Delphi (39 page)

What I found stranger still was that the most famous place in
the world should have suffered such a reversal of fortune that
d we were obliged to look for Delphi in Delphi and enquire
about the whereabouts of Apollo's temple as we stood on its
foundations.

—J. Spon,
1678 Voyage d'Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant

12

THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

It is at first sight surprising that we find a Christian writer, Claudian, during the time of the Christian Emperor Honorious in the early fifth century
AD
, talking with enthusiasm about Delphi and its pagan mythology, a religious sanctuary officially shut down with the outlawing of paganism. As Greece was once again menaced by northern invaders, Claudian imagines that the god Apollo must have rejoiced after his victory in the third century
BC
over these barbarians, a victory that assured “no barbarian [would drink] with defiled mouth the Castalian waters and the streams which have fore-knowledge of fate.” What Claudian's dream highlights is not only the difficult times in which Greece found itself during the early fifth century
AD
(no Apollo to come to the rescue this time), but also that Delphi's pagan days, like those of many other pagan sanctuaries, may not have been so abruptly cut short (as we may have initially supposed) at the time of Theodosius's official outlawing of paganism in
AD
391. Instead we see a much slower, more muddled, transition from paganism to Christianity.
¹

During this slow evolution over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries
AD
, what was Delphi like (see
plate 1
)? Houses, ceramic workshops, ovens, and at least two cisterns seem to have been built into and over the
athletic compound. At the Athena sanctuary, for centuries having been treated as something of a readily available quarry, there was no letup in the reuse of the blocks from its temples and structures. The areas to the west and east of the Apollo sanctuary seem to incorporate expanding arenas of habitation (with the eastern side seemingly slight poorer than the western side). Immediately around the Apollo sanctuary perimeter wall, in the period up to the middle sixth century
AD
, a number of fairly wealthy houses and baths have been identified. Some of these had their origins in previous periods; some were new and employed reused material from monumental dedications in the Apollo sanctuary, and some were simply monumental dedications turned into houses (like the west stoa).
²

Within the Apollo sanctuary itself, much of the northern half (including the Cnidian lesche) seems to have been slowly occupied by houses (see
plate 2
). The Chian altar in front of the temple was dismantled. Most of the still-standing treasuries around the sanctuary were turned into utilitarian buildings of one sort or another, and baths were established in the niche of Craterus to the northwest of the temple of Apollo. Over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries
AD
, the sanctuary of Apollo was absorbed into a seemingly prosperous urban settlement, with the Roman agora continuing to act as a busy commercial center (it was the only area not to be invaded by private buildings). And it is as part of this slow transition that Delphi offers us, once again, an important irony. Today, tourists visiting the sanctuary are guided through it by the zigzag stone pathway leading up to the temple terrace (see
plate 2
,
fig. 0.1
). Most maps of the sanctuary highlight this pathway, and it is often labeled the “sacred way.” Yet it is entirely the creation of the final phase of Delphi's life: a pathway constructed out of reused pieces of stone from around the Apollo sanctuary to service the town that grew up in the abandoned confines of Apollo's precinct.
³
In the over one thousand years of Delphi's history as a sanctuary, there was no single pathway that led to the temple, but instead a myriad of entrances and paths at different terraced levels. The final phase of Delphi's ancient life has left an indelible impression on the way we see and move through the sanctuary today.

What place for the worship of Christ within this changing community, and what happened to the temple of Apollo itself? Scholarship in the early twentieth century emphasized the sheer variety of Christian-era architectural fragments found at Delphi, most of which came from the fifth century
AD
and were thought to have been part of an adaption of an already existing building. At the same time, these fragments demonstrate the continued use of well-known pagan-era motifs like the acanthus. As a result, an argument was made that the Delphians were once again doing what they did best: actively trying to attract (now Christian) pilgrims to the city as a place of now Christian worship by quickly building (or rather altering current buildings in order to create) an ornate Christian basilica.
⁴

More recent investigation has emphasized, in conjunction with the picture outlined above for Greece's slower movement toward a wholly Christian outlook, a more gradual and less opportunistic development of Christian worship at Delphi, beginning slowly in the town that had always surrounded the temple complex, and growing organically over time to engulf the sanctuary and temple of Apollo at its heart. We know of at least three Christian basilicas that were eventually constructed at Delphi, but none can be dated to before
AD
450.
⁵
Indeed, it seems to have been in the second half of the fifth century
AD
that Christian worship really took root at Delphi (see
plate 1
). The French archaeologist Vincent Déroche, in his study of Christian-era structures, records three basilicas at Delphi. First, a basilica “of the new village” west of the sanctuary (beyond the west necropolis of the ancient town), built mostly from recycled material circa
AD
475–500, and with a well-preserved mosaic floor. Second, a newly built basilica in the gymnasium to the east of the Apollo sanctuary (later covered by the Church of the Virgin built in 1743); and third, another newly built basilica constructed inside the sanctuary itself.
⁶
But this basilica did not occupy the temple of Apollo. Instead it was most probably constructed just to the north of the temple, on the terrace between the northern terracing wall of the temple terrace and the area of the theater (see
plate 2
). Built in a rich and cosmopolitan style, it appears to have been the bishop's official basilica, following
Delphi's establishment as an episcopate, and it remained the site of a Christian church right through until its excavation in the late nineteenth century. In addition to these three certain basilicas, there may have been a fourth, dating to perhaps the end of the sixth century
AD
. Pieces of mosaic have been found on the roadside approaching Delphi (above the gymnasium area—see
plate 1
). This mosaic was found beneath a later chapel dedicated to Saint George, which was itself only removed as part of the excavations in the late nineteenth century. As such, scholars have argued that the mosaic may have belonged to a pre–Saint George chapel basilica.
⁷

