Delphi: The Bellybutton of the Ancient World Page #5

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the 500-strong grand juries.

Rather like a lottery machine today.

Here is a list of those,

rich and poor, who died

in battle for the democracy.

It even names individuals

like Nikostratos and Philokomos,

who were killed near the Black Sea.

Here are pottery shards,

which bare the names of Athens'

most famous politicians

Themistokles and Pericles.

But here, too, is an eight-foot high

list of the cities who had to pay up

as members of the Athenian empire.

It's evidence of how the unity

of Greece proclaimed at Delphi

was beginning to turn into

domination by one city.

For democrats, this is an inspiring

place, coming face to face with

the realities and mechanics

of Athenian democracy.

But we shouldn't get too carried

away about Athenian democracy.

For one, it excluded women,

foreigners and slaves.

And secondly, it was the Athenian

democracy that ran the oppressive

Athenian empire, which some cities saw not

as the bringer of freedom, but of tyranny.

From the Persian wars onwards,

Athens festooned the sanctuary

at Delphi

with monuments in order to hammer

home their dominance over Greece.

It began with a new treasury to

celebrate their victory at Marathon.

On it, an Athenian hero, Theseus,

slayer of the minotaur,

got equal billing with Heracles,

hero to all of Greece.

The message of the treasury was,

for Greece, read Athens.

But this unsubtle display of ego

didn't stop there.

We're at the entrance to the

sanctuary, and it was here in

the mid-fifth century at the height

of their empire that the Athenians

built a monument that would take

pole position,

that would be the first thing that people

saw as they came into the sanctuary.

And it was an interesting monument.

It wasn't just statues of gods,

but also statues of the

founding heroes of Athens itself.

All these monuments were saying,

we dominate the sanctuary,

just as we dominate Greece.

The ancient Greeks had a word

for this kind of arrogance -

we still use it today - hubris.

Athens was riding for a fall.

The Athenian expansion was

underpinned by the Athenian fleet.

But eventually some of

the other cities of Greece

could stand Athenian

arrogance no longer.

One of them was Sparta,

which had been supreme on land

for most of the century.

War broke out.

It was a titanic struggle.

Battles were fought right across

the Mediterranean, from Sicily

to the Black Sea and it changed the

Greek world and Delphi, too, forever.

In the end, after 50 years

of on-off conflict,

the Spartans with the help

of Persian money built a fleet

that was able to cut off

the Athenian grain supply

and then defeat the Athenian

fleet in battle.

The result was a famous scene.

The Spartans came into Athens

and they forced the Athenians

to knock down their own stout walls

that had defended the city.

But one of the best ways to see

how the Spartans celebrated

their great victory

is back over there, at Delphi.

Now, for the first time, the

Spartans began to build at Delphi.

And they deliberately targeted

the monuments Athens had built.

The Athenian monument at

the entrance was a gift to Apollo.

So the Spartans couldn't

just knock it down.

Instead, they upstaged it.

They started by deliberately

obscuring the Athenian monument

with a collection of 38 statues of

their own victorious generals.

Then they built a dominating portico

on the opposite side of the sacred way.

But the struggles between

the Greek cities didn't stop.

And in time,

even the Spartans were defeated.

Right on cue, their enemies,

the Arcadians, put up a monument

of their own which ruined

the view of Spartan portico.

It's not just that these real-life wars

were represented by these monuments here.

These monuments lived

those battles themselves.

Remember I said that

for the Greeks,

statues weren't just pieces of

stone, they shimmered with life.

And in the later writers, we hear

stories of these statues

actually dying when their real life

dedicators died in battle.

So when the Spartan power finally

faded and their general, Lysander,

was finally killed, his statue

was said to have crumbled.

The battles rolled on.

The cities of Greece were in near

permanent conflict for 100 years.

And at every stage, they put up monuments

at Delphi to celebrate the struggle.

Delphi was one of the few places

where Greeks could come

together in common worship.

But, ironically, it became the place

where they also expressed their

differences most extremely.

"Know thyself."

Increasingly, the story

Delphi told the Greeks

was not once as it had been with the

Salamis Apollo about Greek unity.

Instead, it was about

ungovernable ambition.

A storyboard of mutual hostility.

And, so, it's not without irony

that amongst all these scenes

of extravagant put-downs

and one-upmanship,

right next door to the

maxim "know thyself"

on the temple, was another and it

read simply "Nothing in excess."

Over time, this competition

of excessive display

and monument building created

something very special.

Nothing could be destroyed

because it all belonged to Apollo.

So these monuments had

to remain here for all time.

As the centuries unfolded, each one

was represented in the sanctuary.

So walking through Delphi is like walking

through the story of ancient Greece.

The story of one of the most

important periods in human history,

told in the form of some of its

most spectacular artistic creations.

But by mid fourth century, a new power

began to take over Greece, that of Macedon.

Phillip of Macedon and his son Alexander

the Great, who would come and take

over not just much of Greece

but much of the ancient world.

In Greece itself,

politics was transformed.

These Macedonian Greek kings

and their successors imposed order

and peace on

the squabbling Greek cities.

The age of competition was over.

So they came here to Delphi to go live and

declare their power directly to the people.

For Delphi, that was

business as usual.

What's more, in the sanctuary we

find a new and revealing practice.

Beneath the temple terrace stands a

retaining wall of polygonal masonry.

And there people came

to write still more messages.

But this time, the messages had

legal force. They were contracts.

Contracts confirming the freedom

of individual slaves.

Dominique Mulliez has been studying

them for decades.

The process was this. These slaves

had managed to buy their freedom.

But because they had no legal rights

until they were free,

the owners gave them to the god,

in order to make them free,

and that's what the contracts

describe.

These carvings are certainly not

a declaration of human rights,

but it's telling that even lowly

slaves came to take their place here

amongst the great and good

who had been commemorated

at Delphi over 700 years

of Greek history.

But then, in 168 BC,

everything changed.

A new power took over.

Rome.

For Greeks, the Roman conquest

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