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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