Delphi Page 27
—J. Spon, 1678 Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant
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THE JOURNEY CONTINUES
It is at first sight surprising that we find a Christian writer, Claudian, during the time of the Christian Emperor Honorious in the early fifth century AD, talking with enthusiasm about Delphi and its pagan mythology, a religious sanctuary officially shut down with the outlawing of paganism. As Greece was once again menaced by northern invaders, Claudian imagines that the god Apollo must have rejoiced after his victory in the third century BC over these barbarians, a victory that assured “no barbarian [would drink] with defiled mouth the Castalian waters and the streams which have fore-knowledge of fate.” What Claudian’s dream highlights is not only the difficult times in which Greece found itself during the early fifth century AD (no Apollo to come to the rescue this time), but also that Delphi’s pagan days, like those of many other pagan sanctuaries, may not have been so abruptly cut short (as we may have initially supposed) at the time of Theodosius’s official outlawing of paganism in AD 391. Instead we see a much slower, more muddled, transition from paganism to Christianity.1
During this slow evolution over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries AD, what was Delphi like (see plate 1)? Houses, ceramic workshops, ovens, and at least two cisterns seem to have been built into and over the athletic compound. At the Athena sanctuary, for centuries having been treated as something of a readily available quarry, there was no letup in the reuse of the blocks from its temples and structures. The areas to the west and east of the Apollo sanctuary seem to incorporate expanding arenas of habitation (with the eastern side seemingly slight poorer than the western side). Immediately around the Apollo sanctuary perimeter wall, in the period up to the middle sixth century AD, a number of fairly wealthy houses and baths have been identified. Some of these had their origins in previous periods; some were new and employed reused material from monumental dedications in the Apollo sanctuary, and some were simply monumental dedications turned into houses (like the west stoa).2
Within the Apollo sanctuary itself, much of the northern half (including the Cnidian lesche) seems to have been slowly occupied by houses (see plate 2). The Chian altar in front of the temple was dismantled. Most of the still-standing treasuries around the sanctuary were turned into utilitarian buildings of one sort or another, and baths were established in the niche of Craterus to the northwest of the temple of Apollo. Over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries AD, the sanctuary of Apollo was absorbed into a seemingly prosperous urban settlement, with the Roman agora continuing to act as a busy commercial center (it was the only area not to be invaded by private buildings). And it is as part of this slow transition that Delphi offers us, once again, an important irony. 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.3 In the over one thousand years of Delphi’s history as a sanctuary, there was no single pathway that led to the temple, but instead a myriad of entrances and paths at different terraced levels. The final phase of Delphi’s ancient life has left an indelible impression on the way we see and move through the sanctuary today.
What place for the worship of Christ within this changing community, and what happened to the temple of Apollo itself? Scholarship in the early twentieth century emphasized the sheer variety of Christian-era architectural fragments found at Delphi, most of which came from the fifth century AD and were thought to have been part of an adaption of an already existing building. At the same time, these fragments demonstrate the continued use of well-known pagan-era motifs like the acanthus. As a result, an argument was made that the Delphians were once again doing what they did best: actively trying to attract (now Christian) pilgrims to the city as a place of now Christian worship by quickly building (or rather altering current buildings in order to create) an ornate Christian basilica.4
More recent investigation has emphasized, in conjunction with the picture outlined above for Greece’s slower movement toward a wholly Christian outlook, a more gradual and less opportunistic development of Christian worship at Delphi, beginning slowly in the town that had always surrounded the temple complex, and growing organically over time to engulf the sanctuary and temple of Apollo at its heart. We know of at least three Christian basilicas that were eventually constructed at Delphi, but none can be dated to before AD 450.5 Indeed, it seems to have been in the second half of the fifth century AD that Christian worship really took root at Delphi (see plate 1). The French archaeologist Vincent Déroche, in his study of Christian-era structures, records three basilicas at Delphi. First, a basilica “of the new village” west of the sanctuary (beyond the west necropolis of the ancient town), built mostly from recycled material circa AD 475–500, and with a well-preserved mosaic floor. Second, a newly built basilica in the gymnasium to the east of the Apollo sanctuary (later covered by the Church of the Virgin built in 1743); and third, another newly built basilica constructed inside the sanctuary itself.6 But this basilica did not occupy the temple of Apollo. Instead it was most probably constructed just to the north of the temple, on the terrace between the northern terracing wall of the temple terrace and the area of the theater (see plate 2). Built in a rich and cosmopolitan style, it appears to have been the bishop’s official basilica, following Delphi’s establishment as an episcopate, and it remained the site of a Christian church right through until its excavation in the late nineteenth century. In addition to these three certain basilicas, there may have been a fourth, dating to perhaps the end of the sixth century AD. Pieces of mosaic have been found on the roadside approaching Delphi (above the gymnasium area—see plate 1). This mosaic was found beneath a later chapel dedicated to Saint George, which was itself only removed as part of the excavations in the late nineteenth century. As such, scholars have argued that the mosaic may have belonged to a pre–Saint George chapel basilica.7
