11
In AD 117, Hadrian became emperor of the Roman Empire. Almost immediately, a correspondence began between him and Delphi that would continue for his entire reign, all of which was inscribed publicly on the outer wall of the temple of Apollo. Within a year of Hadrian’s accession to power, he wrote to Delphi twice. The second of these was in response to a letter from Delphi, congratulating him on becoming emperor and asking him to confirm that he would accord Delphi the status of liberty and autonomy accorded by his predecessors. Hadrian replied verifying exactly that. In response, one of Plutarch’s last official acts as priest of Apollo at the temple before his own death circa AD 120 was to oversee the setting up of a statue to Hadrian in the Amphictyony sanctuary The city of Delphi also set up their own statue to the new emperor.1
There was no letup in the exchange of letters after this first volley. Delphi consulted Hadrian at the end of AD 118 on how to honor an individual called Memmius, and between AD 118 and 120, Hadrian ordered that a series of works be erected in the area, the special power for seeing them through delegated to C. Julius Prudens. In AD 125, the relationship between Hadrian and Delphi became even closer as Hadrian embarked on his own visit to central Greece and visited Delphi. That year, he became, like several emperors before him, the archon of the city. During his visit, he is (later) said to have consulted the Pythian oracle, asking a series of questions on Greek culture, in particular where Homer came from and the identity of Homer’s parents. Hadrian’s visit to the sanctuary prompted the erection of another statue of him in his honor, this time the combined effort of the Amphictyony and the city of Delphi.2 Nor was this the only one. T. Flavius Aristotimus, priest of Apollo at the sanctuary and who had already been sent as ambassador from Delphi to Hadrian in Rome, erected a private statue of Hadrian in the sanctuary of Athena (see plate 3). This was one of the last statues to be dedicated in this sanctuary, which had for many years acted as something of an easily accessible mine when ready stonework was needed elsewhere in the Delphic complex.3
There also seems to have been a series of new issues of Delphic coinage during Hadrian’s reign, bearing the head of the emperor on one side, and images related to the sanctuary on the reverse (e.g., Apollo, the omphalos, the façade of the Apollo temple with the celebrated and mysterious “E,” the serpent surrounding the omphalos). Some coins even featured the mouth of the Corycian cave, suggesting its return to prominence and its full inclusion in the standard tour guide of the sanctuary and its religious landscape.4Perhaps the most interesting coins from this period feature a new figure in Delphic cult at this time: Antinous Propylaius (“Guardian of the Gates”). Antinous, famous for his relationship with the emperor, died in mysterious circumstances on the Nile in AD 130. In response, Hadrian set up a cult in his honor at several places around the Mediterranean (and particularly in the east), including one at Delphi (on the instigation of the priest of Apollo, Aristotimus, who had been responsible for a statue of Hadrian in the Athena sanctuary). This cult, whose location in the Apollo sanctuary is uncertain, was the recipient of a stunning 1.8 meter–high statue of Antinous in Parian marble, which is one of the masterpieces on display in the Delphi museum today (fig. 11.1).5 Nor did improvements under Hadrian cease with the introductions of new cults. The columns of the covered running track (the xystos) in the gymnasium were redone in a bluish marble in ionic style (see fig. 7.3). The first articulation of what would become a built Roman agora—by the Apollo sanctuary’s southeast entrance—also seems to have been made at this time, comprising small workshops perhaps making items to sell to visitors (see plate 2), and the Amphictyony seem to have undertaken work on the small Asclepieion shrine within the Apollo sanctuary at the foot of the temple terrace wall in the final years of Hadrian’s reign.6
Figure 11.1. Statue of Antinous dedicated in the Apollo sanctuary at Delphi (P. de la Coste-Messelière & G. Miré Delphes 1957 Librarie Hachette p. 202)
