Greek Lands and Letters

If leisure is the nurse of sympathetic understanding, “three radiant courses of the sun” are none too many to give to Delphi. The inner meaning of this centre of Greece needs not only to be quarried out of history and literature, but also to be garnered from the abundant beauty of a landscape which created as well as framed a unique religious life.

At the chief oracular seat of the God of Prophecy antiquarian curiosity about its early legends and primitive cults makes way for the realization of Apollo, “the Far-Darter, ruling the glorious temple wherein all men find welcome.” A modern journey is a successor to the journeys and pilgrimages undertaken through many centuries by the men and peoples who sought from his omniscience foreknowledge and advice.

Even the protagonists of shadowy antiquity were brought thither by their hopes and fears. Heracles, the national hero of Greece, driven by Hera to madness and murder, asked at Delphi where he should make his home, and was sent by the oracle to begin his twelve labours. Agamemnon, anxious lord of the Greek armies, sought advice of the god. Io was started on her long wanderings over the earth and through literature because her father was commanded by Apollo’s ministers to drive her from her home and her country. Because of a Delphic response, the infant son of Laius of Thebes was exposed on Mount Cithæron. Œdipus, on the fatal day when he killed Laius, was on his way back from Delphi, whither he had gone to ask if he were son of the Corinthian king who had reared him and where he had received the ambiguous answer that he was fated to slay his father. It was when, as king of Thebes, he sent to “the Pythian house of Phœbus to learn by what deed or word he might deliver his pestilence-stricken city” that he unconsciously invoked his own doom. And it was again the Delphic oracle which closed the pitiful story by prophesying Œdipus’s final reconciliation with the eternal will.

But these ancient demigods and kings move in a world only half realized by us. Their dooms and their emotions have the remote nobility, the superb universality of the Attic drama through which chiefly they are portrayed. It is in the vivacious pages of the charmingly pious Herodotus that the desires of living men and women seem to surge, in failure or fruition, about the Delphic tripod. From the foreign kingdoms of Asia, from Greek colonies in Africa and Italy, from rock-bound island harbours, ships were constantly spreading sails at the impulse of national distress or personal ambition, to furl them in the port that lay below Delphi. From Lacedæmon, deep in the hollow of the southern hills, from Thrace’s widespread plains, swept by the northern tempests, from the wild mountains of Arcadia, from rich Corinth and bright Athens and every other city of Hellas, men made their way in chariots, on mules, and on foot, to the knees of Apollo. Mountains and rivers, rude valleys and hostile villages offered no obstacles, nor were the suppliants repelled by the “dark sayings, dim and hard to know,” which were often their only reward. Kings hurried off embassies at the first signs of rivalry. Adventurers stopped to question the god before carrying new colonies beyond the seas. Quarrelsome states and cities asked for advice in their fratricidal plots. Wealthy cities desired to know if they could always count on their revenues. Ghost-haunted towns asked the meaning of their spectres. Agricultural communities were eager to learn how to restore dying crops. Ambitious politicians sought encouragement in their pursuit of power. Sick men prayed for health, childless men for offspring. Indeed, to the irreverent the Pythian priestess must often have seemed to carry a load of oracles as jumbled as that of Aristophanes’s sausage seller who came staggering into the market-place at Athens with “responses” to sell,—

But Aristophanes himself was at heart as conservative a believer in religion as Herodotus had been. And to piety like theirs, existing from generation to generation, was due the position that Delphi held not only as a source of knowledge but as the conscience of Greece. Sometimes in public affairs this conscience seemed to recommend prudence rather than righteousness, as in the wretched advice distributed at the time of the Persian invasion. In private affairs, such as athletics or the use of trust money, the oracle was always on the side of honour.

It must be borne in mind that along with the widespread acceptance of the oracular responses went a rationalizing independence of judgment which sometimes overruled the religious instinct. Cases of obstinate self-seeking in spite of the plain injunction of the god betray the exercise of this judgment on a low plane. But, soiled though it sometimes was by ignoble use, the mental independence of the Athenians, at least, was a magnificent possession. It saved Hellas when Crete and Argos and all the lesser brood followed the prudent warnings from Delphi. It chose an uneven fight for national freedom in the very face of the accepted conscience of the whole Greek world. Only an understanding of the noblest aspects of the rôle played by the Delphic oracle in Greek history and life can throw into sufficiently high relief the splendid revolt of Athens, when Persia threatened her liberty, against an ecclesiastical authority which had become debased. The historian who is the best guide to a dutiful belief in Pythian Apollo tells the story with implicit sympathy: “Not even the terrifying oracles that came from Delphi and plunged them into fear persuaded them to abandon Hellas. They plucked up courage to await the invader of their land.”

