(electronic flares whooshing)
(majestic music)
By the mid-fourth century this was one of
the most awe-inspiring and spectacular places
in the entire ancient world.
Its combination of art, religion,
money made it, in modern day terms,
the equivalent of the wealth of the Swiss banks,
the religious power of the Vatican,
the advertising potential of the World Cup,
and the historical importance of
all the world's museums combined.
This is Delphi on the slope of
Mount Parnassus in Central Greece.
Home of the great Oracle of Apollo,
Delphi was the omphalos, the belly button,
the center of the ancient world.
According to ancient myth, Zeus sent two eagles
from opposite ends of the earth
and this is where they met.
It was several days journey from
the main cities of the ancient Greek world.
Yet, for centuries, not just ordinary people,
but kings and ambassadors from great cities
and empires, struggled up here in search of
answers to the most puzzling questions.
Fundamentally, they came here to ask
the oracle of the god Apollo about the future.
But, however unwelcome, unhelpful,
indeed awful those responses were, they kept coming.
Why?
And why do we still come here as tourists today?
For me, it was because Delphi told
the ancient Greeks something about themselves.
Indeed, above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo
where they went to see the oracle
was a simple inscription.
It said, gnothi seauton, know thyself.
And that message, I think, isn't just
important to the ancient Greeks.
I believe that know thyself, the message
of Delphi and everything that was incarnate
in this place, still has meaning
and importance for us today.
(mysterious music)
(footsteps crunching gravel)
What the tourists see here at Delphi
has only been like this for just over a century.
Before that it was a lost world.
(crowd chattering)
Scholars knew that Delphi had been
one of the most important sanctuaries in ancient Greece,
but it was buried beneath earth,
rocks and centuries of legend.
The answer was to dig and just about
everybody had their shovels at the ready.
Ever since the Renaissance, the Europeans
had looked to ancient Greece as
the foundation of Western culture.
By the 1890s, American, French, and German teams
were negotiating with the Greek government
for the right to excavate.
Eventually, in 1892, the French won the race.
They sweetened the deal by lowering tariffs
on imported Greek currants and olive oil.
Ever since, they have led the search for ancient Delphi.
(men speaking French)
When I first began studying the sanctuary
as a young post graduate, French scholars
like Dominique Mulliez were an enormous inspiration.
The first problem for the archeologists
was that there were people still living
right on top of the ancient sanctuary.
Despite the difficulties, the sanctuary
and its lost treasures gradually began
to emerge from the soil.
The legend became a real place with an iconic reputation.
In ancient times it had been
a communal sanctuary visited freely
by people from all over the ancient world.
Now once again people flocked to Delphi.
It became a beacon for internationalism
just like the modern Olympic games,
which were founded at the same time in the 1890s.
And in fact, Delphi still is
a beacon for internationalism.
Here's how ICOMOS, the UNESCO organization,
described Delphi when they made it
a World Heritage Site in 1986.
"This reaffirms that one of the enduring
"missions of Delphi is to bring together
"men and women who otherwise remain
"divided by material interests."
But is that true?
And if so, how and why did Delphi
get such a reputation?
The only way to answer that is to find out
what was really going on at this site
thousands of years ago.
(sweeping majestic music)
At its height, the sanctuary at Delphi
covered more than 100 acres.
The temple itself was surrounded by
hundreds of votive buildings, treasure houses,
porticoes and statues, all of them built
by grateful visitors.
Some of them had come hundreds of miles.
They included rulers from across the ancient world,
from the legendary King Midas in
the eighth century B.C., to the Roman Emperor,
Hadrian, a thousand years later.
And the visitors came for the oracle,
to ask the god Apollo for answers
to their questions about the future.
But what actually happened when they got here?
Well, luckily, one of the several accounts
we have is the writings of a real insider.
He was a priest at the temple, called Plutarch.
What Plutarch tells us is that
the oracle operated on only nine days each year.
On those days, crowds of worshipers
would queue to ask their question.
Now faced with the front of the Temple of Apollo,
the inscription, know thyself,
the consultant had to decide
what their question would be.
Some examples, King Croesus from Lydia
in modern day Turkey, wanted to come and ask
whether he should attack his next-door enemy empire.