In the run-up to, and aftermath of the visit in AD 125, Hadrian’s proximity to Delphi seems to have prompted the city to consult him on a number of issues associated with the religious and athletic traditions of the sanctuary. The Imperial correspondence from AD125 that was inscribed onto the Apollo temple wall concerned the organization of the Pythian festival and expressed Hadrian’s concerns (in response to Delphic queries about changing some of the procedures related to these games) that no traditions should be lost or changed. In the following years, as part of his wider Greek agrarian policy, Hadrian also seems to have been consulted and, as a result, have made significant changes to the management of the sanctuary’s sacred land (which was now known simply as “territory”—see map 3), and to the reorganizing of its citizen classes to create a new category of citizen, the damiourgoi, who were to be given full civic rights and larger land allotments. The purpose of this reorganization seems to have been to manufacture a particular class of wealthy citizen at Delphi who could fulfill the role of a local governing class. Though not all the letters between Hadrian and Delphi have survived in full, we know that regular correspondence continued through to Hadrian’s death in AD 138, with Delphic praise for the emperor becoming more and more overt. They praised him for assuring the “peace of the universe,” marked the days of his first (and second) visit to Delphi as sacred days in the Delphic calendar, and wrote a number of letters on no particular issue except to express their adoration of him.7
But Delphi also had something of interest to Hadrian: its Amphictyony. Part of one of his letters to Delphi, dated to around the time of his visit in AD 125, concerned a reorganization of the Amphictyony council. Several emperors, as we have seen, undertook reorganizations, yet Hadrian’s letter is instructive because of the articulated purpose behind the reshuffle. The letter outlines a reduction in the large Thessalian representation (which had in fact been reinstituted by Nero only in the previous century), and the redistribution of those votes on the council between the Athenians, Spartans, and other cities so that, in the words of the letter, “the council may be a council common to all Greeks.”8
Such a purpose focuses our attention on two critical facets of the Roman relationship to Greece and particularly to Delphi. First, as we saw in chapter 10 regarding reorganizations before him (and particularly that of Augustus), the purpose of Hadrian’s was to develop a particular kind of council that could undertake a role that, in reality, the Amphictyony had never had during its archaic, classical, and Hellenistic lifetimes. Its council membership had never been a fair representation of all the Greek people; and it was not, despite many modern attempts at analogies, an ancient United Nations or European Union though this is how Romans (and many in the modern world) choose to see it, use it, and characterize it.9
The second, connected, point concerns Hadrian’s wider plan for Greece. In AD 131–32, Hadrian famously formed the Panhellenion—a union of Greek cities in the Roman province of Achaia that was specifically designed to allow Greece’s cultural and historical eminence to sit on equal terms with the more current economic and political muscle of other parts of the Roman Empire, particularly Asia Minor. Constituent members had to prove Hellenic descent, and its members were the famous metropoleis of central Greece and their overseas colonies. Many scholars have argued that Hadrian’s first instinct was to use the Delphic Amphictyony as the core of such an organization, and that this is why we see this critical restructuring of its membership in AD 125 in preparation for the formation of the Panhellenion in AD 131. Yet, what careful study of the documentation has recently pointed out is that Hadrian’s letter to the Delphi inscribed on the temple terrace wall in AD 125 is actually the report of a Roman senatorial commission about potential reform of the Amphictyony (reflecting the Roman misconception of what the Amphictyony was supposed to be), which was in fact later rejected by Hadrian. Hadrian’s Panhellenion was, it seems, always, in Hadrian’s mind at least, a separate entity that would in fact be centered around Athens, and that led, in Athens, to the creation of a sanctuary of Hadrian Panhellenius, Panhellenia athletic games, and the embellishment of the nearby sanctuary at Eleusis.10
Yet, even though Delphi and its Amphictyony may not have been the inspiration or original focus of Hadrian’s plans for a united Greece, the Greeks certainly responded to Hadrian’s keenness for the concept of a united Greece articulated specifically through the sanctuary at Delphi. In the early years of Hadrian’s reign, and before the creation of the Panhellenion, a statue of the emperor was erected at Delphi by the “Greeks who fought at Plataea.”11 This is the only dedication made in the sanctuary’s history by this particular grouping, although of course it made an instant connection to Delphi’s perhaps most famous monumental dedication, the three twisted serpents supporting a golden tripod set up for the victory at Plataea in 479 BC by the Greeks. The united Greek front achieved during the Persian Wars had been, ever since, a key part of any call for Greek unity, and it is not unsurprising that a collection of Greeks chose to reactivate this banner to demonstrate unity to Hadrian through honoring him with a statue in the very sanctuary in which such unity had originally (centuries earlier) been most monumentally displayed.