Delphi, then, was a curious mix. On the one hand, it had, by the beginning of the sixth century AD, a significant Christian community centered around three (possibly four) basilicas, compared to ancient sanctuaries like Olympia that had only one. But this community did not actively destroy the pagan sanctuary or, importantly, the temple of Apollo.8 Instead, we have to imagine a community in which the abandoned temple, still a massive and imposing structure, stood almost parallel to the new, itself rich and ornate, basilica immediately to its north, at the center of a developing urban (and increasingly Christian) community that slowly expanded to take over the rest of the Apollo sanctuary. And at the same time, while there is no sense that the inhabitants of Delphi tried to preserve any parts of the pagan sanctuary (and thus, it seems, had no interest in living off the rewards of Delphi’s long-term reputation as a place of valued history and memory), there is no evidence for any kind of organized or willful destruction of it either.9 Indeed, what is fascinating about these changes at Delphi is the way in which Christians seem to have synthesized and incorporated pagan traditions. A lamp, for example, found in the eastern baths at Delphi (those renovated at the beginning of the fourth century AD), bears an image of Christ with a serpent at his feet, merging Delphi’s snakey mythology with the worship of Christ. Moreover, the fourth basilica dating to the end sixth century AD, discovered above the gymnasium, may have been dedicated at this stage (and definitely was later in its history) to Saint George, a saint whose fight with the dragon overlaps directly with pagan Apolline and Delphic mythology.10
Apart from the possible construction of a Saint George basilica toward the end of the century, the second half of the sixth century AD likely bore witness to a downturn in the degree of opulence apparent in the structures and archite
cture of the fifth and early sixth century. Houses were abandoned, doors shut up, and cisterns no longer used. At the same time, the area inhabited by the citizens of Delphi significantly contracted. The countryside was abandoned and people huddled together in among poorly built houses and workshops in the central area of the old sanctuary and city. This downturn and contraction may have been the result of the plague of Justinian, but it may also have been the result of a fresh wave of uncertainty in relation to increasing territorial invasion.11 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. At Delphi a hastily constructed defensive wall from this era cuts across the gymnasium, abandoning the remains of the Athena sanctuary and city around it—a final attempt to protect the core of the city (see plate 1). 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 AD. In that time, Delphi had simply faded away. The remnants of its once proud buildings gradually crumbling; its glistening marble and local limestone either buried under, or incorporated into, a new, impoverished and ramshackle settlement known not as Delphi but as Castri; its inhabitants seemingly unaware of the remains over which they built and that, in some cases, still stood visible above the earth.14 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
What brought Cyriac here in AD 1436? His interest in the physical remains of the ancient world reflected the growth of the Humanist movement and the First Renaissance in Italy from the early fourteenth century and led by scholars such as Petrarch. Up to this point, western European interest in Greece, let alone Delphi, had been confined to the study of its surviving literary texts. The idea of actually visiting—of seeking the physical remains of classical antiquity—was distinctly unattractive. Since the church schism of AD 1054, Greece, as part of the Eastern Orthodox Church, had been viewed with suspicion: a place difficult to travel to, unsafe to travel in, and with little assured reward.16
Yet by Cyriac’s time, there was increased agreement among the Humanists that the rediscovery of classical antiquity was an important step in the process of applying its lessons to the contemporary world. In the early fifteenth century, the Florentine monk Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Description of Crete (1414) and Books of the Islands of the Archipelago (1422) were best sellers. Cyriac took the search one step further with the idea that “monuments and inscriptions are more faithful witnesses of classical antiquity than are the texts of ancient writers.” His task, as one companion put it, was “to restore antiquity, or redeem it from extinction.”17
Cyriac traveled throughout the Mediterranean between 1435 and 1453. He recorded in great detail what he saw, but his notebooks were all but lost in a library fire in Pesaro in 1514. The scant remains tell of his journey to Delphi in March 1436, when he saw the stadium and its theater (which would later disappear from view entirely as generations of rock fall, earth, and habitation covered it); a round building he thought was the temple of Apollo (in fact the Argive semicircle in the southeastern corner of the Apollo sanctuary—see plate 2, fig. 6.2); several tombs and statues still intact, as well as a large selection of inscriptions.18