Or the Athenians, when they were faced
with the Persian invasion came here to ask
what should they do.
But the thing is, we don't know
exactly how the consultation took place.
But if we get inside the temple,
perhaps we can get a better idea.
(insects rattling)
And here we are, inside the sacred
Temple of Apollo, following in the footsteps
of the people who came to consult the oracle,
moving from the public front end
of the temple towards the back,
the inner sanctum, the most sacred area.
And it's here that French archeologists,
in the most recent plan of the temple,
have discovered something new.
Here, this rectangular structure,
what they're calling an oikos,
which may well be what the literary sources
talk about as the adyton, the home
of the Pythian priestess herself.
But the thing is, we still don't know
for sure the mechanics of what actually
happened in this space.
What we do know is that the oracle was a woman.
(woman singing operatically)
The priestess was said to sit
on top of a tripod set over a chasm
in the rock from which vapors rose.
She was reputed to breathe in the vapors
and answer in a trance as if inspired by Apollo.
The priestess gave her answers to
the applicant's question from within the trance
and once she had spoken, the applicants
then had to try to understand what she had said.
So what was the prophetic vapor
that induced trances in the priestess?
Well, we now know that Delphi's geology
produced hallucinogenic fumes.
The sanctuary grew up at a place
where two geological faults crossed.
And here on the temple floor,
you can see the signs of subsidence
caused by the two faults.
And right beside the temple and its oracle,
is a telltale deposit.
This is travertine, formed when
water releases hydrocarbons, which it can
only accumulate if it exists around a fault line,
another sign, another piece of evidence
that the geological fault line runs
right through the temple here at Delphi.
Recent tests showed that one of
those hydrocarbons is the gas, ethylene,
which is known to affect the working of the brain.
That could explain the trance.
But geology can only explain why
the priestess was here in this exact position.
It can't help us explain why Delphi
became such a spectacular sanctuary,
and why it maintained its reputation
in the ancient world for over 1,000 years.
(mysterious music)
If we examine Greek religion itself, however,
things become clearer.
After all, oracles were a basic element
of ancient Greek religious traditions
and they included some sometimes
quite bizarre beliefs.
And to understand the religion of
ancient Greece, you have to understand
that there were gods in everything and everywhere,
Poseiden in the sea, Hades in the underworld,
but nymphs in the grottoes and the caves,
Pan around you.
Every tree, every bush had a god.
And in that world, the gods had to be worshiped.
They had to be prayed to,
to Demeter to fertilize your fields,
or Athena to watch over your city
or your industry.
You had to make sacrifices.
You met the gods in your dreams.
They cured your illnesses.
They were everywhere and they could
be for you or against you.
So you had to do your utmost to ensure
that they were on your side.
(car rumbling on gravel)
These ideas go back to the very
beginnings of ancient Greece.
I'm on my way to one of the oldest
sacred places in the area.
It lies even higher up Parnassus,
behind the Delphi peaks, right off the tourist map.
It was one of the many places where
the ancients came to make offerings
to their many gods.
This is the Corycian Cave,
sacred to Pan, the god of the countryside,
and to the Muses.
(mysterious music)
(water trickling)
It was only in 1969, some eight decades
after Delphi began to be excavated,
that scholars began to investigate
this place properly.
What they found was amazing.
Some of the objects had been put here
nearly 7,000 years ago, long before
the Oracle at Delphi began to develop.
Most of them weren't as old as that,
but all of them were very different
from the statues and great buildings
which the French had found at Delphi.
They found lots of things like this at the cave.
Perfume jars,
small oil flasks.
Things like necklaces and rings.
They were all very low-key, very personal,
and demonstrate the close and continuous
relationship between the local Delphians
and their visitors coming here to worship
their local gods in this cave.
Offerings in places like this were designed
to keep the gods on side, but the excavators
discovered the cave was more than
just a place to make offerings.
There was something else found here, in fact,
25,000 knucklebones, animal knucklebones.
Now, knucklebones in ancient Greece
were used by kids as part of a game,
and they may have been dedicated here at the cave
as part of a ceremony that symbolized the transition
between childhood and adulthood
on the eve of marriage, for example.
But about 20% of these knucklebones
were also inscribed with the names of gods,
and some of them even started to look like dice.