Delphi, then, was a curious mix. On the one hand, it had, by the beginning of the sixth century
AD
, a significant Christian community centered around three (possibly four) basilicas, compared to ancient sanctuaries like Olympia that had only one. But this community did not actively destroy the pagan sanctuary or, importantly, the temple of Apollo.
⁸
Instead, we have to imagine a community in which the abandoned temple, still a massive and imposing structure, stood almost parallel to the new, itself rich and ornate, basilica immediately to its north, at the center of a developing urban (and increasingly Christian) community that slowly expanded to take over the rest of the Apollo sanctuary. And at the same time, while there is no sense that the inhabitants of Delphi tried to preserve any parts of the pagan sanctuary (and thus, it seems, had no interest in living off the rewards of Delphi's long-term reputation as a place of valued history and memory), there is no evidence for any kind of organized or willful destruction of it either.
⁹
Indeed, what is fascinating about these changes at Delphi is the way in which Christians seem to have synthesized and incorporated pagan traditions. A lamp, for example, found in the eastern baths at Delphi (those renovated at the beginning of the fourth century
AD
), bears an image of Christ with a serpent at his feet, merging Delphi's snakey mythology with the worship of Christ. Moreover, the fourth basilica dating to the end sixth century
AD
, discovered above the gymnasium, may have been dedicated at this stage (and definitely was later in its history) to Saint George, a saint whose fight with the dragon overlaps directly with pagan Apolline and Delphic mythology.
¹⁰

Apart from the possible construction of a Saint George basilica toward the end of the century, the second half of the sixth century
AD
likely bore witness to a downturn in the degree of opulence apparent in the structures and architecture of the fifth and early sixth century. Houses were abandoned, doors shut up, and cisterns no longer used. At the same time, the area inhabited by the citizens of Delphi significantly contracted. The countryside was abandoned and people huddled together in among poorly built houses and workshops in the central area of the old sanctuary and city. This downturn and contraction may have been the result of the plague of Justinian, but it may also have been the result of a fresh wave of uncertainty in relation to increasing territorial invasion.
¹¹
And in the early seventh century
AD
, Delphi's luck finally ran out. A new series of invasions from the north by the Slavs caused huge devastation across Greece. At Delphi a hastily constructed defensive wall from this era cuts across the gymnasium, abandoning the remains of the Athena sanctuary and city around it—a final attempt to protect the core of the city (see
plate 1
). But it was not to be. The final layer of the city of Delphi shows signs of destruction and wholesale abandonment.
¹²
We hear little from Delphi for over eight hundred years, apart from the occasional inference that small pocket communities were living in among the ruins during the medieval period.

The appearance of the Italian merchant Cyriac of Ancona in the Parnassian mountains of Greece for six days from 21 March
AD
1436 must have caused quite a stir among the sparse local population.
¹³
Cyriac is the first foreigner visitor we know of who went searching for Delphi after the site was abandoned in the early seventh century
AD
. In that time, Delphi had simply faded away. The remnants of its once proud buildings gradually crumbling; its glistening marble and local limestone either buried under, or incorporated into, a new, impoverished and ramshackle settlement known not as Delphi but as Castri; its inhabitants seemingly unaware of the remains over which they built and that, in some cases, still stood visible above the earth.
¹⁴
It is one of the most humbling facts in Delphi's long history that even with its important and glorious past it could be forgotten and lost—even by those who lived on top of it.
¹⁵

What brought Cyriac here in
AD
1436? His interest in the physical remains of the ancient world reflected the growth of the Humanist movement and the First Renaissance in Italy from the early fourteenth century and led by scholars such as Petrarch. Up to this point, western European interest in Greece, let alone Delphi, had been confined to the study of its surviving literary texts. The idea of actually visiting—of seeking the physical remains of classical antiquity—was distinctly unattractive. Since the church schism of
AD
1054, Greece, as part of the Eastern Orthodox Church, had been viewed with suspicion: a place difficult to travel to, unsafe to travel in, and with little assured reward.
¹⁶

Yet by Cyriac's time, there was increased agreement among the Humanists that the rediscovery of classical antiquity was an important step in the process of applying its lessons to the contemporary world. In the early fifteenth century, the Florentine monk Cristoforo Buondelmonti's
Description of Crete
(1414) and
Books of the Islands of the Archipelago
(1422) were best sellers. Cyriac took the search one step further with the idea that “monuments and inscriptions are more faithful witnesses of classical antiquity than are the texts of ancient writers.” His task, as one companion put it, was “to restore antiquity, or redeem it from extinction.”
¹⁷

Cyriac traveled throughout the Mediterranean between 1435 and 1453. He recorded in great detail what he saw, but his notebooks were all but lost in a library fire in Pesaro in 1514. The scant remains tell of his journey to Delphi in March 1436, when he saw the stadium and its theater (which would later disappear from view entirely as generations of rock fall, earth, and habitation covered it); a round building he thought was the temple of Apollo (in fact the Argive semicircle in the southeastern corner of the Apollo sanctuary—see
plate 2
,
fig. 6.2
); several tombs and statues still intact, as well as a large selection of inscriptions.
¹⁸

What would also have been clear to Cyriac as he traveled around Greece and elsewhere during those years—as was becoming increasingly clear also to the rest of Europe—was the advancing power of the Ottomans. In 1453, just seventeen years after Cyriac's visit to Delphi, the sultan launched his final assault on Constantinople, closing the book on
the Byzantine world and rendering Greece part of his dominions. It is a bizarre note in the story of the first person seeking to save the remains of the ancient world from extinction that our last glimpse of Cyriac, in May 1453, finds him standing at the sultan's side (and reading to the sultan relevant sections from the great ancient writers) as the sultan prepares to take Constantinople.
¹⁹