Nor is there here any inconsistency. The faithful in all religions have refused to identify the sins and follies of the priests with the will of the gods. The Persians might intimidate or buy the ministers of Apollo. The Alcmæonidæ, exiled from Athens, might bribe them to do their selfish will. Cleomenes of Sparta might purchase his throne from them. But the pious had always the refuge created by Sophocles for Iocasta when she declared the oracle was false: “It came not from Phœbus but from his servants.” When the Persians had been defeated, Athens, on the flood tide of victory, freedom, and power, raised noble memorials of her struggle in the sacred precinct of the oracle which had advised her not to fight. When the modern traveller has brought himself to see that this was not done in grim humour but in unbewildered piety, he is ready to undertake his own journey to Delphi.

Of all the possible approaches none can be happier than a drive on a moonlight night up from the little port of Itea, the inglorious terminus of the eight hours’ sail from Piræus through the canal and along the Gulf of Corinth. The comfortable carriage road winds through the “moon-blanched” olive orchards and vineyards of the ancient Crisæan plain, mounting gradually toward the steep slopes of Parnassus and its attendant mountains, and twisting in long courses among shadowy hillsides which only hint at rude crags and deep ravines. Perhaps it was some such night as this that led the writer of the Homeric Hymn to Artemis to see the sister of Apollo, “slackening her fair-curved bow and going to the mighty hall of Phœbus in the Delphians’ rich deme and arraying there the Muses’ and the Graces’ lovely dance.” The exquisite grace of the landscape, half hidden, half revealed through the fragile veil of silver light, seems like a gentle preparation for the epiphany, expected on the morrow, of the god of the golden blade.

The carriage passes very early by Amphissa, the capital of modern Phocis as it was of ancient Locris, and an hour later halts, to rest the horses, at a dim corner of the village of Chryso, a name which preserves that of the Crisa of antiquity. All this drowsy territory has been the stage of one of the significant dramas of history. The modern demarch hospitably presses water from the village fountain upon modern wayfarers, but the Crisæans once used their strategic position as owners of the whole wide plain to plunder pilgrims on their way to the shrine. This evil monopoly gave way, early in the sixth century, to the powerful confederation of twelve Greek states, known as the Delphic Amphictyony, whose representatives met at Delphi twice a year and ruled the affairs of the sacred domain. During almost one hundred and fifty years, with unquestioned right, whatever internecine wars were in progress, delegates from Thessaly and Bœotia, from Athens and Sparta, from Phocis itself and from other lesser states could pass and repass through Crisa, while the fertile plain went untilled. Even after war invaded the protected territory the existence of the Council was not endangered. But the constitution of the delegates changed with the fortunes of battles. By the middle of the fourth century the Phocians were struck from the list and the Macedonians added. Philip had become the chief actor, seizing his opportunity when the men of Delphi, at the instigation of the Athenian delegate, Æschines, attacked the men of Amphissa because they were turning the consecrated wilderness of the plain into corn-fields and olive groves and filling up the empty places with prosperous houses and busy little potteries. A series of easy steps led to the overthrow of Greek freedom.

But under the compassionate moon the sentimentalist continues his way, in wilful oblivion of the catastrophe of the drama, to the point nearest ancient Delphi. This is the tiny village of Kastri, which less than twenty years ago was plying its life on the unconscious surface of earth spread over the ruins of the sacred site. At great expense of money and trouble it was picked up by the French excavators and deposited, safe and whole, a little farther to the west around the sharp corner of the mountain, where, in fear of slipping into the deep valley below, it curls close to Parnassus’s side. Here lodgings may be obtained either in a conventional hostelry or, preferably, in a low-eaved peasant house, where on cool nights a wood fire glows in a big stone fireplace and the light of candles is eked out by diminutive copper lamps which would have seemed primitive to Agamemnon.

The popular time for ancient pleasure-seekers to visit Delphi was in the middle of August, when games were held in honour of Apollo. At that season, if ever, the slopes and peaks of Parnassus were accessible, but the burning heat as the rocks reflected the sun’s rays, alternating with heavy thunderstorms as the wind rushed up from the valley, must have modified the comfort of visitors. In the spring the modern traveller will find an equable and pleasant climate. And also, prepared as he may be for the solemnity and the lonely grandeur of the scenery about Delphi, he will discover unanticipated qualities in the landscape which are illuminative of certain elements in the significance of the place. A walk along the highway that leads from Kastri to and through the ruined precinct reveals both the expected and the new. Toward the southwest lies the Crisæan plain filled with olive groves. Beyond its gray-green breadth gleams the Corinthian Gulf with the far-off mountains of Arcadia girding the horizon. Directly in the west the snow-capped mountains of Locris, the highest in Central Greece, fret the sky. Southeastward plunges the valley of Delphi, formed by Mount Parnassus on the north and by Mount Cirphis on the south, and watered by the river Plistus which in a long line of gleaming argent seeks its westerly home in the bay of Itea.