And in fact, we also found dice,
ancient dice here in the cave.
Now this is interesting because dice
are sometimes associated with a cheaper, easier oracle.
So the cave was also used for divination,
a simple kind of oracle.
The aim was to lift the curtain between
the natural world and the supernatural
world of the gods.
This cave was an arena for spiritual communication
going back thousands and thousands of years,
but down below, in the sanctuary
of Apollo at Delphi, it was just all
on a very different scale.
Here, you had farmers, shepherds, local villagers
coming to consult perhaps a dice oracle.
Down below you had tyrants, cities,
emperors, kings coming to ask their questions,
questions that would define the history
of the ancient world.
Although the Delphic Oracle emerged
from traditions like this, Delphi itself
began as a typical settlement of
the high country of Central Greece.
And the earliest remains indicate,
not a religious center, but a prosperous town.
According to Catherine Morgan,
one of the leading experts on early Delphi,
it was the geography here which
may have made the difference.
It's a very well-connected area.
We're pretty close to the major
mountain passes coming down from the north.
We're right on a major east-west waterway.
It's a really major junction.
Here, we've got an amazingly fertile plain.
We've got quite a nice harbor.
And then we've got good pastureland up above.
So all resources are here.
It's a seriously big place.
It's not specifically a place of
pilgrimage or sanctuary, but it is
a community with a religious center.
(serene music)
Its location on long distance trade routes
brought visitors to Delphi in increasing numbers,
and the reputation of Delphi's local oracle
began to spread.
From 800 B.C. onwards it began to attract
interest and offerings from further and further afield.
At first they were small bronze statues
of warriors and praying worshipers.
Later, they ran to giant bronze cauldrons,
and gold and silver, too.
The Oracle was heading for stardom
and the economic effects were enormous.
Almost from the minute you've separated
the sanctuary from the local surroundings,
you're creating a cocoon.
You've got something that requires,
is very, very high maintenance.
It's requiring an awful lot of sacrificial animals,
lodgings, et cetera, et cetera.
Where you gonna get it from?
You're warping the local economy to do that,
and certainly a lot of what we know implies
an increasingly rich pastoral economy supplying Delphi.
(bus engine rumbling)
So Delphi's international career
began for real in the seventh century B.C.,
and it's a career which still continues today.
In one way, modern Delphi is a reincarnation
of the ancient sanctuary.
How ya doin'?
Comin' live from Delphi.
(people laughing)
It still brings people from all over the world.
They come now to learn about the past
not the future, but they bring with them
stories about the present.
Canada's gotten off pretty scot-free
with regards to the economic crisis.
They bring information in huge quantities.
Huge riots.
Every single store front window was smashed.
To find out what's going on around the world,
you hardly need to leave Delphi's cafes.
The new line that they've been promising
for at least five years now, it's,
the cuts are coming in slowly.
Ancient Delphi was just the same.
A huge mixture of visitors, and the more people who came,
the more information came with them.
Information which the priests and the oracle could use.
So Delphi's answers were better informed
and much more likely to make sense.
(tourists chattering)
But the oracle's answers were also famous
for their ambiguity.
They were only a basis for interpretation,
and to deal with that, you had to know yourself.
When the Athenians went to ask about
what they should do about the Persian invasion
they were told, trust in your wooden walls.
They had to figure out what that meant.
They decided it meant the wooden walls of their ships,
and they turned out to be right.
But King Croesus, when he asked about
whether or not he should attack
his neighboring empire, he was told,
if you attack, a great empire will fall.
He interpreted that to mean his enemies.
It turned out to be his own.
He even complained to the oracle
about the response he had got,
but the response came back to him saying,
it was your fault, your misinterpretation.
The ambiguity of the response forces
the question back on us, forces us to know ourselves.
(mellow music)
Once the oracle took off, Delphi took off with it.
It became the focus for a whole range
of other activities as people began
to come here in huge numbers.
And it was all good business for
a thriving city which surrounded the sanctuary.
Imagine what this place must have
been like at full capacity.
When the games were on maybe up to
40,000 people in the stadium, here in the theater
watching the athletic and musical competitions.
At night, gathered around the landscape,
around their campfires glittering
all over the valley.
