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a flow of wailing sounds that would be turned into a neat but cryptic prophecy by the attendant priests. An extraordinary set of things was juxtaposed here. On the outside, set in breathtaking natural scenery, there were artistically accomplished buildings, fine statues, and the recreational buildings that belonged in sanctuaries – a stadium and a theatre. But at the core there was a religious mystery that involved the surrender of rationality to wild hallucination. The site was supposed to be the earth’s navel, the point at which its umbilical cord had long ago been attached, and therefore in some sense the centre of the world. An ancient carved stone remains, the omphalos, which stands up from the ground, tied off with sets of sculpted bandages, evidently in imitation of an earlier stone which would have had real bandages tied round it in solemn ceremonies. The place was special, and was a place of pilgrimage. This meant that by classical times, when the temple dedicated to Apollo was built, the priests at Delphi were unusually well informed about what was going on across the whole of the Greek-speaking world, and would therefore have been in a good position to give political advice. The superstitious practice of consulting the oracle would have been effective in part because the weird ululations were interpreted by people who were highly knowledgeable about current affairs. The buildings here, which include some very fine ones, had various functions – marking the centre of the Earth, housing the mysterious oracle, keeping secure the offerings brought by the various states (and the buildings themselves were offerings) as well as housing visitors and priests, and entertaining them with athletics and dramas.

The most famous of the Greek sanctuaries now is the Acropolis in Athens – a rocky plateau that rears up from the floor of a broad valley. In very ancient times it was a fortified citadel, but by classical times it had become a religious sanctuary. Again, there were a number of buildings here, the most famous of which is the Parthenon (Figure 7) which is famously a building of the highest artistic accomplishment, built with astonishing precision, out of blocks of solid marble, very finely and accurately shaped. This was the artistic high point of the Acropolis. The most sacred building, though, was the Erechtheion, a rather quirky asymmetrical building, which seems to have been pushed into its final shape because it had to take account of various immovable features on its site. The tomb of an ancient king of Athens was here, and so was a scar in the rock that had been made when the sea-god Poseidon’s trident, a thunderbolt, had struck the ground when he was fighting with the goddess Athena. The story goes that the ancient city enjoyed the favours of the sea, and of the olive tree, given by Athena, a warrior virgin. When it came to the point at which a decision had to be made as to whose city this was, the two fought for it, and of course Athena won, which is why the city is called after her. At the Erechtheion there was in a courtyard a descendant of the original olive tree that Athena had brought to the city. Also inside there was a folding stool that had been made by Daedalus – the inventor, who had built the labyrinth on Crete, which housed the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull (whose conception Daedalus had engineered). Daedalus was later imprisoned in the labyrinth with his son Icarus, and they escaped when Daedalus made them wings so they could fly away. The story about how Icarus flew too high and came to grief is surprisingly better known than the story of the successful flight that Daedalus himself made. For us this is all plainly mythological, and we do not think of these events as historical facts, but at the Erechtheion there was an ingenious folding stool that had clearly been made by someone. There were other relics of a similar status – very ancient, with mythical provenances – that made the building a remarkable repository of the city’s claims to sacred and cultural authority. The natural features of the