The valley of the Plistus lies in full sight after the Crisæan plain and the gulf beyond it have been blotted out by a turn in the road which leads sharply around a large, rocky ridge, the barrier between the new town and the old. This ridge formed the western wall that isolated Delphi in lonely remoteness between the bare steep rocks of Cirphis and the cliffs of massive Parnassus, which spreads its huge buttresses over the surrounding country. Rising two thousand feet above the level of the sea, these cliffs present a magnificent expanse of gray and red limestone, and still reflect the brilliant morning sun, true to their ancient name of the “Shining Rocks.” Where they bend around, in their long course, a deep gorge is formed from which the storied spring of Castalia still issues. Above the gorge, invisible when one stands under the cliffs but conspicuous from lower levels, rise twin peaks, seeking a proud supremacy.

Superb mountains, precipitous cliffs, deep ravines, lonely valley, all are here. But here too, softening, transfiguring, some unforeseen influence is at work. Over the mountains a friendly, familiar sunshine casts a gentle glamour. Olive trees fearlessly silver the long slopes that stretch from the shining rocks to the glistening river. In jocund profusion, tripping through the valley and climbing up the steep places, pink and white almond trees flower like blushing dryads. The Far-Darter has chosen this hour to lay aside his bow. No longer does he come,—

but he lifts the “golden lyre” that quencheth even the lightning spear, the bolt of Zeus’s immortal fire.

Or perhaps Apollo has abdicated for a time and it is Dionysus who is concealing the terror of the oracle beneath the sparkling audacity of spring. For the worship of this multiform god had a strong hold on Delphi, and the “beat of his unseen feet” as he was wont to lead his Mænads in furious dance among the uplands of Parnassus echoes through Greek poetry. According to one set of legends, Dionysus was the first to hold the oracle. According to another, Apollo regularly departed for three months each year, leaving the more fiery god of inspiration in charge of the sacred tripod. In any case the relation between the divine brothers seems to have been very amicable. An old vase-painting represents them as affectionately shaking hands under a palm tree.

The scene of the Dionysiac revels was the broad table-land which lies, more than three thousand feet above the level of the sea, between the Shining Rocks and the peaks of Parnassus. Here amid the wooded ravines and open meadows the flashing, flowing Dionysus, god of all ardent life, lord of the ichor of spring, held one of his many courts. It is significant of the unparalleled inclusiveness of Greek ideals that not only on “the topmost heights of Caucasus” and in the “vales of Lydia,” but also above Apollo’s temple where were inscribed in letters of gold the maxims of the seven sages, “Know thyself” and “Nothing too much,” the god of mad impulse and unchartered freedom should have been seen to leap and dance, and give “to his female followers the note for the Bacchic tune.” Every two years, “when spring flashed out for the first time” and sorrow might be swallowed up in joy, a torch festival was held in his honour by women of the surrounding country. Even from Attica women made their way to join in the celebration, travelling over the same “Sacred Way” by which the Athenians periodically sent their offerings to Delphi, and which Apollo had taken on his civilizing march through the wild places of men, escorted with great reverence by the road-making people of Athens. The passionate desire for the mad nocturnal revels which awaited the Bacchantes at the end of their long journey was attributed by Euripides, who must often have seen the procession starting out from Athens, to Tyrian women on their way to the service of Phœbus at Delphi. Detained in Thebes by the civil war of Œdipus’s sons, they tease their imaginations with visions of the rock that flasheth a splendour of light and the cloven tongue of the torches’ flame, of the vine that each morning offers up its giant cluster to brim the cup of the mystic ritual, of the snow-smitten, lonely ridges where, with souls unafraid, they might be wreathing the happy dance.^[26]

But mortal women were not the only companions of Dionysus. The exuberant play of nature, the change from death to life as winter made way for spring, not only goaded human hearts with a divine torture, but peopled the hills with lithe nymphs of untouched soul, rollicking with Pan and even with the greater god whose joy, to spirits touched to finer issues, was more terrible than sweet. Pan and the nymphs had their special dwelling-place in the Corycian Cave, which Pausanias mentions as one of the four most famous caverns of the whole world, “among a total number past finding out.” It was certainly the most remarkable one in Greece, a country abounding in “caves that open upon the beach or in the deep sea,” and in mountain caverns due to the frequent honeycombing by earthquake and subterranean currents. Very large and containing two chambers, it lies about seven miles northeast of Delphi, near the top of one of the low hills which form the northern boundary of the Parnassian uplands. According to the descriptions of travellers, the greater chamber has slender stalactites hanging from the roof at both ends, and at the inner end stalagmites rise from the ground to meet them. The other chamber, like a remote shrine, must be reached through a narrow passage and lies in almost total darkness. At the mouth of the cave an inscription was found containing a dedication to Pan and the nymphs. Certainly a fit abode for divine embodiments of soulless nature was this vaulted, echoing grotto, whose cavernous mouth opens upon the widespread beauty of an untamed world. Æschylus may have seen the “Corycian Rock” or he may have trusted to the eyes of others in describing its hollow loneliness, “the home of birds, and the resort of deities.”

If it is difficult to disentangle the myths which connect several gods with one place, it is still more difficult to understand the legends which hint at the infinite complexity of each god in any one of his own several spheres. In studying the Delphic Apollo, the clear outlines of the great god as he governed the Greek world will best be preserved by noticing those stories which have been preferred by the poets. It was natural that Æschylus should penetrate beyond any individualized form of divine activity to primeval forces, following the legend which made Apollo a late heir to the first owners of the oracle, to Earth herself and to her daughter, holy Law. It was equally characteristic that Euripides, with his eye for vivid detail, should have been attracted by the story which begins with Leto’s golden-haired son coming from the fruitful meadows of his birthplace, Delos, to the Dionysus-haunted summit of Parnassus. Under its shadow, amid the thick-leaved laurel, lay as guardian of the holy place a dragon with gleaming talons. This horrid monster the young god slew, thereafter taking his seat upon the golden tripod. Earth, appearing only as the mother of the dragon, sought to wrest from him the right of prophecy. But, swift of foot, he fled to Olympus and the throne of Zeus, and the king of the gods laughed and shook his awful hair and gave to his youthful son in perpetuity the sovereignty over the Delphic abode.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which contains the oldest account of the killing of the dragon, also relates that the god chose Cretans to be his first ministers. Whatever the historical basis of this story may be, its telling gives the riotous Ionian poet a chance to transform Phœbus Apollo into a dolphin deflecting from its course a swift ship sent out from Cretan Cnossus to Pylos on the border of the Ionian Sea. The dolphin caused it to traverse strange waters, beyond Peloponnesus and the ford of Alpheus, past the steep ridge of Ithaca and wooded Zacynthus, into the harbour of Crisa. Here the dolphin disappeared and the god leaped from the ship in the guise of a star at high noon, while sparks of frequent fire flew from him and flash of splendour reached the sky. On shore he appeared as a man, lusty and strong, and persuaded the Cretans to dance in his train and to take charge of the temple. By suggesting that they might use for themselves the flocks brought for sacrifice, he overcame their fear that they would fare but meagrely in a country neither vine-bearing nor rich in meadows.

The story of the hymn is too confused to be worthy of Apollo. He was no music-hall performer, making lightning transformations, but lord, in simplicity and dignity, of music and all harmonies, elder brother and guide in the paths of conduct. So at least he reveals himself on a spring morning beneath the Shining Rocks lit by his sunlight from the south.

But homelier memories also come to life. It may have been in the “fragrant dawn” of a day like this that the boy Odysseus, while he was on a visit to his grandfather, went hunting with his uncles in the windy hollows of wood-clad Parnassus and killed a great boar. From its white tusks he had received a wound which was to leave an indelible scar and years later betray his identity to his aged nurse. Certainly it must have been on such a morning that another boy, Ion the acolyte, was performing his early tasks for the temple when visitors from Athens arrived to question him about the sights. They were women who had accompanied the queen Creusa when she and her husband, like many others, came to Delphi in their childlessnesschildlessness. In her youth, before her marriage to Xuthus, she had been loved by Apollo and had borne him a son in his cave below the Athenian Acropolis. The baby had been abandoned by her, but a servant had carried it to Delphi and left it as a foundling with the priestess. Unknown to Creusa, he had grown into the boyish minister of his divine father. The plot of the Euripidean drama which uses the story is sensational, including attempted murders and many complications before mother and child recognize and accept each other. But the boy Ion is one of the happiest creations of a poet whom Aristophanes accused of skepticism. His unstained youth consecrates his daily work of sweeping the temple floor, adorning the doorway with fresh wreaths and laurel boughs and driving away the wild pigeons. Reared by a holy woman in the remote quiet of the sanctuary, he has become a vessel, crystal clear, to hold the purest essence of religious feeling. His morning hymn reflects the unspoiled reverence with which, among the greedy hordes, many must have turned to Delphi:—

This unstudied rapture is interrupted by the worldly women, exclaiming over the wonderful sculptured metopes of the temple. Euripides, with the usual license of the Greek dramatists, put before his legendary characters the works of art that he himself might have seen in the latter part of the fifth century before Christ, when a rich civic and artistic life was occupying the stage of the vast theatre into which, as Strabo observed, Nature had moulded the site of Delphi. The semicircular valley opens only on the east, and from it terraces, like tiers of seats, rise from the Plistus to Parnassus. The ancient city of Delphi lay in two portions along the base of the Shining Rocks. The modern highroad approximately marks the division between the upper terraces, which held the sacred precinct, and the lower, where were the houses and business buildings of the permanent inhabitants, and also, east of Castalia, a few temples and other public structures. It is the upper terraces, west of Castalia, which enchain our attention, although all that is left even here, save for the small reërected Treasury of the Athenians, made of Parian marble, are remnants of walls, low-lying foundations, traces of pavement, broken bases, and pieces of graven stone. But they represent sacred ways and buildings, monuments and statues which made glorious one of the richest centres of Greece, from long before the time of Euripides to the destructive epoch of Nero and beyond. Delphi became the pride of the Macedonians as it had been of the Athenians and the Spartans, and under their sovereignty the Delphic Amphictyony continued and the oracle was the centre of the new widespread Hellenic world. The Gauls attacked Delphi in the third century B. C. as vainly as the Persians had attacked it in the fifth century. Even the ruthlessness of Rome brought no immediate destruction. Æmilius Paulus, the final conqueror of Macedon, set up near Apollo’s temple, in the most conspicuous place of the entire precinct, a monument to his victory. Even Nero seems to have wished to repair the temple, but the story that he afterwards tore it down because of an oracular response which reflected upon his moral character is at least ben trovato. He divided the Crisæan plain among his soldiers and carried off an enormous number of statues from Delphi. But a still greater number was left, and the glory of the god’s dwelling place had not vanished. Under Hadrian, the imperial apostle of culture, new treasures were added, and a little later Pausanias saw more than he could describe. It was not until two more centuries had passed that the oracle itself with one last cry became dumb forever. To the ambassador of Julian the Apostate, who was seeking advice in his wars with the Persians, the message was given:—

Theodosius put a formal end to the Delphic cult as well as to the Olympic games.

From Apollo’s slaying of the earth-born dragon to the Byzantine emperor’s destruction of the oracle is a long stretch of centuries. Within them fell the brilliant epochs which filled Delphi with the opulence of all the arts. As Greek and barbarian brought hither their well-wrought schemes and passionate desires, so they brought also, in offerings to the god, their best skill in architecture and sculpture and painting, their rarest workmanship in marble and bronze and gold and silver. Ghostly proofs of the existence of some of these offerings the French excavators have within twenty years evoked from the reluctant soil. Gallic precision and insight have even made of ruined walls and broken stones an orderly array easily perceived by the traveller who is patient enough to follow his guidebook. The Museum supplements the ground foundations by several important sculptural details.

There were many localities and objects made holy by legendary associations, like the tomb of Neoptolemus, Achilles’s red-haired son, whose murder is described by Euripides and whose quadrennial worship brought crowds of Thessalians to Delphi; or like the marble Omphalos, or navel stone, flanked, in Pindar’s day, by golden eagles which marked the meeting place of the winged explorers sent east and west by Zeus in search of the exact centre of the earth. But of paramount importance in the religious life of Delphi was the Temple of Apollo, built above the deep cleft in the ground that held the sacred spring of prophecy. The Priestess sat upon a tripod in the adyton or holy of holies, directly over the fissure from which a natural vapour issued, and her ravings were transmitted by the priests in ambiguous hexameters. The site of the first primitive temple was preserved, but upon it rose successive structures. The temple that was seen by Herodotus and Thucydides, by Pindar, by Æschylus and Euripides was built in the latter half of the sixth century to replace an older one destroyed by fire. In the fourth century an earthquake necessitated still another, and it is to this one that the existing foundations are attributed, although fragments of the other are not wanting. Owing to the shifting history of the fourth century, this temple was long in building and was not yet completed when Demosthenes thundered out his scorn that the barbarian of Macedon had assumed the “honours of the temple,” to which even all the Greeks could not pretend. The work had been undertaken by an international commission, and inscriptional records of the contributions are richly suggestive of the private life of the times. Many individuals and some states promised first fruits. An actor and a physician of Athens sent a tithe of their earnings. Among individuals the Peloponnesians were the most pious, although contributions straggled in from Attica, Bœotia, Northern Greece, the islands, Africa, and Sicily. Collectors went from house to house, and by far the larger number of contributors gave no more than a drachma. Doubtless in many cases this modesty was due to poverty rather than to indifference, and the religious sentiment prompting the gifts must often have been comparable to that which reared the arches and illuminated the windows of the Cathedral of Chartres. For the sake of such contributors one could wish that after the Roman restorations the Delphic temple had not been allowed to crumble under earthquakes, corroding rains, and the tread of the unnumbered years. Of adyton and oracular chasm the excavators have found no smallest trace, and not even one column rises from the low foundations to give evidence of things unseen. But, at least, unlike the Parthenon and many another great shrine, it was never converted into a church of an alien faith.