The animals that had to be brought here,
not just to sacrifice but also
to feed that many people.
The noise, the smell, all the tourists
coming in and out as Delphi became
more and more famous.
And in amongst that, the Temple of Apollo,
and perhaps the consultants waiting desperately
for the next available day to see the oracle.
All that crammed into one crag
of the Parnassian mountains.
(light bouncy music)
Perhaps the most important international event
at Delphi was the athletic festival
called the Pythian Games.
(crowd cheering)
It took place every four years
and rivaled the Olympics.
At the top of the sanctuary there was
a spectacular stadium.
Here they ran running races.
Elsewhere, there was boxing, all-in wrestling,
and chariot racing.
(crowd cheering vigorously)
The athletes competed naked and their struggles
for victory attracted spectators
from all over the Greek world.
And the winners dedicated monuments
to celebrate their victory.
One of Delphi's most famous treasures is the Charioteer.
It was discovered in three separate pieces
right at the beginning of the excavation.
Six feet high, it's one of the few
Greek sculptures to survive in bronze.
And the statue still preserves
its original inlaid eyes,
bits of the silver and copper headband,
and even some silver teeth.
The Charioteer was a magnificent cry of triumph
in honor of a tyrant from faraway Sicily.
His horses had won the chariot race
and he wanted the world to know it.
But the triumphant horses are missing
and all that is left to us is the clothed
figure of the slave who drove them to victory.
Athletics and religion may seem for us
like uncomfortable bedfellows,
but for the ancient Greeks it couldn't
have been more natural.
People came to sanctuaries to honor and worship
the gods, and athletic and musical competitions
were a great way of doing that.
In fact, over here is one of the best
examples of just how tight that relationship
between religion and athletics was.
It's an instruction in the wall of the stadium
saying that wine, (speaks Greek),
may not be taken out, out of the stadium.
Not into as we might expect.
Out of the stadium because they were
actually making sacrificial wine
inside the stadium to use in sacrifices
that would have preceded the athletic competitions,
and if you did take that wine out of
the stadium, you got fined at least
five drachmas and had to make
additional sacrifices to the god.
(majestic music)
Competition in the stadium wasn't
the only kind going on at Delphi.
Down below in the sanctuary, peoples and cities
vied with one another to shower the gods
with ever grander dedications.
They turned the whole place into
an echo chamber of competing voices
coming alive from Delphi, a giant information exchange.
It wasn't just that information
was coming into Delphi, it was also
being broadcast in a very public way.
In a world without mass communication technology
Delphi was the giant notice board,
the ancient equivalent of Piccadilly Circus,
Times Square New York, or even
the advert breaks in Britain's Got Talent.
If you had a message to get across,
Delphi was the place to do it.
(strong dramatic music)
That message could be carried in many ways,
through elegant sculpture or expensive buildings,
or precious vases.
But more simply, it could also be done through a text.
Everywhere there are inscriptions on the buildings.
So far, scholars have counted more than
3,000 individual texts, some of them
running to hundreds of words.
Literally, Delphi was the Greek world's notice board.
And these dedications, in all their forms,
came from individuals and cities near and far.
Dedications arrived from cities more than
1,000 miles away, like the Greek colony
at Marseille in France.
They came from all kinds of places
and all kinds of people.
And Plutarch in his descriptions of
his travels and visits to the sanctuary
talks about one evening when he was
walking with friends and they came across
the dedication of a certain Rhodopis,
Rhodopis from the city of Naucratis in Egypt.
Now, Rhodopis was a prostitute, or courtesan,
and she'd made so much money that she had
dedicated piles of iron spits in the sanctuary
along with an inscription saying just how she'd earned it.
Plutarch's friends were indignant.
(dramatic music)
Some of the Greeks came here to know themselves.
What did they learn from the myriad of messages
that were being broadcast from this place?
Lesson number one seems actually
to have been, show thyself.
And the bigger and bolder, the better.
In around 550 B.C., the people of
the tiny island of Sifnos discovered
gold and silver mines on their island.
In thanksgiving, they built themselves
a treasure house to hold their offerings
to Apollo at Delphi.
It was packed with gold, silver, and other rich gifts.
