Delphi: The Bellybutton of the Ancient World Page #3

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He interpreted

that to mean his enemies.

It turned out to be his own.

He even complained to the Oracle

about the response he had got,

but the response came back

to him saying,

"It was your fault,

your misinterpretation."

The ambiguity of the response

forces the question back on us,

forces us to know ourselves.

Once the Oracle took off,

Delphi took off with it.

It became the focus for a whole

range of other activities,

as people began to come here

in huge numbers.

And it was all good

business for a thriving city,

which surrounded the sanctuary.

Imagine what this place must

have been like at full capacity.

When the games were on, maybe up to

40,000 people in the stadium,

here in the theatre watching the

athletic and musical competitions.

At night, gathered around

the landscape, with their campfires

glittering

all over the valley.

The animals that had to be brought

here, not just to sacrifice,

but also to feed that many people.

The noise, the smell,

all the tourists coming in and out

as Delphi became

more and more famous.

And in amongst that,

the temple of Apollo.

And perhaps the consultants,

waiting desperately

for the next available day

to see the Oracle.

All that crammed into one

crag of the Parnassian mountains.

Perhaps the most important

international event at Delphi

was the athletic festival

called the Pythian Games.

It took place every four years,

and rivalled the Olympics.

At the top of the sanctuary,

there was a spectacular stadium.

Here they ran running races.

Elsewhere there was boxing,

all-in wrestling and chariot racing.

The athletes competed naked

and their struggles for victory

attracted spectators

from all over the Greek world.

And the winners dedicated monuments

to celebrate their victory.

One of Delphi's most famous

treasures is the Charioteer.

It was discovered in three separate pieces

right at the beginning of the excavation.

Six feet high, it's one of

the few Greek sculptures to survive

in bronze, and the statue still

preserves its original inlayed eyes,

bits of the silver and copper headband,

and even some silver teeth.

The Charioteer was a magnificent

cry of triumph

in honour of a tyrant

from far away Sicily.

His horses had won the chariot race,

and he wanted the world to know it.

But the triumphant horses

are missing, and all that is left

to us is the clothed figure of

the slave who drove them to victory.

Athletics and religion may seem for

us like uncomfortable bedfellows,

but it couldn't have been

more natural.

People came to sanctuaries

to honour and worship the gods,

and athletic and musical competitions

were a great way of doing that.

In fact, over here is one of

the best examples of just how tight

that relationship

between religion and athletics was.

It's an instruction, in the wall

of the stadium, saying that wine,

"to oinon maerfaren," may not

be taken out - OUT - of the stadium!

Not into, as we might expect.

Out of the stadium,

because they were actually making

sacrificial wine inside the stadium

to use in sacrifices that would have

preceded the athletic competitions.

And if you did take that wine out of

the stadium, you got fined at least

five drachmas and had to make

additional sacrifices to the god.

Competition in the stadium wasn't

the only kind going on at Delphi.

Down below, in the sanctuary, peoples

and cities vied with one another

to shower the gods with

ever-grander dedications.

They turned the whole place into

an echo chamber of competing voices

coming live from Delphi,

a giant information exchange.

It wasn't just that information was

coming in to Delphi,

it was also being broadcast

in a very public way.

In a world without

mass communication technology,

Delphi was the

giant notice board -

the ancient equivalent of

Piccadilly Circus, Times Square,

New York, or even the advert breaks

in Britain's Got Talent.

If you had a message to get across,

Delphi was the place to do it.

That message could be carried

in many ways.

Through elegant sculpture, or

expensive buildings or precious vases.

But more simply, it could

also be done through a text.

Everywhere there are

inscriptions on the buildings.

So far, scholars have counted

more than 3,000 individual texts.

Some of them running

to hundreds of words.

Literally, Delphi

was the Greek world's notice board.

And these dedications, in all their

forms, came from individuals

and cities near and far.

Dedications arrived from cities more

than 1,000 miles away,

like the Greek colony

at Marseilles in France.

They came from all kinds of places

and all kinds of people.

Plutarch, in this description of his

travels and his visits to the sanctuary,

talks about one evening when

he was walking with friends,

and they came across the

dedication of a certain Rhodopis.

Rhodopis, from the city

of Naucratis in Egypt.

Now Rhodopis was a

prostitute, a courtesan,

and she'd made so much money

that she had dedicated piles

of iron spits in the sanctuary,

along with an inscription saying

just how she'd earned it.

Plutarch's friends were indignant.

So, if the Greeks came here to "know

themselves," what did they learn from

the myriad of messages which were

being broadcast from this place?

Lesson number one seems actually

to have been "show thyself."

And the bigger and bolder,

the better.

In around 550 BC, the people

of the tiny island of Siphnos

discovered gold

and silver mines on their island.

In thanksgiving, they built

themselves a treasure house

to hold their offerings

to Apollo at Delphi.

It was packed with gold,

silver and other rich gifts.

Even in the context of

this opulent sanctuary,

it was a spectacular building.

But today,

there's almost nothing left to see.

So even though I'm no artist,

I find it helps to try to draw

what was once there to get

some idea of its magnificence.

What you can see here today

is just the foundations.

It was on top of those that they

placed the Siphnian marble,

brought all the way

from their home island.

This was the first building at Delphi

to be made entirely of marble.

And on top of the Siphnian marble

walls, sculpture in marble,

and they didn't stint there

either with the decoration.

They commissioned some of Greece's

finest sculptors to adorn the treasury.

And they put their most spectacular

scene on the wall facing the path

up to the temple

where everyone could see it.

It depicted the great Greek myth about

the war between the gods and the giants.

Carved with incredible depth and skill to

make the figures leap out at the viewer.

The ancient equivalent of

the 3D movies.

In front, the portico was supported

by two enormous caryatid columns.

And unlike what we see today,

all the sculpture was brightly

painted and inlaid with

precious metals to make the details

of the sculpture stand out.

And if that seems flashy,

well, that's exactly

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