What would also have been clear to Cyriac as he traveled around Greece and elsewhere during those years—as was becoming increasingly clear also to the rest of Europe—was the advancing power of the Ottomans. In 1453, just seventeen years after Cyriac’s visit to Delphi, the sultan launched his final assault on Constantinople, closing the book on the Byzantine world and rendering Greece part of his dominions. It is a bizarre note in the story of the first person seeking to save the remains of the ancient world from extinction that our last glimpse of Cyriac, in May 1453, finds him standing at the sultan’s side (and reading to the sultan relevant sections from the great ancient writers) as the sultan prepares to take Constantinople.19
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. In the meantime, despite the difficulty of obtaining access to, and traveling in, the region, the great interest in classical antiquity had continued to grow, particularly in the French and English courts. By the late seventeenth century, the idea that there was much to see, that it was important to see it and if possible own it as well was established. The acquiring of such artifacts was particularly valuable as an instrument of international power politics between royal families and aristocrats. It was in this atmosphere that two famous travelers reached Castri a year after Vernon, on 30 January 1676: the French doctor Jacob Spon and the English naturalist George Wheler, both crucial to the history of the development of archaeology. Spon was the first to use the word “archaeology,” in the preface to his publication about the diverse monuments in Greece. At Delphi, they identified the gymnasium that lay beneath the monastery of the Panagyia (which would later keep a register of all visitors to the area), but otherwise “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.”20 Jacob Spon’s thoughts continued in the epigraph to this chapter. 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.
Soon after their visit, in 1687, the Venetian assault against the Turks in Athens led to the igniting of the gunpowder store in the Parthenon, whereupon large sections of the building were destroyed. Yet this did nothing to slow the passion for antiquities, both as possessions for the powerful, and as important windows into the past for those interested in history. In 1734 the Society of Dilettanti was formed in London for aristocrats who had visited Italy and who had, at least according to Horace Walpole, been drunk (preferably in Italy). The discovery of Herculaneum in 1738 and Pompeii in 1748 fanned the flames of interest. In France, there was a craze for Greek inscriptions, not only because they were considered the most useful type of evidence for illustrating history, but also (and perhaps more importantly) because they could be used as meaningful mottoes for medals struck to commemorate the exploits of Louis XIV (for which the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres had been established in 1701).21
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, and Posterity will have to reproach us.” Volume I of their detailed drawings of monuments in Greece was published in 1762, and it was as part of their work that they came to Delphi in 1751. During their stay en route from Thermopylae, they were bewitched by the romantic feel of the natural landscape, but also took time to investigate in among the buildings of the haphazard village of Castri. They found part of the enormous polygonal wall covered in inscriptions that supported the temple terrace (see plate 2). The stones of the wall were so large, they lamented, that they were unable to take them away.22
Some laughed at this newfound love of all things Greek, but many would have agreed with Gavin Hamilton, a dealer in Rome, who (with gre
at advertising aplomb) said in 1779, “Never forget that the most valuable acquisition a man of refined taste can make is a piece of Greek sculpture.” The “gusto Greco” was now in full maturity, fueled also by the crucial writings of the German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the second half of the eighteenth century on the beauty and importance of Greek sculpture. Although Winckelmann never actually set foot in Greece, more and more travelers did make the arduous journey to Athens, and a handful made the even more difficult journey to Castri nestled in the Parnassian mountains. 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). Richard Chandler, on an expedition sanctioned by the Society of the Dilettanti, bathed in the waters in July 1766 and, despite the summer weather, was overwhelmed by the coldness of the water to the extent that he shook so badly he was unable to walk without aid. Returning home, he wrapped himself up, drank large quantities of wine, and began to sweat profusely. Perhaps, he mused, this was what the ancients had taken for the oracular priestess’s possession by the god.23
But despite this kind of ancient amusement-park activity, what could Delphi really offer its visitors? Inscriptions were all the rage, and Delphi had many of them to offer. Late eighteenth-century visitors write with glee of finding more inscriptions than they had time to record. But the disappointment felt by Spon and Wheler at the meager remains of what had been, according to the ancient literary sources, one of the most extraordinary sites in the ancient world, continued to pervade visitors’ thoughts. As they arrived with their literary texts in hand—particularly Pausanias, who, as indicated above, had written the first tour guide of the sanctuary back in the second century AD—Delphi’s first modern tourists were continually disappointed in their inability to see the site itself. William Gell’s drawing of Castri from 1805 outlines the little that was on view (fig. 12.1). As the Swedish priest A. F. Sturtzenbecker put it following his visit in 1784: “Delphi has kept nothing of its former splendour. Everything is lost bar its name.”24