Even in the context of this opulent sanctuary
it was a spectacular building,
but today there's almost nothing left to see.
So even though I'm no artist, I find it helps
to try to draw what was once there to
get some idea of its magnificence.
What you can see here today is just the foundations.
It was on top of those that they placed
the Siphnian marble brought all the way
from their home island.
This was, in fact, the first building
at Delphi to be made entirely of marble.
And on top of the Siphnian marble walls,
sculpture in marble.
And they didn't stint there either with the decoration.
They commissioned some of Greece's
finest sculptors to adorn their treasury
and they put the most spectacular scene
on the wall facing the path up to the temple
where everyone could see it.
It depicted the great Greek myth
about the war between the gods and the giants,
carved with incredible depth and skill
to make the figures leap out at the viewer.
The ancient equivalent of the 3D movies.
In front, the portico was supported
by two enormous caryatid columns.
And unlike what we see today,
all the sculpture was brightly painted
and inlaid with precious metals to make
the details of the sculpture stand out.
And if that seems flashy, well,
that's exactly what it was meant to be.
Over time, this kind of thing gave Delphi
a collection of sculpture almost
unparalleled in the ancient world,
but we also have to remember this,
for the Greeks statues were not just stone.
They were potentially animate.
They lived, they breathed, they responded.
So when we look around here, we shouldn't
see statues made of dead stone or bronze,
but statues shimmering with life.
The Siphnian Treasury marks the cusp
of the classical age of ancient Greece,
an age of which Delphi was going to be the beating heart,
but it was more than that.
Delphi was the historical log book of the age.
As every key moment in history was
represented here in bronze, gold, marble,
so that history began to accumulate
a power of its own.
And when the Greeks came here to ask the oracle
who they were as the oracle demanded,
Delphi itself provided a kind of answer,
an answer that was growing all the time.
At this time, the answer seemed to be
that they were winners.
The sanctuary became a kind of trophy chest
of Greek victories in war, and in particular,
their victories in the epic struggle against the Persians.
The initial Athenian victory at Marathon
in 490 B.C., and the clinching victories
at Salamis in 480 B.C., and Plataea the following year.
In celebrating these victories, they created an ideal,
that of Greek unity.
And it was first celebrated where else
but right here at the omphalos at Delphi.
I worked beside Anne Jacquemin when I first began
to study the sanctuary.
Now she and her colleagues have made
an extraordinary discovery which has
finally confirmed the importance
of Delphi as a unifying space.
It concerns the inscription on the base
of the giant statue of Apollo,
which the cities who fought at Salamis
put up outside the temple.
Unfortunately, the statue's
dedicating inscription is damaged.
The first word identifying the dedicator is missing.
Until this time, almost all dedications
had been by individual people or cities.
But here we know that the last word, anethen,
is in the plural, and the physical
alignment of the letters cuts down
the possibilities.
So the Salamis monument was saying
something completely new, that there was
a community who thought of themselves as Greeks
and it was not only united, but victorious.
This is exactly the kind of unifying message
that so excited the original excavators,
and indeed, still excites UNESCO and
other international bodies today.
The idea that Greece in the ancient world
was one nation, one country, one idea.
And it is an amazing idea.
Greece in the ancient world, most Greek cities
spent all their time at each other's throats.
Not in unity.
And this statue became a crucial marker
in the sanctuary as a result.
It was known as (speaks Greek), the big man.
This idea of Greek unity continued
to inspire dedications at Delphi.
On the same terrace, a year or two later,
another dedication went up.
It became the most famous of all Delphi's monuments.
(ethereal music)
It celebrated the victory against
the Persians at Plataea
and on it were carved the names of
the cities who had contributed soldiers.
It was a huge bronze column made of
three coiled serpents supporting at
the top, a golden tripod bowl.
The serpent column was a staggering
nine meters high, and it was to become
the defining icon of Delphi.
But today in Delphi, there's only
a replica, five feet tall.
The victory at Plataea was an amazing moment.
Individual little cities of Greece
had managed to defeat the greatest
empire in the Mediterranean,
and from that point Greek unity would
be sung as an ideal by the poets,
praised by the philosophers,
aimed at by the politicians, but it was
always an ideal at risk from the traditional
rivalries that made Greece what it was.