The level of contact and care lavished on this sanctuary by Hadrian during his reign represents without doubt a high point in Delphi’s history. It was a blessing Delphi was to enjoy, after Hadrian’s death in AD 138, for much of the rest of the second century AD, and it came in several forms—first, through continued interaction with the emperor and other important Roman officials. Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius, became archon of the city, and his image appears on a series of Delphic coins, the last major series of coins minted at Delphi in its history, most probably struck for the occasion of its ongoing and successful Pythian games. And Valeria Catulla, the wife of Tiberius Claudius Marcellus, a Roman official in Greece during the second half of the second century AD, set up a statue in the sanctuary in Antoninus’s honor with the agreement of the Amphictyony.12Second was through a growing interest in and use of the sanctuary as a base for philosophical thinking. Since the end of the first century AD, Delphi had been acquiring a reputation as a locus for philosophical discussion, thanks to its unique combination of history, oracle, philosophical heritage, and athletic and musical competitions, which even other Panhellenic periodos sanctuaries could not match. It was a reputation much enhanced by Plutarch’s time as priest of Apollo and the dissemination of many of his philosophical discussions about Delphi and other matters (see fig. 10.1).13As a result, Delphi was visited by a significant number of philosophers and sophists during the second century AD, such as Aulus Gellius who attended with his students to watch the Pythian games in AD 163. At the same time, a number of statues of Sophists were erected in the sanctuary both by the city of Delphi and by other cities like Ephesus and Hypata, and by groups of Sophists in honor of respected members of their circle.14
Combined with (and partly as a result of) this Imperial favor and reputation as a philosophical hotspot, Delphi’s games also continued strongly in popularity during the second century AD. The sanctuary’s increasingly packed confines were populated with a plethora of statues to athletic winners and to those tasked with organizing the games (in particular the agonothetes) from the Amphictyony, as well as from cities around the Mediterranean who had previously dedicated in the sanctuary, and sometimes from cities that had never dedicated at Delphi.15 Ancyra, in Asia Minor, for example, made its only dedication in the sanctuary’s history at the end of the second century AD, erecting a statue of its victor in the Pythian musical competition. Likewise, Myra (in Lycia in Asia Minor) erected its only offering in the sanctuary’s history during the second century AD: a statue for its own Pythian victor. So, too, Sardis (in Asia Minor) erected a series of monuments to one of their extremely successful athletes (who had been victorious in a number of the periodos Greek games) at the end of the second century AD and the beginning of the third century.16
This interest in Delphi’s athletic and musical competitions reflects Delphi’s importance all across the Mediterranean (but especially in the east) during the second century AD.17 But at the same time, the sanctuary was the focus of one of Greece’s own greatest benefactors from this period: Herodes Atticus. A millionaire aristocrat from Athens, but also of Roman citizenship (and who would be consul in Rome in AD 143), Herodes Atticus was born at the very beginning of the second century AD and died in AD 177. During his lifetime, he saw Greece flourish under the spotlight of successive Roman emperors (many of whom he encouraged to take an interest in Greece, and with whom he was on excellent terms). More importantly he was himself prolific in building projects designed to enhance both Athens and other cities in the Greek world. At Delphi, he turned his attention—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the amount of interest in the Pythian games at this time—to the stadium. What you see today when you visit the site is largely the work of Herodes Atticus (fig. 11.2). The stadium’s length was reset to measure six hundred (Roman-measured) feet. For the first time in its history, the stadium was given stepped seating in local limestone: twelve levels on the northern side, six on the southern, with curved seating at the western end that allowed for approximately 6,500 spectators. At its eastern end, a monumental entrance was created with arched doorways and niches for statues. As a result of Herodes’ enormous benefaction, a number of statues were put up in his honor. One, predictably, comes from the city of Delphi, which also erected one to his wife, Regilla, and to Herodes’ disciple Polydeucion. In contrast, it is interesting that we have no record of the Amphictyony erecting a statue in Herodes’ honor. But Herodes Atticus seems also to have been keen to erect statues in honor of his own family and circle in the sanctuary—of his wife, more than one of his daughter and son and Polydeucion; and in turn his wife set up a statue of him And all these were placed prominently near the temple of Apollo.18
Herodes Atticus died in AD 177, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161–80), who had himself taken the cue from his predecessors (and indeed his co-emperor Lucius Verus AD 161–69) and continued a close relationship with Delphi. Both Lucius and Marcus confirmed the continued independence and autonomy of Delphi as a city, and Marcus Aurelius seems to have kept up a lengthy correspondence with the sanctuary.19 We can get some sense of the wealth of Delphic citizens in this period from their tombs, collected in burial areas (necropoleis) surrounding the city and sanctuary (see plate 1). We know, for example, that an underground crypt was created during the Imperial period in one of the necropoleis to the west of the sanctuary. While it is difficult to date the crypt specifically, we can be more certain of the date for a large, ornate, and expensive sarcophagus from the second century AD, now on display outside the Delphi museum (fig. 11.3). It is known as the sarcophagus of Meleager because of the mythological scene carved around it, and it was an expensive choice for whomsoever was originally buried in it. Indeed it was so much admired that it was reused as many as fifteen times for additional burials between the second and fifth centuries AD.20
Figure 11.2. A view of the stadium at Delphi following a makeover thanks to the benefaction of Herodes Atticus in the second century AD (© EFA/P. Aupert [Aupert FD II Stade fig. 142])
