Spartans.”18 Nor were they the only city-states to commemorate the Spartan downfall. Thebes constructed a new treasury in the sanctuary (the first for many decades), and Thessaly offered statues of the victorious generals.19 Sparta seems to have retaliated as best it could, by returning to update its statue group to victory at Aegospotamoi from 404 BC with a new victory inscription written by Ion of Samos.20

  As the power vacuum left by the collapse of Sparta was filled with city-states like Thebes and Athens fighting for ascendancy in the years after 371 BC, Delphi, still in a state of partial collapse following the earthquake, continued both to play host to that competition and to provide opportunities for a wide number of city-states to realign and recharacterize their histories to fit with the swiftly changing power balance.21 Several dedicators returned to the sanctuary in the following decades to update their previous monuments to military victory by reinscribing their dedicatory epigrams, sometimes to emphasize their religious rather than political nature, and sometimes to make those victories more visible and emphatic.22 Several cities also returned to make their close relationship with Delphi cl
earer: the Siphnians returned to their treasury built in the sixth century BC to inscribe the fact that they had promanteia across the lintel of its doorway, and the Naxians returned to their sphinx (also a dedication of the sixth century BC), standing high on its column, to inscribe a record of their own promanteia (lower down on the column where it was highly visible to visitors).23

  Rewriting history was not the only role for Delphi in this period. In 368 BC, a(nother) peace conference was held at Delphi to try and settle the ongoing political and military disputes in Greece that would eventually culminate in another major clash in 362 at the battle of Mantinea. It was organized by Philiscus of Abydus, an undersatrap of Arioborzanes from Asia Minor, and its main participants were Athens, Thebes, and Sparta. That a Persian should be interested in cultivating peace with Greece is understandable only because the former had need of the (by now) battle-hardened Greek mercenaries for its own wars—men it could obtain only if there was peace in mainland Greece. The conference was a failure, according to some ancient historians, because, though it was held at Delphi, it did not consult the oracle (if indeed the oracle was functioning enough to be consulted).24

  The failure of the peace conference, and the failure to settle the ongoing political and military disputes in mainland Greece through the 360s, began to take its toll on Delphi. For sure, the commission for the rebuilding of the Apollo and Athena sanctuaries continued to meet every spring from 370 until 356, but progress was slow—unsurprising when it was a project likely involving a large number of Greek city-states at a time when they were at loggerheads with one another.25 At the same time, however, a surviving inscription from this period related to the lowering of interest rates at Delphi is perhaps testament to an economic slowdown, which would eventually cripple even the major cities like Athens in the 350s. It was more worrying still that the command structure at Delphi was becoming increasingly thwarted by the political and military struggle that was dividing Greece. On the one hand, most of the citizens of Delphi, led by a man called Astycrates, were keen to support the people of Phocis (and by extension Athens) against the increasing Theban supremacy. The Amphictyony, on the other hand, seem to have increasingly leaned toward supporting Thebes. 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. Later that year, the city of Delphi, no doubt under duress from the Amphictyony, granted the Thebans the right of promanteia at a level unlike any they had granted before: the Thebans had the right to consult the oracle not simply before everyone in their particular group, but before everyone in the entire world except the Delphians. The (enforced) political bias of Delphi (or rather the Amphictyony) could not have been clearer, although the Thebans still thought it worthwhile to inscribe their new rights at Delphi on the treasury they had built a decade earlier.26

  More internal Delphic strife erupted soon after. A wedding was planned at Delphi between Orsilaus, son of one of the Delphic archons (magistrates), and the daughter of a man called Crates. In preparation for the wedding, during a ritual libation pouring, the vessel cracked. Seeing it as a bad omen, Orsilaus refused to go through with the ceremony. In revenge for the spurning of his daughter, Crates orchestrated for Orsilaus and his brother to be accused of stealing sacred objects from the sanctuary (the same trick the Delphians had used on Aesop a couple of centuries before). Found guilty, the brothers were thrown off the Hyampia cliff to their deaths. Crates, it appears, was still not satisfied and, going insane, murdered a number of Orsilaus’s family members and friends in the sanctuary of Athena at Delphi. This story of revenge for a spurned marriage may well have had a political undertone: Orsilaus’s family was said to have been pro-Theban, and that of Crates pro-Phocis. As a result of the conflict, Crates’ family was heavily fined and the proceeds supposedly dedicated to the goddess whose sanctuary had been defiled by the murder: Athena. Scholars have argued that the money in fact went toward paying for a new structure in the Athena sanctuary: a beautifully constructed and sculpturally adorned tholos, whose exact function is still hotly debated, although the surviving remnants ironically, given how little we know about the use of the building, make up one of the most well-known images of Delphi in today’s tourist literature (see plate 3).27

  The changing power balance and resulting tension, both at Delphi, and in the wider Greek world, soon erupted into renewed conflict, but this time over Delphi itself. The Phocians, no longer supported by a now weak Sparta, were targeted by the Thebans at a meeting of the (pro-Theban) Amphictyonic council. They accused the Phocians of sacrilege and ensured that the Amphictyony imposed on the Phocians a heavy fine. The Phocians were between Scylla and Charybidis: paying meant financial penury and submission to Theban supremacy; not paying put them at risk of becoming the target of an Amphictyonic sacred war. 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

  In summer 356, under Phocian occupation, the exiled Delphian Astycrates was welcomed back to the city, and the pro-Thebans elements were driven out. This was, for now, a conflict between Phocis and Thebes: the Phocians even began to pay the fine originally imposed on them by the Amphictyony. Indeed they did everything they could to demonstrate their ritual respect for the sanctuary: their general Philomelus promised he would respect the sanctuary’s treasures and even managed to turn the chance remark of the Pythia (along the lines of “do as you please”) into an oracular response to support his occupation.29 But a year later, in 355 BC, the Amphictyony were forced into action to protect the sanctuary they were supposed to be running: sacred war was declared on Phocis for their occupation of the sanctuary. It was not, however, a united front. Several Amphictyonic members chose to remain neutral. Athens, though often represented on the Amphictyonic council, in reality supported her old ally Phocis, and, in a complete volte-face from the time Phocis had occupied the sanctuary a century before, Sparta now also supported Phocis (because Sparta was now anti-Thebes, having suffered defeat at their hands at Leuctra in 371).

  It must have been an odd experience to visit Delphi in the 350s BC. On the one hand, the sanctuary was still a building site, its oracle functioning in some kind of temporary setup. On the other hand, the sanctuary was militarily occupied by the Phocians. They had destroyed the stele in the sanctuary on which the original Amphictyonic charge of impiety against them had been inscribed. 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

  But the Phocian bravado disguised despair. The Phocian general Philomelus threw himself off a cliff in 354 BC, and his brother Onomarchus took over and was later replaced after being killed in battle (the Phocians proceeded to dedicate statues of Philomelus and Onomarchus in the Apollo sanctuary in their honor). The Phocian force faced opposition from within Delphi as well: Onomarchus was forced to expel seven families from the city and confiscate their property to keep control. As the conflict continued, the Phocians were even forced to go back on their promise not to mistreat the sanctuary’s many sacred dedications. Money was needed to pay for the occupation, and the only source available was the money at Delphi gathered for the temple rebuilding and from oracular consultation, and, when this ran out, they started melting down Delphi’s precious metal offerings. 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. In total, Diodorus Siculus tells us that ten thousand talents’–worth of silver were melted down.31