Rivalries on display here in the sanctuary.
Even on the terrace surrounding
the serpent column, individual cities
put up still bigger monuments to their own glory.
Despite the idealism, the competition continued.
(middle eastern music)
In that competition, one city took the lead,
Athens, which ruled the roost for four decades
from 480 B.C. to 440 B.C.
It was Delphi's advice to the Athenians
to rely on the wooden walls of their fleet
which had helped preserve the city
in the Persian wars.
And that fed an Athenian cultural explosion
which can still be heard today as classical art,
philosophy, and literature were transformed.
(Greek folk music)
Modern Greece has always looked back
at that time as a golden age.
Even today, there is a nod to the Delphian
way of doing things.
Just as in Delphi, ancient Greeks put up
statues and inscriptions about their victories,
here on the podium of the Parliament Building
in Athens are the battle honors of the modern Greeks,
right up to Alamein and Korea.
(rhythmic clapping)
It's no surprise that the modern day
capital of Greece is Athens.
From the balmy days after the Persian Wars
it was the city of Athens that benefited most.
They had their fleet.
They took the fight to the enemy
and then they created an empire
that spanned much of the ancient Greek world.
(majestic music)
Success allowed the Athenians to decorate
their city with some of the most beautiful
buildings the world has ever seen.
And to fund a political system whose ideals
we still live by today, and even fight wars over,
more than two and half thousand years later.
It was in Athens that democracy was born
and the idea that votes, not wealth
or breeding, should determine politics.
Not far from the city center, you can climb
a hill where it all happened,
where the state assembly met, composed of
the whole voting population,
and astonishingly enough, the speaker's podium
still survives here in the middle
of the flat space where the citizens stood.
Most people think of the Parthenon
as the center of ancient Athens,
but I believe that this place is much more important.
This was the assembly of the ancient Athenians
where they came to make every decision,
including going to war.
This was the place that allowed Pericles
later to claim that Athens was
an education to all of Greece.
And in fact, just centuries later,
it was the governing council at Delphi
who put it perhaps best.
"It was the Athenian people, being the fount
"and origins of all things beneficial to humanity
"that raised mankind from a bestial existence
"to a state of civilization."
For those who built the modern state of Greece,
and for those who excavated at Delphi,
that idea was a irresistible call
to unpack the ancient world and to make it
part of their and our identity.
From then on know thyself meant knowing ancient Greece.
(birds chirping)
Amazingly, we do know an enormous amount
about that democracy.
We can actually see it in action.
In a remote corner of the university district
is the state Epigraphic Museum.
I like it because it contains direct evidence
of how the Athenian democracy worked.
Here is the machine which decided by lot
who was to sit on 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, Nicostratos
and Philokomos who were killed near the Black Sea.
Here are pottery sherds which bear the names
of Athens's most famous politicians,
Themistocles 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.
(speaks Greek)
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 Perisan Wars onwards, Athens festooned
the sanctuary at Delphi with monuments
in order to hammer home their dominance over Greece.
(foreboding music)
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 the 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.
(dramatic music)
(water splashing)
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.
(ethereal music)
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 the Spartan portico.
(pencil scratching)
It's not just that these real-life wars
were represented by the 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.
By increasingly, the story that 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.
(people chattering) (light airy music)
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 the mid-fourth century,
a new power began to take over Greece,
that of Macedon, Philip of Macedon and his son,
Alexander the Great who would come
to take over not just 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 B.C., everything changed.
A new power took over, Rome.
(dramatic music)
For Greeks, the Roman conquest meant
the end of their independence.
But Greece's prestige meant that Roman leaders
still found it useful to emphasize their power
at Delphi with a series of magnificent monuments.
Moreover, their religious outlook was very similar
so some of the sanctuary's most beautiful
treasures date from that time.
The stadium was rebuilt in stone
and the Temple of Apollo restored.
They even expanded the gymnasium and added
eight characteristically Roman plunge pools.
Yet something had changed.
Delphi was no longer in the political mainstream.
By the first century A.D. we find even
Plutarch and his friends lamenting
that the oracle was no longer the political
arbiter it had been.
But even though the oracle was no longer
being heeded on the international stage,
Delphi still had its place.
Even the most important people in
the Hellenistic and Roman world
tried to justify their importance
by placing themselves here at Delphi.
The ironies of those mottoes, know thyself
and nothing in excess continued.
But then, something happened which did
finally bring a halt to Delphi's story.
And to understand what that was
we need to go a very long way indeed.
(men chanting)
In the fourth century A.D., the Roman Emperor,
Constantine converted to Christianity.
He founded a new capital for the empire.
It's now known as Istanbul, but the emperor
renamed it Constantinople, after himself,
and it was a Christian capital.
Not long afterwards, one of his successors
banned divination in the political field
and a decade after that, another Roman Emperor
banned the ancient gods completely.
In 360 A.D. the last pagan emperor, Julian,
sent a question to the oracle back at Delphi.
But the sources say that this is the only
response he received.
"Tell the king the fair wrought hall
"has fallen to the ground,
"the water of speech even, is quenched."
The oracle at Delphi had finally fallen silent.
(choir singing in foreign language)
Now a museum, once a mosque, this building
began life as the great church of Hagia Sophia.
It was built by one of Constantine's successors
as the state church of the new Christian empire.
The emperors decreed that the center
of the world, the omphalos,
was no longer at Delphi, it was here.
The emperors were crowned here at Hagia Sophia
in a place they called the Omphalion.
The architecture and symbolism here show
all too clearly how the world of classical Greece
had been transformed forever.
This place's name, Hagia Sophia, means holy wisdom,
but not the kind of wisdom, that edgy,
self-awareness that was on display at Delphi.
Here that wisdom is part of a monotheistic
religious orthodoxy, and the politics
it represents isn't that of the showing off
and elbow-shoving of the classical Greeks.
Here, it's all about an absolute, incontestable autocracy.
And in that very new world, the omphalos,
is now the place where the Byzantine
emperors themselves were crowned.
But astonishingly, here in this city
there is still a direct link back to
the days when Delphi had been
the center of the ancient world.
In the emperor's new capital there had
to be a stadium for chariot races.
Bigger and better than racetracks
anywhere else, including Rome.
Within the middle, where everyone could see it,
cultural booty from all around the empire.
And from Delphi they brought perhaps
the most potent symbol of all,
the Serpent Column, symbol of Greek unity
and of Greece's heroic past.
And here it is battered and broken,
imprisoned, overshadowed by the obelisks
on either side, forgotten.
The Serpent Column of Plataea from
the fifth century B.C. that stood
opposite the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
And the names still just barely legible
on the coils are those cities and states
who came together to fight against
the Persian invasion of Greece.
You know, I often wonder that if the bronze
and stones of the ancient world could talk,
what would they say to us, and this creature
would have a lot of stories to tell.
Not just the 800 years or so it spent at Delphi,
but its history after that.
That it came here to Constantinople, one day Istanbul.
It was placed in the Hippodrome,
the charioteers it saw racing around it.
The wars, the crusades.
It got turned into a fountain at one point.
And it's incredibly sad sight to see it
now today, forgotten in something
almost akin to a bit of a rubbish dump.
But we have to remember this piece
is almost 2,500 years old, and for me,
that makes it a miracle that it's here at all.
(majestic orchestral music)
For this small town on the side
of a Greek mountain, it's been
an astonishing career.
Delphi has been a local shrine
and an arbiter of international events,
a focus of national unity, and
an arena for intense political rivalry.
And its messages, know thyself and
nothing in excess, still reverberate.
For me the message is actually,
think about yourselves in relation
to others and understand yourselves
in relation to others.
Delphi is referred to in the ancient world
often as a theatrum, their word for spectacle,
our word for theater, a place where
people came to watch, but also
to be seen, to discuss, to debate,
to think about themselves and about
the world around them.
And Delphi is still doing that for us today.
It's broadcasting many different messages
to many different people.
But for me, it's about that double-edgeness
that Delphi has, that ambiguity
and yet, clarity, that unity and yet rivalry,
the constant reinvention of what Delphi is
that forces the question in the reflection
back on us and makes us think about ourselves,
our limitations, and ultimately
about our own humanity.
(sweeping majestic music)
(electronic flares whooshing)