Figure 11.3. The Meleager sarcophagus, at the moment of its discovery in the nineteenth century (© EFA [La redécouverte de Delphes fig. 86])
Moreover we catch brief glimpses of the continued use of the oracle in this period, mostly for private inquiries, but also for more official ones. A Spartan theopropos was sent to consult during Marcus Aurelius’s reign (about what, we do not know), and stories circulated that the oracle had even been involved in ensuring that Galen, one of the most famous medical practioners in the ancient world, give up his studies in a different field to concentrate on medicine.21 Yet with renewed attention paid to the oracle, so too was it subjected to greater criticism in a world that was fast changing and would, in less than 250 years, officially reject paganism entirely in favor of Christianity. One writer, Lucian of Samosata, writing in the middle and second half of the second century AD, chastised the Delphians for being at the beck and call of dedicators because their fates were tied to that of the oracle, and railed against the famed obscurity and ambiguity of Delphic oracular responses, a trope that would continue to play well with Christian writers keen to undermine oracular sanctuaries and paganism in general in the years to come.22
Yet it was during the reigns of Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verrus, and Marcus Aurelius in the second half of the second century AD that Delphi was immortalized in another set of writings: those of Pausanias. Despite the survival of Pausanias’s Description of Greece, we know almost nothing about the writer himself; indeed we are not even sure of his name. He seems to have come from Asia Minor, possibly Magnesia in Lydia. Born during the reign of Hadrian, circa AD 110–15, he was old enough to have seen Antinous, Hadrian’s lover, alive before Antinous drowned in the Nile on 30 October AD 130. Compared with other famous men of his time, he was about the same age as Ptolemy of Alexandria, and a little older than Lucian of Samosata and Galen of Pergamon. His writings belong to the period AD 155–80 and fit into a broader genre of literature known as periegetic: tour guide mixed in with, among other things, geography, history, mythology, art history, and ethnography.23 His Description of Greece appears to do just what it says on the tin. Starting in Athens in book 1, Pausanias claims to deal with “panta ta hellenika” (“all things Greek” 1.26.4) and proceeds to travel around Greece, describing Olympia in the middle (books 5–6) and Delphi in the final book (book 10).24 As a result, his detailed descriptions of many Greek sites are instantly recognizable to those studying ancient Greece today and were a fundamental guide to the early excavations of those sites, Delphi included.25
And yet, there have always been a number of questions about how to understand his text. At the same time as it was an indispensable aid to excavators in the nineteenth century, literary and textual scholars like von Wilamovitz Moellendorff intensely criticized his work. More recently, there has been a concerted effort to highlight the difficulties in taking Pausanias at face value, and even a question about his usefulness for archaeological research.26 No longer do we see him as simply recording what he saw, but as a writer with particular interests and views writing to a very particular agenda, and shaping what he reported to fit that mold. As such, Pausanias’s text is now considered not simply a straightforward tour guide, but rather a cognitive map created to express a particular ideology of Hellenism contiguous with the greater project of reshaping (and creating) a unified Greece as seen in other initiatives like Hadrian’s Panhellenion. Pausanias’s focus, scholars have stressed, was on stories, places, objects, and moments that spoke to Greek unity, and most definitely to Greece’s past rather than its present: with only two exceptions, no monument discussed by Pausanias at Delphi was erected later than 260 BC (the exceptions being the stadium and a structure in the Athena sanctuary). Pausanias’s present-day Delphi, indeed any part of Delphi’s history subsequent to the assumption of full control by the Aetolian league, seems not to have fit with Pausanias’s project, which sought to stress the antiquity, cultural history, memory, and importance of an (ancient) unified Greece.27
Pausanias’s goals are understandable. His Description of Greece came at a time of heightened interest in, and prosperity for, the country; as well as at a time of recognition that Greece’s trump card in a fast changing Mediterranean world was its claim to an unrivaled historical and cultural contribution. But, was he successful in his literary goals? In two ways, it could well be argued that he was not. His own work, the Description of Greece, seems not to have been much read in antiquity. The first surviving mention of him and his text is 350 years after his death, in the time of the Roman Emperor Justinian subsequent to Rome’s conversion to Christianity. But perhaps more importantly, and indeed what might explain his lack of success, is that by the time of his death circa AD 180, the brand of philhellenism ignited by Hadrian had begun to splutter slightly.28 It is telling that one of the two monuments Pausanias mentions in his description of Delphi, and which dates from after 260 BC, is the stadium, and that his description of it differs from what we find today (see fig. 11.2). Pausanias claims that Herodes Atticus paid for the spectator banks to be made out of marble. But the surviving ones are of local limestone. Scholars have discounted the possibility that the marble has been lost. Instead they believe it was likely never there. Pausanias may well have written about what he heard was intended, but, after the death of Herodes Atticus in AD 177, it seems the plans were scaled back. The opulence was no longer justified, and stone from the local quarry was used instead. At the same time, when Pausanias writes about the sacred lands belonging to Apollo, and which had remained uncultivated since the sixth century BC, it is telling that no one at Delphi seems to know exactly why this is the case. He hears some say it is because they are cursed, and others that it was not good earth for olive trees.29 Respect for Delphi, it seems, was beginning to falter, and Delphi’s trump card—its reputation as a place of cultural memory and unsurpassed history—was threatened by its own lack of knowledge about its own history.
