Delphi: The Bellybutton of the Ancient World Page #4
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what it was meant to be.
Over time this kind of thing gave
Delphi a collection of sculpture
almost unparalleled
in the ancient world.
But we also have to remember this.
For the Greeks,
statues were not just stone.
They were potentially animate.
They lived,
they breathed, they responded.
So when we look around here,
we shouldn't see statues made
of dead stone or bronze,
but statues shimmering with life.
The Siphnian treasury marks the cusp
of the classical age of ancient Greece.
An age of which Delphi was
going to be the beating heart.
But it was more than that.
Delphi was the historical
logbook of the age.
As every key moment in history was
represented here in bronze, gold,
marble, so that history began
to accumulate a power of its own.
And when the Greeks came here,
to ask the Oracle who they were,
as the Oracle demanded, Delphi
itself provided a kind of answer,
an answer that was growing
all the time.
At this time, the answer seemed to
be that they were winners.
The sanctuary became a kind of
trophy chest of Greek victories in war.
And, in particular, their victories in
their epic struggle against the Persians.
The initial Athenian victory at
Marathon in 490 BC,
and the clinching victories
at Salamis in 480 BC
and Plataea the following year.
In celebrating these victories,
they created an ideal.
That of Greek Unity.
And it was first celebrated, where else,
but right here at the Ompholos at Delphi.
I worked beside Anne Jacquemin when
I first began to study the sanctuary.
Now she and her colleagues have made
an extraordinary discovery,
which has finally confirmed
the importance of Delphi
as a unifying space.
It concerns the inscription on the
base of the giant statue of Apollo,
which the cities who fought at
Salamis put up outside the temple.
Unfortunately, the statue's
dedicating inscription is damaged.
The first word identifying
the dedicator is missing.
Until this time, almost all dedications
had been by individual people or cities.
But here we know that the last word,
anethen, is in the plural.
And the physical alignment of the
letters cuts down the possibilities.
So the Salamis monument was
saying something completely new.
That there was a community who
thought of themselves as Greeks,
and it was not only united,
but victorious.
This is exactly the kind
of unifying message that
so excited the original excavators,
and indeed still excites UNESCO and
other international bodies today.
The idea that Greece
and the ancient world
was one nation, one country, one idea.
And it is an amazing idea.
Greece in the ancient world,
most of the Greek cities
spent all their time at each other's
throats, not in unity.
And this statue became a crucial
marker in the sanctuary as a result.
It was known as Megale Andras,
the Big Man.
This idea of Greek unity continued
to inspire dedications at Delphi.
On the same terrace, a year or two
later, another dedication went up.
It became the most famous of
all Delphi's monuments.
It celebrated the victory against
the Persians at Plataea.
And on it were carved the names of the
cities who had contributed soldiers.
It was a huge bronze column made of
three coiled serpents
supporting at the top
a golden tripod bowl.
The serpent column was
a staggering nine metres high
and it was to become the defining
icon of Delphi.
But today in Delphi, there's
only a replica, five feet tall.
The victory at Plataea
was an amazing moment.
Individual little cities of Greece
had managed to defeat
the greatest empire
in the Mediterranean.
And from that point, Greek unity
would be sung as an ideal
by the poets, praised by
the philosophers,
aimed at by the politicians.
But it was always an ideal at risk
from the traditional rivalries
that made Greece what it was.
Rivalries on display here
in the sanctuary.
Even on the terrace surrounding
the serpent column,
individual cities put up still
bigger monuments to their own glory.
Despite the idealism,
the competition continued.
In that competition,
one city took the lead,
Athens, which ruled the roost for
four decades from 480BC to 440BC.
It was Delphi's advice
to the Athenians to rely on
the wooden walls of their fleet
which had helped preserve
the city in the Persian wars.
And that fed an Athenian cultural
explosion which can still be heard
today, as classical art, philosophy
and literature were transformed.
Modern Greece has always looked
back at that time as a golden age.
Even today, there is a nod
to the Delphian way of doing things.
Just as in Delphi, ancient Greeks
put up statues and inscriptions
about their victories,
Here on the podium of the Parliament
building in Athens
are the battle honours
of the modern Greeks,
right up to Alamein and Korea.
It's no surprise that the modern-day
capital of Greece is Athens,
for in the balmy days
after the Persian wars,
it was the city of Athens
that benefited most.
They had their fleet, they took
the fight to the enemy and then
they created an empire that spanned
much of the ancient Greek world.
Success allowed the Athenians
to decorate their city
with some of the most beautiful
buildings the world has ever seen.
And to fund a political system
whose ideals we still live by today,
and even fight wars over
more than 2,500 years later.
It was in Athens that democracy
was born and the idea that votes,
not wealth or breeding,
should determine politics.
Not far from the city centre, you can
climb a hill where it all happened.
Where the state assembly met, composed
of the whole voting population.
And astonishingly enough,
the speakers' podium still survives,
here in the middle of the flat space
where the citizens stood.
Most people think of the Parthenon
as the centre of ancient Athens,
but I believe that this place
is much more important.
This was the assembly of the ancient
Athenians where they came to make
every decision
including going to war.
This was the place that allowed
Pericles later to claim
that Athens was an education
to all of Greece.
And, in fact, just centuries later,
it was the governing council at
Delphi who put it perhaps best.
"It was the Athenian people
being the
font and origins of all things
beneficial to humanity,
who raised mankind
from a bestial existence to
a state of civilization".
For those who built the modern
state of Greece and for those
who excavated at Delphi,
that idea was an irresistible call
to unpack the ancient world and to
make it part of their and our identity.
From then on, "know thyself"
meant knowing ancient Greece.
Amazingly, we do know an enormous
amount about that democracy.
We can actually see it in action.
In a remote corner of
the university district
is the state epigraphic museum.
I like it because it
contains direct evidence
of how the Athenian
democracy worked.
Here is the machine which decided
by lot who was to sit on
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