II. DELPHI

From Plutarch’s city, Chaeronea, one passes at the continuous risk of his life over a dozen mountains into Phocis, to reach, on the very slope of Parnassus, the sacred city of Delphi. A thousand feet below is the Crisaean plain, bright with the silver leaves of ten thousand olive trees; five hundred feet farther down is an inlet of the Corinthian Gulf; ships move with the stately, silent slowness of distance over waters deceptively motionless. Beyond are other ranges, clothed for a moment in royal purple by the setting sun. At a turn in the road is the Castalian Spring, framed in a gorge of perpendicular cliffs; from the heights, legend said (adding another fable to his own), the citizens of Delphi hurled the wandering Aesop; over them, says history, Philomelus the Phocian drove the defeated Locrians in the Second Sacred War.*²³ Above are the twin peaks of Parnassus, where the Muses dwelt when they tired of Helicon. Greeks who climbed a hundred tortuous miles to stand on this mountainside—poised on a ledge between mist-shrouded heights and a sunlit sea, and surrounded on every side with beauty or terror—could hardly doubt that beneath these rocks lived some awful god. Time and again earthquake had rumbled here, frightening away the plundering Persians, and a century later the plundering Phocians, and a century later the plundering Gauls; it was the god protecting his shrine. As far back as Greek tradition could reach, worshipers had gathered here to find in the winds among the gorges, or the gases escaping from the earth, the voice and will of deity. The great stone that nearly closed the cleft from which the gases came was, to the Greeks, the center of Greece, and therefore the omphalos, as they called it, the umbilicus or very navel of the world.

Over that navel they built their altars, in older days to Ge, Mother Earth, later to her bright conqueror Apollo. Once a terrible serpent had guarded the gorge, holding it against men; Phoebus had slain him with an arrow, and, as the Pythian Apollo, had become the idol of the shrine. There, when an earlier temple was destroyed by fire (548), the rich Alcmaeonids, aristocrats exiled from Athens, rebuilt it with funds subscribed by all Greece and augmented by their own; they gave it a façade of marble, surrounded it with a Doric peristyle, and supported it with Ionic colonnades within; seldom had Greece seen so magnificent a shrine. A Sacred Way wound up the slope to the sanctuary, adorned at every step with statues, porticoes, and “treasuries”—miniature temples built in the sacred precincts (at Olympia, Delphi, or Delos) by Greek cities as repositories for their funds, or as their individual tributes to the god. A hundred years before the battle of Marathon, Corinth and Sicyon raised such treasuries at Delphi; later, Athens, Thebes, and Cyrene rivaled them, Cnidus and Siphnos surpassed them. Amid them all, as a reminder that Greek drama was a part of Greek religion, a theater was built into the face of Parnassus. Far above all the rest was a stadium, where Greece practiced its favorite worship of health, courage, beauty, and youth.

Imagination pictures the scene in the days of Apollo’s festival—fervent pilgrims crowding the road to the sacred city, filling noisily the inns and tents thrown up to shelter them, passing curiously and skeptically among the booths where subtle traders displayed their wares, mounting in religious procession or hopeful pilgrimage to Apollo’s temple, laying before it their offering or sacrifice, chanting their hymns or saying their prayers, sitting awed in the theater, and plodding up half a thousand trying steps to witness the Pythian games or gaze in wonder at mountains and sea. Life once passed this way in all its eagerness.