But this was by no means a sudden downfall. At the end of the second century AD, with the arrival of Septimius Severus as emperor (AD 193–211), Delphi once again sent ambassadors to congratulate him on his military victories over rivals (that had brought him to power), and, no doubt, to ask him to reconfirm the liberty and autonomy of the city and sanctuary in accordance with his predecessors. This he did, and the Delphians duly wrote up his response on the walls of the temple of Apollo. In addition, during the reigns of Severus and his son Caracella, a further restoration of the temple of Apollo seems to have been undertaken and overseen by the proconsul of the Roman province of Achaea, Cn. Claudius Leonticus.30 Indeed, at least for the city and citizens of Delphi, the end of the second century AD and the beginning of the third seems to have been a relatively prosperous and stable time. One Amphictyonic secretary from this period, M. Junius Mnaseas, could claim to be the grandson of a Pythian priestess and descended from a number of priests of Apollo; such, it appears, was the stability of the governing class within the city. Moreover Delphi’s inhabitants were wealthy enough for numerous statues to be put up in the sanctuary for members of their own families, as well as for a number of important Romans and Roman officials.31 The Imperial governor (and corrector of Delphi), Cn. Claudius Leonticus, who was probably responsible for a series of renovations of the temple, is thanked with no less than five statues set up by individual Delphians for taking care of all Delphi’s affairs. Moreover, although the dating is notoriously difficult, the initial elaboration of the Roman agora space at the entrance to the sanctuary of Apollo continued, and seems to have been accompanied around this time by an expansion to the south with the construction of a complex originally thought to be a set of baths, but now thought likely to have been a complex of housing, shops, and service workshops (see plate 2).32
It seems, thus, that the celebrations by people like Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century AD, that the time of oracles was over, were premature in a number of ways. Not only do we have evidence that the oracle at Delphi continued to give responses right through into the fourth century AD (and even the Christian writer Origen of Alexandria writes about the Pythia in the present tense in the mid-third century AD), but also it seems that the oracular sanctuary at Delphi continued to be respected enough by the Roman state and its citizens to ensure that the Delphians did well enough for themselves to continue embellishing their sanctuary and city during that time.33 At the same time, as we saw in the introduction to this book, it was in the third, or even, fourth century AD that Delphi starred as the setting for Heliodorus’s fictional novel, Aethiopica, which portrayed Delphi not only as the center of (and well connected with) a wide Mediterranean world, but also as a busy and prosperous sanctuary.
