Delphi and its Museum

The bronze Charioteer of Delphi originally stood in a great, four-horse, bronze chariot. It was dedicated after a chariot race run about 470 bc. Although its pose is still rigid, this Early Classical sculpture is more lifelike than were the Archaic sculptures that preceded it.

George Seferis, diplomat and Nobel Prize poet, knew that it’s not easy being Greek, not easy to bear the weight of history, myth, and legend. Yet it is a destiny that is inescapable.

Even the visitor, slipping on the ancient stones of the Acropolis, will graze the lines of Greek column and caryatid with the mind’s eye for the rest of his life. When not preoccupied with the architecturally monumental or with sculptural perfection, the very landscape of Greece is all essentials of light and form, of rock and sea and sky.

The Greeks, progeny of Pericles and Plato and Homer and the pantheon of the gods, are the children of light and landscape containing the legends, images, and ideals that have captured and shaped the imagination of the Western world for millenia, and perhaps light and land do so more in Delphi than anywhere else.

The thing about Delphi is that all absence is presence. Even the Oracle of Delphi seems, in the silence, to speak. I was there in late October, when the sun was still warm, but the hordes of tourists and tour buses had gone elsewhere.

Delphi, in the heart of the Mt. Parnassos region, rises, terrace upon steep terrace, above what the ancients termed “the navel of the earth, or omphalos, because Zeus, in a great geographer mood, had once freed two eagles at the ends of the earth to fly in opposite directions, and they had converged at Delphi.

Approach Delphi from Thebes, and surely the Sphinx awaits you at a particular bend in the road. Approach from the tiny mountain village of Arachova, and Diana the Huntress haunts the mountainous twists and ridges. In this sublime, dramatic spectacle are deep canyons, perhaps the shadow of an eagle marking an unexpected darkness, and occasional glimpses of the sea of Itea, which either covers you with its wind-driven mists or blinds you with refractions of sun and sea. Rounding a cliff, you find Delphi spread before you like an amphitheater, olive trees to one side and the looming peaks of Mt. Parnassos to the other. This is terrain that only the gods could have devised.

Once upon a time, there were the first mysterious exhalations (now thought to be water vapors, or methane and ethylene, or carbon monoxide) issuing from a fissure below the giant cliffs of the Phaedriades. At first, this spot was dedicated to a cult of the earth-goddess, but, in time, Apollo became the presiding deity, worshipped in the guise of a dolphin, or, in Greek, delphos.

Associated with the earth’s “exhalations” were mysterious prophecies of a pythoness, the Pythia, and a religious city grew up around the oracle. Later, athletic games, rivaled only by the Olympics, were dedicated to the worship of the Pythian Apollo and held in the stadium, while the oracular pronouncements gained renown throughout the ancient world, influencing the actions of political leaders and ordinary people. Greek art and literature are steeped in the legend of the Delphic oracle, and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides move forward and double back through the mouth of the oracle.

How did this system of the oracle work? Before each prophecy, the priestess – always a woman over fifty to insure chastity – would fast, then bathe in the adjacent Kastalian Spring (springs were gifts from the gods), burn laurel leaves and breathe in their vapors, and in ceremonial robes and a trance sit on the sacred tripod of Apollo above the crevasse from which the exhalations came. Her answers to seekers of their destinies were cryptic at best, incoherent at worst, and were interpreted, usually ambiguously, in verse, by priests. Skeptics, among them Aesop, were charged with sacrilege and hurled from the high cliff to jagged rocks below.

From the eighth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D., the gift-giving and advice-seeking made Delphi a huge repository of treasures (stored for Apollo in the treasuries and often plundered) and temples, laden with art. The spectacle brought both great wealth and incalculable power to what might be termed a canny bunch of priests in a tiny mountainous village.

Today, most visitors approach Delphi with a tour group. They climb the hill to the zigzagging Sacred Way and look upon the treasuries, the ruined temples, the fallen columns – and let pass the temptation to walk into the center of the bowl and deliver something oracular.

Above the sanctuary and the temple of Apollo is the fourth century open-air theater, seating 5,000 and still occasionally used for performance of ancient Greek drama. The path goes steeply upward to the stadium -- which once held 7,000 spectators and had twenty running lanes with starter blocks -- and is set just below the crest of the mountains. The games were held almost in the clouds, so that when the course was finished, American author Henry Miller, in his book “The Colossus of Maroussi,” imagines that the charioteers must have driven their steeds over the ridge and into the blue. “The atmosphere,” he writes, “ is superhuman, intoxicating to the point of madness.”

Even among ruins and remnants, the setting is of such grandeur and mystery and the colors of sunset and sunrise so compelling that having already visited everything in the daylight, I arose the next morning at 4 am to sit in the sanctuary in awe and await the hour when brooding night would give way to blushing Aurora, called Eos, the rosy-fingered goddess of dawn. It was solitude with a velvet silence.

The modern village of Delphi is compact, traversed by a single street lined with small hotels, cafes, restaurants and shops. A 10- minute walk leads to the columns and half-columns, the foundations, the sculptural fragments on pediment and metope, the partial walls smoothed with the patina of time. There is the exquisite rebuilt Treasury of the Athenians of Parian marble, the Temple of Apollo erected by Athenians and now restored by the municipality of Athens, the theater, the stadium, and an excellent museum. But because it feels as if the whole exists outside of time, I like to think that it is all a museum which one enters to feel the past impinging upon the present.

The Museum

Saying farewell to Delphi and its museum in the here and now is to leave something behind physically, but to carry Delphi forward. Well over two thousand years ago, the messages at Delphi inscribed on the temple of Apollo – “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess” -- were delivered; mankind would do well today to take heed.