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8 Plato, Euthyphro, 6a–b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [adapt.] [LCL].

9 This and other fundamental aspects of Greek religion are discussed with great élan by Walter Burkert (1985).

10 Demosthenes, 4.35.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Delphi, the Oracle

1 Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).

2 Today just along the esplanade from modern-day Itea.

3 See Plato’s Apology, 2ia. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [adapt.] [LCL]; also Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Aristophanes’ Clouds, Wasps and Birds.

4 The equivalent of walking to church, temple or mosque through the killing fields of Cambodia or the napalm-blasted pathways of Vietnam. Places that we knew had witnessed hideous suffering; images brought to a mass audience by art (tragedies then, now movies).

5 Of course Apollo is a Johnny-come-lately at Delphi. Originally this was the Python’s place. A holy zone for a serpentine female spirit: Homer’s ‘rocky Pytho’. Myth-stories told of this being the home of Ge, or Gaia, mother-earth. The archaeological remains of Bronze Age female figurines, winkled out of the earth by archaeologists and, haply, by farmers, back up the literature. There is no doubt that for 700 years some kind of female spirit was worshipped here. But then, the stories go, Apollo wrestled the snake-goddess-serpent-dragon, the Python, to the ground. Her spirit slithered away into a cave and the holy hot-spot was his. Visiting in the mid-fifth century BC, it would have been Apollo’s brash, colonnaded temple built partly with Athenian money and shared with Dionysos, a sturdy canopy to contain spirits that dominated the crowded Delphic skyline. The Athenians were particularly keen to stamp their mark. One family (the Alcmaeonids) funded the completion (in marble) of Apollo’s monumental temple started in the sixth century BC.

6 And almost certainly Leto – although there are no extant remains.

7 Pindar, Pythian, 7.12.

8 Porphyry, On Abstinence, 2.9; HN 4 n.13.

9 See De Boer and Hale (2000), 399–412; De Boer, Hale and Chanton (2001), 707–10. Broad (2006).

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Gnothi Seauton – Know Yourself

1 Trans. O. J. Todd (1992). See also Plato, Apology, 21a; Gorgias, 447a; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.48.

2 Nb Both Chaerephon’s visit to Delphi and the date of this putative visit are uncertain.

3 Pausanias, 10.24.1.

4 Scholiast to Plato, Phaedrus, 229e.

5 Macrobius, Dream of Scipio, 1.9.2.

6 The Hellenic Ministry for Culture claims the pronaos (inner portico) was most likely.

7 Aristotle is reported as having said that Socrates, not Chaerephon, went to Delphi, but this is a relatively unstable source. Diogenes, Laertius, 2.23.

8 Cf. Herodotus, 7.141.

9 Pindar, Pythian, 7.9–13. Trans. B. L. Gildersleeve (1890).

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Aristocrats, democrats and the realities of war

1 See Hatzilambrou, Parsons and Chapa (2007), 15.

2 Deighton (1995), 34.

3 See pg. 15, The Oxyrhyncus Papyri, Volume LXXI, ed. R. Hatzilambrou, P. J. Parsons and J. Chapa, Egypt Exploration Society, London, 2007.

4 There were also pretend equids all around: painted and Amazon-mounted on the walls of the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Stoa; free-standing in bronze outside the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios, – the Stoa of Zeus of Freedom, in gaudily coloured terracotta on the roof of the Royal Stoa – the place where Socrates had been charged with his crimes, moulded into tiny models to be offered as votives for the gods in sanctuaries and shrines across the heaving market-place. See also, e.g., The Four-Horse Chariot of Helios, ACR. 19052, and the Four-Horse Chariot of Selene, ACR. 19053, 19054.

5 The writer-general was a huge admirer of Socrates’ thought, and a former pupil of the philosopher.

6 Xenophon, The Cavalry Commander, 3.2. Trans. E. Marchant and G. W. Bowestock (1925) [LCL].

7 Plato, Republic, 2.373e. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).

8 Thucydides, 3.48.

9 Spartans captured from the battle on Sphacteria, an island adjacent to Pylos, in 425 BC. Cf. Powell (1988), 165–70; 237–8.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Peloponnesian War,