In one aspect of Delphic business, however, there were signs of change, and this was the Pythian games, which had long been a stalwart of Delphic business, and a major reason for the sanctuary’s continuing success. But the sanctuary was to become something of a victim of that success. On the one hand, certain communities, like that of the Hypatians, seem to have been stalwart supporters of the games, and even to have taken the opportunity of the festival to conduct a ritual in honor of Neoptolemus at his small cult area in the Apollo sanctuary from the second century AD onward. But on the other hand, from AD 180 AD through to AD 268, there seems to have been a massive exportation of the Pythian games, at the command of successive emperors, to twenty-seven cities in the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Syria. At first sight, this might seem good news only for Delphi, and without doubt, the spread of the Pythian games must in some part have been inspired by the high regard in which the Delphi Pythian games were held. But in reality these were not carbon copies of the Delphic games. They were loosely based on them, but incorporated a wide range events and practices. Moreover, in no way does the spread of the Pythian games seem to have been officially linked to their original location: not a single epigraphic attestation of this expansion survives at Delphi.34 Instead these new sets of games are known predominantly through the publicity generated in their newfound homes. So, while the “original” Pythian games would with little doubt have continued to hold a particular attraction, these new ones throughout the Roman world must have drawn attention away from Delphi. This was especially the case because these new games seem to have been motivated in the third century AD by a shift in the worship of the emperor away from temple building and sacrifice toward the performance of agonistic festivals and ceremonies in his presence. Given that the way to honor the emperor was increasingly through games, no one city or sanctuary could expect to hold the monopoly on these activities, and indeed we should expect increasing rivalry between the different events, which meant increased competition for the Pythian games at Delphi, especially as new Pythian games were hosted in cities closer and closer to Delphi. A Pythian festival, almost identical to that at Delphi, was founded at Thessalonike under the Emperor Gordian III (AD 238–44). As a result, despite the liveliness of the Pythian games at Delphi depicted in the sources for mid-late second century AD, the inscribed catalogs of victors shows a marked decline in numbers during the first half of the third century AD.35
One of the reasons the Pythian games, as opposed to the Olympic games, became the model for export was their association with the god Apollo. During the course of the third century AD, Apollo, and particularly Apollo Helios (Apollo “of the Sun”), who was deemed the Greek equivalent of the Roman Sol Invictus (“Invincible Sun”), became a more and more popular patron deity for emperors. Yet the third century AD was also a period of prolonged crisis for the Roman empire: confronted by ongoing invasion from multiple directions; dealing with a continued, bitter, and violent struggle for Imperial control within Roman society; suffering from brief fractures in the empire itself and accompanied by economic difficulties and even plague.36 On the one hand, Delphi did its best to keep up with this continually changing, fractured, and fraught political landscape. Emperor Gordian III (despite his approval for the setting up of identikit Pythian games at Thessalonike) was honored by the Amphictyony and the city of Delphi with a statue in the sanctuary. So, too, the city of Delphi honored Valerian (AD 253–56) and his son Gallienus who was co-ruler with him for a time (AD 253–60), and then sole ruler (AD 260–68). Likewise, the city of Delphi set up a statue of his successor, Claudius Gothicus (AD 268–70), and later for Carus, who ruled for only a year in AD 282–83.37 At the same time, the sanctuary itself was not unattended to or unpopulated. The first phase of the eastern baths, completed on a terrace between that of the stoa of Attalus and the Roman agora, can be dated to the second half of the third century AD (see plate 2). Likewise, dedicators still came to the sanctuary from far afield. Sinope, on the Black Sea, erected a statue to its own athletic superstar in AD 250–75, and, in keeping with the military and political instability of the period, a group of mercenary soldiers erected a statue of their leader in the sanctuary at some point during the third century AD.38
Yet, there were also signs that the institutions running Delphi were beginning to struggle in a number of ways. The statue set up to Gordian III is the last known statue in Delphi’s history set up by the dual authority of the Amphictyony and the city of Delphi. While the city would continue to set up statues of later emperors, the Amphictyonic record is much more hazy. Its final known dedication in the sanctuary is that of a statue of Philiscus, a governor of the Roman province of Thessaly (created by Emperor Diocletian at the turn of the third–fourth centuries AD). But that came 150 years after the last surviving record of an Amphictyonic meeting—a time about which we know little. The Amphictyony itself seems to have continued, but, though scholars debate the degree to which it maintained itself as a functioning force at Delphi and in the wider Greek world, there is general agreement that it had passed its prime.39
