The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [112]
Delphi, its columns and treasuries, its walkways polished shiny-wet by human traffic, feels as though it is a stone site simply borrowed from the mountains; that the earth will soon reclaim its own.5
Before you could even consider a visit to Apollo’s oracle here you had to purify yourself with holy water from the Kastalian spring. You can still scoop out the sweet silver-ice trickle, but will find yourself with few companions other than stragglers from an unusually eager tourist group, filling up a bottle for the coach journey home (perhaps in the hope that it still – as it was believed to in the fifth century – brings the muse).
And then Chaerephon would have had to push through the hordes on the Sacred Way, gawping at the material might of civilisations crammed into and onto the state treasuries that lined this thoroughfare. Finds from twentieth-century excavations – for instance, a life-size silver bull, 7½ feet long, three layers of silver sheet pasted over a wooden core – still take our breath away. During one battle amidst the ‘Sacred Wars’, exquisite ivory statues of Apollo and Artemis were burned.6 Both lay buried under the Sacred Way until 1939, when they were stumbled upon by the unsuspecting excavation team and brought, blinking and black, back into the light, their gold headdresses, earrings and necklaces untarnished. Through the carnage these charcoal-dark immortals still wear their enigmatic smiles.
But in comparison with the other treasures on show at Delphi these were nothing. Who could miss the monumental highlights that became legend sooner than they became history: the colossal sphinx, atop a 40-foot-high column, dedicated by the islanders of Naxos as proof of their might in the sixth century; a giant statue of Apollo; friezes of Amazons and Trojan war heroes in red, blue and bronze against a royal-blue background; the Cnidian Clubhouse (a kind of sacred embassy building), gaudy with paintings by the master artist from Thasos, Polygnotos – he who also decorated the Painted Stoa back in Athens. Croesus of Lydia, consulting the oracle before he attacked the Persians, dedicated at Delphi a solid gold lion, rampant on 117 blocks of fine, white gold.
A journey through the site today is so denuded in comparison. The limestone paving stones are polished smooth by human footsteps, and the views – clouds that scud through the plain below, eagles that perch on the highest peaks, twisting valleys that tempt you to imagine what life is like just out of sight – are still heart-stoppingly magnificent. But there is none of the brouhaha that would once have been here. Instead of broken walls, imagine a kaleidoscope of colours on the painted marble surfaces, the greasy smoke of sacrifice – and everywhere the butter-yellow reflection of gilt, silver, gold.
A Lydian tyrant built the first-ever treasury at Delphi. Whatever the political persuasion of the city-state as time went on, these flamboyant treasure-stores, bank-deposits in effect, maintained the same trouble-making, virile, ‘look-at-me-and-tremble’ feel. The Athenians dedicated their own treasury after victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon of 490 BC. Here many oiled and gilded muscles were being flexed.
And so Chaerephon would have made his way to the oracle dazzled by the sparkle and gleam of loot. One-tenth of military booty was expected to be dedicated at a sanctuary, and much of it came to Delphi. Hoplite shields, necklaces, thrones, sections of whole throne-rooms, crystals, spears, teams of golden horses, bangles grabbed from the suppliant arms of the vanquished, were all displayed here.