Secular buildings followed in the wake of the religious importance of Delphi. The Amphictyonic Council had a hall for its meetings to the west of the sacred precinct, on or near the site now occupied by the little chapel of St. Elias. Here, in sight of the Crisæan plain, the incendiary speech of Æschines had its full effect. Within the precinct, safe from attack in times of war, public treasuries were erected by Asiatic kings and Greek tyrants, by Greek states in Asia Minor and colonies in Italy, and by sovereign cities like Athens and Thebes.

The erection of a treasury often followed upon some public success, but other monuments and statues also rose at the feet of Apollo to mark the tidal flow of national fortunes. A study of all such memorials, known to have existed at Delphi, would be equivalent to a detailed study of Greek history. The repulse of the Persians from the mainland and of the Carthaginians from Sicily, and the stemming of the later invasions of Gallic barbarians required thank-offerings to the Delphic god. The rise of Athens, the struggle of Ionian and Dorian, the victory of Sparta, the late hegemony of Thebes are here commemorated; and with these the lesser quarrels of Sparta with Argos and Arcadia and of Athens with Megara, and the petty warfare of Phocians and Thessalians.

A myriad of statues and monuments commemorated personal interests or feeling. From a haul of tunny fish to the discovery of stolen goods, no event was too prosaic to inspire an offering from island or village. And, throughout Greece, from Macedonia to Crete, towns delighted to express their reverence by gifts of marble and bronze. Midas from Asia Minor sent a chair of state and Crœsus sent a golden lion and silver bowls. Arcesilas of Cyrene in northern Africa, in the fifth century, celebrated a Pythian victory by the gift of a sculptured chariot and charioteer. The statue still remains, the most famous single object discovered at Delphi. Dominating one room in the Museum, he seems in his bronze dignity as untroubled by the chilling silence of to-day as was his living prototype, in the hippodrome in the plain below, by the noise and tumult of the day of victory. The description by Sophocles of the Delphic chariot race in which Orestes was supposed to be killed reproduces the excitement against which many a charioteer must have had to steady his nerves.^[27]

Of statues of mortals dedicated by themselves or by their admirers there was no end. Among these persons were the great rhetorician Gorgias, to whose teaching Greek prose owed its first artistic development, and Phryne, the famous courtesan of Thespiæ. With her statue, seen by men of Demosthenes’s age between the figures of the Spartan king Archidamus and Philip of Macedon, we may surrender the effort to distinguish the links in the mighty chains which, as in Plato’s vision, bound the Greek earth to a heavenly throne.

It is less difficult to understand the Greek harmony between the graver and brighter needs of the common life which added to the temples and treasuries of Delphi buildings for recreation and enjoyment. A club-house was erected by the rich Cnidians, where conversation, the favourite amusement of all Greeks, could be carried on. Centuries later Plutarch made it the scene of his dialogue on the decay of oracles. If the age of the Antonines showed a loss of faith, art at least held its own, and the talkers must have added to the pleasure of skeptical speculation a delight in the decorations which dated from the fifth century before Christ. They consisted of pictures by Polygnotus of the capture of Troy and Odysseus’s journey to hell. Now only bits of stucco painted blue betray their presence, and fragmentary stones alone are left of the splendid building. Little more is left of the beautiful colonnades which furnished protection from sun and rain to the frequent crowds. In fairly good preservation still is the Theatre, where, as in all the religious centres of Greece, dramatic representations added literature to the pageant of artistic gifts. Equally inevitable was a Gymnasium; but most important of all was the Stadium, in which the quadrennial games were held.

This Stadium lay far beyond the sacred precinct to the west, and occupied a lofty and magnificent situation. In what Pausanias calls “the highest part of the city” the slopes of Parnassus break sufficiently to leave a narrow shelf of flat ground. Every foot of this was used for the erection of the structure, the northern side being bounded by the precipices of the great mountain, the southern side being supported by a wall of polygonal masonry. Part of this wall is still left, and in the interior there are tiers of seats to tempt the dreamer. The marble with which Herodes Atticus is said to have faced them in the second century after Christ is now all gone. But one may yet sit on the original stone and see not only the valley of the Plistus far below, but westward a bright strip of the Corinthian Gulf. Here once gathered eager thousands to watch the foot races and the wrestling matches, and to hear the contesting flutes and the rival lyres. Originally, before the Crisæan war, the Pythian festival had occurred only once in eight years and had consisted of a contest in singing, to the accompaniment of the lyre, a hymn to Apollo. The early musical festival found its aftermath in the combination of musical with athletic contests in the more frequent “Games” instituted by the Amphictyons after they had taken Delphi under their common charge. This was a part of that general reorganization in the sixth century by which the Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean, and especially the Olympic games were thrown into high relief among the multitudinous festivals of Greece. At Delphi a hymn in honour of the god of the golden lyre continued to be an important part of the proceedings. Among the most conspicuous discoveries of the French are three fragments of such hymns, engraved on stone, two of them accompanied by musical notation. The hymns are late ones, of no especial merit, but their scores have furnished a key to that art which played so large a part in Greek education, literature, and philosophy, and which made the Pythian festival a reminder of the lord of music.

Of the hymns in honour of mortals victorious in the games we still have some of the greatest representatives in the Pythian odes of Bacchylides and Pindar. Pindar may well boast that his song of triumph was a splendour in the Pythian crown of Hiero of Syracuse; that he would come to him over the deep sea, a light shining farther than any heavenly star. For only through a victory at some one of the four great festivals of Greece was even a tyrant sure of any Panhellenic honour. The centrifugal forces of Greek life found an antidote in these expressions of common ideals. It has, indeed, been often said that the only other antidote lay in the political organization of Delphi itself. But this political unity was limited, and, if Delphi focused Greek interests in any way that even Olympia could not, the reason must be sought in facts that lay beneath a particular form of government. In the lofty Stadium men from cities whose disparate and jealous memorials lay below united in self-forgetful applause of all the victors.

Here the traveller may pause to grasp, amid the chaos of swift impressions, a picture of the Delphic life. In it religion and politics, art and amusement coalesced into a stream of almost illimitable influence. From month to month without cessation pilgrims sought the oracle. The store of information about public and private matters thus brought to the oracular seat gave to the priests a knowledge of political conditions which they could easily transmute into an apparently supernatural wisdom and a unique power in public life. Hand in hand with this political power went an ethical sovereignty due to the essential religiousness of the Greeks. And lastly, the more continuous influx of visitors, over against an infrequent and congested festival, may easily have rendered the artistic influence of Delphi more insistent than that of Olympia. Xerxes was better acquainted with what was worthy of note at Delphi than even with what he had left in his own house, for many of those about him were continually describing the treasures. Often the seed of such descriptions, or of actual sight, must have fallen on richer soil than an Oriental despot’s imagination. Who knows what village smithy in Thessaly or Arcadia was stimulated to a finer output by the iron stand made by Glaucus of Chios to hold the big silver bowl sent to Delphi by Crœsus’s father? Indeed, the wonderful animals and plants wrought in relief for the first time upon welded iron may have inspired many a designer in Athens and Corinth. And many a young sculptor must have taken home from his Pythian pilgrimage a knowledge of Phidias and Praxiteles and Lysippus.

Thus was the world forever pouring itself into Delphi and again, like a retreating wave, bearing something of Delphi away with it, something larger and richer even than the golden honours that were symbolized by the crown of laurel so eagerly borne home by the victors in the games. And yet there was a further significance in the fragile wreath itself, however infrequently realized by athletes and spectators, which pointed beyond the artistic and moral power of the Pythian God. The wreath was made of leaves brought from, the Vale of Tempe, where Apollo had plucked his own crown of victory, when, as lord of light, he had vanquished the powers of darkness and had been purified from the evil which the struggle had entailed. Laurel (or bay) trees grew in the valley of Delphi itself, lingering on until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the last one is said to have drooped and died in the little garden of the church of St. Nicholas which, before Kastri was removed, stood in front of the spring of Cassotis. This spring, not yet exhausted, was the feeder of the oracular chasm and watered the grove of Apollo, “freshening with an ever-living stream the undying gardens” from which Ion gathered his laurel broom. Not only did the acolytes use laurel in their simple tasks, but the Priestess fumigated herself with burning boughs before she sat upon the tripod, and chewed laurel leaves before she delivered her prophecies. But the meaning of Apollo’s crowning, from which the sacred uses of the laurel sprang, was beyond the reach of Ion, untroubled “worshipper within the Temple’s inner shrine.” Nor to moderns is the revelation likely to come until the Shining Rocks grow pale and night obliterates the lively daylight of the spring. Into the dark void left by the withdrawal of Apollo swings the moon, no longer compassionate but majestic. Suddenly upon the receptive imagination descends the Delphic awe. The almond trees slip into shadowy insignificance. The hills stand out dark and brooding, while their ravines deepen unfathomably. And through the fearful silence sounds the prophetic voice of an unseen god vaster than the consciousness of the race which created him. The quality of sublimity and awfulness now apparent in the landscape explains the influence of that ideal of omnipotent righteousness which, among a singularly intellectual people, gradually formed for itself a living centre. For an understanding of such a god at Delphi one must turn to Æschylus. To him Apollo was a god “who knew not how to do unrighteousness,” in whose hands were loosed the tangled skeins of human sin. Sophocles, in his dramas of Œdipus’s life, represented the folly and wrong-doing of a noble nature forgiven by the Pythian god after the willing endurance of a just punishment. But Æschylus, in the “Eumenides,” deals with a much subtler aspect of divine law. That its opening scene is laid at Delphi is appropriate to the overshadowing importance of its religious meaning. Orestes had been told by the oracle to kill his mother, as a divinely ordained punishment for her murder of her husband. But there is no slaying that does not involve guilt, as Apollo himself knew when he slew the foul dragoness. The awful Furies hound Orestes from Argos to the altar in the innermost shrine of the Delphic temple. Here is laid the Æschylean scene. The Furies, with their hair of coiling snakes, mutter in a savage sleep, ready at a signal to fall once more upon the wretch who has obeyed the god against the human conscience. The suppliant Orestes, doubting and hopeless, crouches at the altar steps. And towering over them all stands the saving God who had once, in a fair vale of purification, put upon his own head the crown of victorious goodness. He promises Orestes no easy rescue from the earthly consequences of his god-directed act. He must be pursued once more by the hateful spawn of Darkness over the sea and through sea-girt cities. But at last he shall come to Athens, a suppliant of Athena, and Apollo himself will come and gain for him freedom and the forgiveness of his kind, and justice among men shall be forever established. This is no mere praise, however splendid, of the wisdom and the justice of Athens. It is rather the embodiment of the idea which to the Greeks shone as a “far-off heavenly star” above all the expedients of practical religion, or all the necessities of worldly power. Among the hills and cliffs of Delphi dwelt a god whose ways were past finding out, whose commands led to terror but whose service led to peace.

Thus with the lengthening of day into night rises the flood tide of fragmentary realizations of ancient thought. But the tide ebbs with the sinking moon. The cold night air draws the dreamer back to the waiting fires and hospitable copper lamps of Kastri. As he makes his homeward way through the low dark ruins, which are all that the intrepid archæologists could summon from the grave of centuries, he is moved to wonder whether Delphi, save for its natural beauty by day and by night, has any place in modern thought. The ancient interpretation of its importance was by no means only a religious one. The Greeks cannot be understood only through an Æschylus of profound spiritual insight, or an Herodotus of intelligent piety. Thucydides, amid the bustle of its life, was as rationalizing in his ideas about Delphi as we can be amid its dead ruins. To him as to us, its oracular power was a matter of superstition. He would have attributed Socrates’s faith in it to his goodness rather than his knowledge, and doubtless anticipated the modern explanation of the wisdom of the priests. And yet Thucydides accepted without question the political and civic value of such a centre for the Greek world. Now that that value has disappeared with the world it served, we are left to find a new value in the imperishable human thoughts which were inspired by Delphi and have outlived its marbles, its silver and gold, its laurel crowns and echoing lyres. For any subsequent religion has but created, mutatis mutandis, the differing types of men through whom we know the pagan god. If the oracle is dumb, and Apollo but an antique fable, yet men of the twentieth century may still find in the poets and thinkers of Greece expressions of their own faith or their own doubt. They may find also that blending in one mind of belief born of idealism with unbelief born of experience which is familiar to the modern world. Pindar’s piety was such that “at Delphi they kept with reverence his iron chair, and the priest of Apollo cried nightly as he closed the temple, ‘Let Pindar the poet go in unto the supper of the god.’” And yet he uttered the universal lament:—