At the same time, those statues that were erected by the city of Delphi during the third century show signs of increasing thrift. The statue of Claudius Gothicus was erected (and inscribed) on a base that had been originally placed in the sanctuary in the fifth century BC, when it had carried a statue of a horse, which had been dedicated (and inscribed) by the Pharsalians of Thessaly for one of their own military victories. This process of reuse is by no means uncommon in the ancient world (and indeed at Delphi), and it would become more prevalent in the sanctuary over the course of the century. Carus’s statue base, for example, was reused for another emperor almost immediately. But its reuse now—even for statues of, and honoring, the emperor—is a very real testament to the uncertain political landscape. Claudius’s reign was only three years long and came almost immediately after the Delphians had set up statues to two recent predecessors, and Carus’s reign was only one year. Given such short periods of rule an investment in an entirely new stone might have been deemed unnecessary and not worthwhile, especially in view of the generally worsening condition of Delphic finances. Nor is reuse of the statue base the only change in attitudes toward the monuments of the Apollo sanctuary at this time. It is during the third century AD that we first see hints that the treasury of the Athenians—for centuries one of the most prestigious structures at Delphi—was being used as a home to pawnbrokers, a practice that continued well into the fourth century AD(see plate 2, fig. 5.4).40
Given this picture, and that the following century saw the emergence of Christianity as the Imperial religion of choice, and eventually the official religion of the Roman world, it is logical that Delphi continued its slow slide into decline from this point on. But, if anything, the opposite seems true. Delphi’s governing class—the damiourgoi created under Hadrian—was still exerting a good deal of influence (if not more than ever) at Delphi in the fourth century AD, even though its meetings were now held in Hypata. Statues of philosophers dedicated during the first half of the fourth century AD have been discovered in the sanctuary.41 Carus’s statue base was reused as the base for a statue of Constantius Chlorus (the father of Constantine the Great) at the turn of the century. All of this, in fact, seems to have been part of a wider reenergizing of the sanctuary—at the very moment in which the fate and direction of the wider Roman world was turning toward Christianity on the battlefield of Milvian Bridge near Rome.42 As Constantine the Great swept through the Roman Empire, defeating his co-emperors and reuniting the territory under his command (and under his Christian standard), at Delphi, the city and sanctuary seem to have been playing host to almost the last major building project we know about in the site’s pagan history. A surviving inscription from AD 319 attests to the generosity of L. Gellius Menogenes, president for life of the college of the damiourgoi (and also a man with important roles in the religious life of the city of Athens), who handed over 500,000 coins (of an unknown denomination) for the cleaning of the Delphic baths, a donation matched by a woman: Aurelia Julia Sotia. This money seems to, at least in part, have gone to not only cleaning the baths, but also to renovating them substantially, including an upgrade of the heating system (see plate 2).43
It is instructive that Constantine the Great, the emperor—who conquered under the Christian standard, reunited the Roman Empire; set about establishing a new capital for the empire at Constantinople (Istanbul); and in the process removed some of the greatest works of art from across the Mediterranean to grace his new capital, including the Plataean serpent column that had stood at Delphi since the fifth century BC—received no statue at Delphi from the city of Delphi during his lifetime.44 In contrast to the statues erected for emperors who survived only a year (like Carus), this lethargic behavior toward Constantine, who ruled for much longer, might indicate the uncertainty of the times—Delphi felt it politically inappropriate to honor an emperor who was making war on his co-rulers. Or indeed it might suggest the sadness they felt at Constantine’s removal of their most famous dedication to his capital at Constantinople (fig. 11.4). In the aftermath of Constantine’s death, however, in AD 337, and as a result of the more settled (if new) Roman order, the city of Delphi erected not one but two statues to Constantine.45 It was at this time as well that the Roman agora, which, since the time of Hadrian had been through several renovations, was rebuilt again in its grandest form, using material taken from various parts of the Delphic complex (including the marble columns that, during Hadrian’s reign, had been installed in the covered running track of the gymnasium). Stoas on three sides of the agora square were constructed, with the agora’s axis corresponding to the entryway into the Apollo sanctuary, and with its own vestibule entrance to the east (see plate 2). More importantly, this new space was, it seems, identified as the choice location for Imperial statues (which had until this time been placed mostly on the level of the temple terrace). After AD 330, all Imperial statues were likely placed in the Roman agora.46
Figure 11.4. The Serpent column dedicated in 479 BC at Delphi following the battle of Plataea, now in the hippodrome built by Constantine in Constantinople (© Michael Scott)
The steady flow of Imperial statues also resumed in this period of religious flux. Dalmatius, junior emperor from AD 335 to 337 with control of—among other provinces—Achaea, received a statue from the city of Delphi, employing a base that had previously been used for one of the statues of the Emperor Hadrian.47 Flavius Constantius, son of Constantine the Great, was honored with a statue by the city of Delphi in period AD 337–40, possibly since, though he co-ruled in his early reign with his brothers, his sphere of influence included Illyricum (nowadays part of the Balkans) and was thus more important for Delphi to impress. But this statue, too, employed a reused base, one that had originally been set and inscribed as the base for the statue of Polydeucion, the disciple of Herodes Atticus in the second century AD.48
Delphi was caught in the same catch-22 as all the pagan sanctuaries in this period. They were erecting statues to honor Christian emperors in pagan sanctuaries, as both people and emperors negotiated the difficult task of being Christian in a still overwhelmingly pagan world; some estimates put Christian numbers at perhaps 10 percent of the population in the 320s AD.49 And though these emperors were diplomatic enough to allow pagan worship to continue (Delphi received in AD 342–44 an Imperial reply assuring the continuing liberty of its cult), the increasingly loud voices of Christian writers also focused in on the practices of these sanctuaries as evidence not only for their decline, but also, curiously, for historical support for the inevitability of Christian victory.50 The Christian historian Eusebius, for example, records that in his time only the oracles of Apollo at Delphi, Clarus, and Didyma were still working, and when someone asked why this was so, the explanation offered had to do with earthquakes and the natural passing of time.51 At the same time, Eusebius reports a consultation by the Nicaeans, who asked Apollo whether, in view of the lapsed oracle, they still needed to honor Pythian Apollo with the traditional sacrifices. According to Eusebius, the oracle said it was now impossible to renew the spoken oracle at Delphi since “it has put on itself the keys of prophetic silence,” but that it was still important to continue the offerings.52Other writers portrayed the oracle’s silence as a direct consequence of the coming of Christ, and, in this period, the story circulated that when, at the time of Jesus’s birth, the Emperor Augustus himself had consulted about his successor, the oracle remained dumb and, when asked why, replied, “a Hebrew boy bids that I leave this house and go to Hades. Depart therefore from our halls and tell it not in the future.”53
Yet even in this climate, Delphi had its supporters, and none of them was bigger than the man who attempted to turn the Christianization of the Roman world on its head: Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor. Ruling from just AD 361–63, Julian was a committed pagan whose attempts not only to deny Christianity but to sideline it within the Roman system may well have had a great deal of success if his reign had not been cut short by his death on the battlefield. As it was, this was paganism’s last hurrah, and Delphi had a famous role to play. Julian not only wrote extensively against Christians, defending how it was the oracles had gone silent, but also paid significant tributes particularly to Delphi, and commented on its athletic events. But even more famously, he sent a doctor, Oribasius, from Constantinople to act as Imperial quaestor in Achaea and to consult the Pythian priestess at Delphi. The response (if indeed the sources have not been confused and Julian actually consulted the oracle at Daphne rather than Delphi) is the last recorded oracular response from Delphi and is (as one might expect) dramatically (and perhaps too suitably) final: “Tell the king the fair wrought hall is fallen to the ground. No longer has Phoebus a hut, nor a prophetic laurel, nor a spring that speaks. The water of speech even is quenched.”54
In AD 365, just two years after Julian’s death, Greece was rocked by a devastating earthquake. In the latest scholarly publication by French archaeologists concerning the temple of Apollo, it is argued that the damage done by this earthquake might have been similar to that of the 373 BCearthquake, and that it was certainly enough to distort the east-west axis of the foundations of the temple (a distortion still visible today—see fig. 7.2).55 We don’t know how much damage was done to other parts of the Delphic complex, but it’s likely there were some who believed it was a sign that Delphi’s end was finally approaching. It was, however, not to be, at least not quite yet. The Christian emperors, Valens and Valentinian (AD 364–75), were honored at Delphi with an imposing (and new rather than reused) base topped with statues in the Roman agora in the early 370s AD, which thanked them for their benefaction to the city.56 Perhaps that benefaction came in the form of repairing any damage from the AD 365 earthquake. If so, it was an important example of the kind of religious peace Valens and Valentinian sought to create between paganism and Christianity during their rule: Christian emperors giving help to a famous pagan shrine and being honored in return, in a far more generous way than Delphi had honored Constantine and his family successors.57 But, at the same time, the inscription relating to the honoring of these emperors also reveals a crucial public change in Delphic status. For centuries Delphi had described itself in its official inscriptions as “hiera,” a “sacred place.” Even in honoring the Constantinian emperors, Delphi had proudly continued to claim its (pagan) holy title.58 But in the inscription honoring Valens and Valentinian, Delphi drops it. It is only a city, it claims, perhaps because, despite the era of religious peace (and indeed because of it), it is no longer advisable to draw attention to one’s pagan credentials. The monument to Valens and Valentinian is the last known pagan monument at Delphi.59 In the last thirty years of the fourth century AD, the Roman world witnessed increasingly damaging attacks by Christians on pagan shrines; the official outlawing of paganism by the Roman Emperor Theodosius in the early 390s; and, as a result, the official end to the pagan sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi.
What I found stranger still was that the most famous place in
the world should have suffered such a reversal of fortune that
d we were obliged to look for Delphi in Delphi and enquire
about the whereabouts of Apollo’s temple as we stood on its
foundations.
—J. Spon, 1678 Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant