Greek Mythology, page 7
Delphi was one of the great meeting places of the Greeks. Some came to watch or participate in the Pythian Games, whose athletic events took place in the stadium (built in its present form by the second-century AD Herodes Atticus), while contests for the Arts were held in the theatre, and chariot races on the plain at Crisa far below. Others flocked to consult the oracle, which gave its response on the seventh day of each of the nine months when Apollo was in residence. Questions ranged widely – from whether the enquirer would have children to whether and where to found a colony. Many became famous: in the sixth century BC the Lydian king Croesus asked whether he should invade his neighbours, the Persians. The response was that if he crossed the River Halys, the boundary between them, he would destroy a mighty empire. He did. It was his own. At the end of the fifth century BC, the oracle announced Socrates as the wisest man alive (something which the philosopher tried – unsuccessfully – to disprove by posing questions to self-proclaimed experts, all of whom he found wanting). It may have reassured Alexander the Great, arriving imperiously on a non-consultation day, that he was invincible; and in the Roman era, the thirty-year-old Nero was relieved to be told to ‘beware the age of seventy-three’, believing that this was when he would die. Soon afterwards he realized his error, committing suicide rather than face enemies loyal to his seventy-three-year-old general, Galba.
The process of consulting the oracle remains unclear, but petitioners, having first sacrificed and purified themselves in the Castalian Spring, probably put their questions through the priests to the priestess seated on her tripod above the vaporous chasm, while she moaned in her ecstatic trance. The priests then interpreted what she said, presenting an answer neatly composed in hexameters and almost always so equivocal that they could not be blamed if the advice proved unsatisfactory – one of Apollo’s many epithets was Loxias (‘Ambiguous’).
For much of antiquity Delphi was indeed the centre of the Greek world, one of the richest of all sanctuaries. Offerings included gold-and-ivory statues of Apollo from Ionia; a sphinx from Naxos, crouching on a high column; a gold- and silver-plated bull; a bronze column, 8 m (26 ft) tall (dedicated after the Greek victory over Persia at Plataea in 479 BC) in the form of a twisted three-headed Python, which (tripod-like) supported a gold cauldron; as well as countless statues of Apollo, other gods and the great and good of Greece. Here cities and families conspicuously flaunted their wealth, storing it in treasuries or using it to construct or enhance altars and temples. In time almost every god was honoured with a shrine at Delphi, and the sanctuary of Athene Pronaia (‘In Front of the Temple’), home to the well-known tholos (round temple), became particularly prominent.
With temples, treasuries and statues, some of solid gold, many set on ever-higher pillars, Delphi was a magnet for would-be plunderers. Twice Apollo is said to have sent rocks crashing down on invading armies: the Persians in 480 BC, and the Gauls in 279 BC. In the end, Gaia herself intervened, or perhaps it was Poseidon. When an earthquake closed the chasm’s mouth, the oracle spoke no longer.
Other explanations for the oracle’s demise gained legendary status. Christian writers (wrongly) told how, shortly before AD 15, it gave its final utterance: ‘a Hebrew boy, a god who rules the blessed, commands I leave this house for ever and return to Hades. In silence leave my altar.’ Another account tells how a question from Rome’s last pagan emperor, the fourth-century AD Julian the Apostate, was met with the response: ‘Tell this to the emperor: the well-wrought hall has fallen to the ground. No longer does Apollo keep his shrine, his prophesying laurel or his murmuring spring. Even the waters of his spring are dry.’
Today, the massive base and five more-or-less resurrected columns are all that remain of Apollo’s glittering fourth-century BC temple. Gone are the maxims the god is said to have had inscribed high on its walls (‘Know Yourself’; ‘Nothing in Excess’; ‘Certainty Brings Disaster’), though their wisdom is timeless. The temple pediments which so neatly encapsulated Delphi’s duality exist only in fragments – those on the east side showing Apollo (seated on his tripod) with Leto, Artemis and the Muses, a study in poise and harmony, those on the west showing Dionysus and his maenads. Perfection, the Greeks knew, lay in the reconciliation of two opposites. At Delphi, it came close to being achieved.
Delphi
SOME IMPORTANT DATES & REMAINS
C7th BC
Delphic oracle begins to assume international importance.
582 BC
Pythian Games inaugurated.
late C6th BC
Sanctuary enlarged and colonnaded Temple of Apollo built.
373 BC
Temple of Apollo destroyed by earthquake and subsequently rebuilt.
C1st BC
Oracle in decline.
C1st–3rd AD
Reflowering of Delphi, partly as a tourist destination.
AD 391
Christian Roman emperor Theodosius bans pagan religions, including the Delphic oracle.
? AD 424
Last Pythian Games.
There are several parts to the site today. Half a mile east of the modern village, on the left of the main road, the Sacred Way ascends between the remains of once lavish treasuries (including the reconstructed Treasury of the Athenians) on a path formerly flanked by statues. This leads to the partially reconstructed Temple of Apollo with its fine altar, near which a reconstruction of the serpent column is planned. (The remains of the original can be seen in the Hippodrome in Istanbul.) Above is the well-preserved theatre. Still further up is the impressive stadium (no access), rebuilt in stone in the second century AD.
To the left of the main road, visitors pass first the shady Castalian Spring (no access). Further on to the right, a track leads down to the precinct of Athene Pronaia containing the foundations of a number of temples, including the evocative reconstucted tholos. Close by is the gymnasium.
Delphi’s rich Archaeological Museum contains a fourth-century BC copy of the Omphalos and sculptures from different phases of the Temple of Apollo (including its fourth-century pediments) and the Siphnian Treasury, as well as many offerings made at the site from throughout the Classical world. These include two kouroi (statues of male youths; c. 580 BC) – identified as Cleobis and Biton – from Argos; the Naxian Sphinx (c. 560 BC); remains of sixth-century BC Ionian gold-and-ivory statues of Apollo, Artemis and Leto; a life-sized silver and gold bull from the same period; and the exquisite bronze charioteer, traditionally believed to have been dedicated by Polyzelus of Gela in Sicily in around 478 BC following his victory at the Pythian Games. There is also a kylix (cup) showing Apollo with his lyre seated opposite a black crow.
6
Ephesus: Artemis & the Cult of the Mother Goddess
I sing of Artemis, goddess of the golden shafts, the hallowed virgin whose hunting call resounds, who brings down stags, who pours out arrows, blood-sister to Apollo of the golden sword. She curves her golden bow across mountains deep in shadow, across windswept peaks, delighting in the chase, unleashing agonizing arrows. The summits of high mountains tremble and the matted undergrowth of woods resounds to wild beasts’ bellowing. The earth shakes and the fish-infested sea. Boldly she advances far and wide to destroy generations of wild creatures.
Homeric Hymn to Artemis, 1–11
Basking in her nest atop the tall – if somewhat crooked – column, a white stork spreads her wings and gazes languidly around. Hers is an enviable vantage point. Close by to the east is the dusty modern town of Selçuk, its low hill crowned by the towering walls of Ayasuluk Castle. Here too are the sun-washed ruins of St John’s Basilica, whose pure-white columns gleam in the early evening light, while, below, crows roost in the ruined minaret of the Isa Bey mosque. Stretching her neck, the stork looks south to where a ridge of mountains rises from flat farmland, with rich fields of cotton, vineyards, olive groves and orchards ripening with oranges and lemons. But her attention is focused closer and below. For in the low-lying hollow, strewn with tumbled masonry and flanked to the west by tall dark trees, is a reedy swamp, alive with frogs, the easiest of pickings for a lazy stork.
For most who come here, though, the site with its one reconstructed column, its submerged foundations and stray marble fragments has a quite different significance. For this was once the Temple of Ephesian Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, a place of awe and majesty, the echoing, glittering, incense-laden sanctuary of one of antiquity’s most powerful deities. Now it may be little more than a mosquito-haunted swamp, yet in a real sense Artemis is present still. The goddess of nature, the mistress of wild things, the unfettered force of newborn life, she has reclaimed her sanctuary to live on in the teeming reeds and marshland.
The Virgin Artemis
Artemis was one of the most complex and compelling of Greek divinities. Like her twin brother Apollo she was the embodiment of opposites. The protectress of young animals, she delighted in the hunt. An enthusiast for mountain peaks (Homer envisages her ‘with her bow, roaming the high ridges of Tagetus’), she was associated with marshy lowlands (Euripides tells how ‘she wanders the swamps and sand-bars of the sea, and the foaming eddies of the surf’). And despite being an avowed virgin, she was the goddess whose help women most often evoked when in labour. As the elder sibling, Artemis acted as midwife when their mother Leto bore Apollo on Delos – an experience that both qualified her to preside over childbirth (helped by minor deities such as Eileithyia) and ensured she had no wish to endure the process herself.
In his Hymn to Artemis, Callimachus describes how, a precocious toddler, the goddess sat on her father Zeus’ knee and demanded:
Father, let me guard my virginity forever, and give me many titles so that Apollo can’t outdo me. Give me arrows and a bow – wait, father! I’m not asking you for a quiver and mighty bow. Right now the Cyclopes will make me arrows and a supple bowstring! No, but let me be Bringer of Light and wear a belted tunic – knee-length, with an embroidered border – so I can kill wild beasts! And give me sixty daughters of Ocean to dance with me, all nine years old, still children, still wearing young girls’ dresses, and twenty nymphs from the [Cretan River] Amnisus to be my handmaidens, to look after my boots when I’ve finished hunting lynx or stags, and to tend to my hunting dogs. And give me every mountain, but whatever city you see fit – for Artemis goes rarely down into the city!
Enchanted, Zeus agreed, giving her thirty cities and appointing her the guardian of streets and harbours. (Episkopos, which Callimachus uses for ‘guardian’, later meant ‘bishop’.)
Callimachus describes how, having visited Sicily, where the Cyclopes presented her with a Cretan-style bow, quiver and arrows, then Arcadia, where Pan furnished her with hunting hounds, Artemis discovered five hefty hinds with golden horns grazing in a meadow. Resisting her instinct to shoot them, she rounded them up, tamed them and yoked them to her chariot – all bar one, which escaped and later caused Heracles much grief when he was sent from Tiryns to capture it. Artemis then perfected her archery, firing at an elm, an oak and a boar before turning her arrows on ‘a city of unjust men’, whose cattle died and crops withered as old men mourned their sons and women died in childbirth. They were by no means the last to experience her wrath.
The Wrath of Artemis
In her state of perpetual adolescence, Artemis quickly took offence at perceived slights – as one of her attendants, the nymph Callisto, discovered. Like all Artemis’ coterie, she had taken an oath of virginity. But this meant nothing to Zeus, who disguised himself as Artemis and seduced her. Later, while they were bathing, Artemis recognized the signs of Callisto’s pregnancy. Outraged, she showed no mercy. An early poem attributed to Hesiod tells how she changed Callisto into a bear. Others maintained that it was Zeus or Hera who performed the transformation and that Artemis shot her pregnant acolyte with an arrow. Happily, Zeus saved Callisto’s son, Arcas, smuggling him to safety, and turned Callisto into a constellation – the Great Bear. In Classical times bears played a role in worshipping Artemis: girls on the cusp of adolescence serving at Artemis’ sanctuary at marshy Brauron near Athens (where Iphigenia, sacrificed to appease her, was honoured with a hero-shrine) were known as ‘she-bears’.
Artemis watches while Actaeon is torn apart by his own hounds on a metope from Temple ‘E’ at Selinunte, Sicily.
Actaeon, too, provoked Artemis’ anger. A prince of Thebes, he was hunting with his comrades when, straying from the path, he came across a pool in which the goddess and her nymphs were bathing naked. Some say that he tried to rape her; others that when Artemis caught sight of him, she was flustered. She knew that, young as he was, Actaeon would soon be boasting to his comrades, describing her naked body in excruciating detail. So she transformed him into a stag. Bewildered, Actaeon bounded off; his hounds gave chase; the stag was felled; and Actaeon was torn to pieces by his dogs. Pausanias writes that his ghost then terrified the countryside, being placated only when his remains were buried and a bronze statue of him was riveted with iron to a rock.
Artemis of Ephesus & the Amazons
Throughout the rest of Greek world Artemis was imagined as a virgin huntress. But not at Ephesus. Here her cult statue was unique, as surviving copies show. Each is subtly different, but she typically wears a tall crown adorned with winged beasts and topped by a model of the city or its temple, a garland of fruits draped round her neck. On her short cape appear signs of the zodiac, and from her long tight dress rows of animals stand out in sharp relief: lions and griffins, leopards and goats, bulls and bees. But most eye-catching is the profusion of egg-like spheres which cover her from chest to waist. It is unclear what they symbolize. Some say (nipple-less) breasts, others gourds, still others bulls’ testicles. Whatever they are, they clearly proclaim Ephesian Artemis as the essence of fertility.
Why such a difference? When most ancient civilizations met, they delighted in finding similarities between each others’ gods and, where possible, merging them in a process known as syncretism. Usually the resulting deity was recognizable to both cultures. Not so at Ephesus. Here, migrating Greeks apparently discovered an ancient Asiatic goddess of wild animals (perhaps the Great Mother Goddess, Cybele), in whose essence but not appearance they saw similarities with their own goddess of wild nature. A venerated cult statue of this native goddess – which some said had fallen from the skies, a gift from Zeus – was probably already in existence at Ephesus. So the Greek settlers retained her physical attributes, but gave her the familiar name of Artemis.
They also gave her a distinct form of worship, again probably adopted from earlier cult practices. In an exception to the Greek norm, virgin priestesses were augmented by ‘Megabyzi’, eunuch priests like those who served Cybele. Curiously, sources disagree about whether laywomen were allowed into her precinct. The aptly named Artemidorus (‘Gift of Artemis’), a second-century AD writer on dreams and a native Ephesian, wrote that women were forbidden entry on punishment of death.
Ephesian Artemis had her own mythology, too. Local legends told that she was born not on Delos, but at Ephesus itself. As for her cult and statue, Callimachus recognizes their ‘barbarian’ origins:
The Amazons, whose hearts are set on battle, set up a wooden image to you [Artemis] beside the sea at Ephesus beneath an oak tree, and Hippo [their queen] performed the sacrament. The Amazons danced a war-dance round the statue, first with shields and armour, then in a circle with the dancers widely spaced. And pipes played loud, a shrill accompaniment.… Feet beat; quivers rattled. And afterwards a great temple was erected round the wooden statue, richer and more sacred than any other which the dawn might see. It easily surpasses Delphi.
The Amazons’ association with Artemis’ temple at Ephesus was entirely logical. Like the goddess, this legendary tribe of fierce warrior women rejected sex, except when absolutely necessary to increase their numbers. And like Cybele, they were non-Greek, coming from beyond the fringes of the civilized (Greek) world. Fifth-century BC Greeks believed that their home was in Scythia (modern Crimea).
The name ‘Amazon’ was thought to derive from the Greek a-mazos, ‘without a breast’. As the Roman historian Justin explained: ‘These maidens used to exercise with weapons, on horseback and in the hunt. They burned off the right breasts of their young girls so that they would not impede them as they fired their arrows. For this reason they are called Amazons.’ However, Greek sculptors and artists never show this mutilation, and it is more likely that their name derives from the Indo-European hamazan (‘warriors’).
Encounters with Amazons often resulted in a heady mixture of romance and death. When Heracles was sent to steal the battle belt of Hippolyta, the Amazonian queen, his confederate Theseus fell in love with and abducted her sister Antiope, by whom he had a son, Hippolytus (himself an ardent follower of Artemis). In retaliation the Amazons invaded Attica, almost capturing Athens, and their defeat was a popular subject for artists. Pindar writes that it was during this expedition that they founded the temple at Ephesus, establishing its sanctuary as a place of asylum.
At other times Amazons attacked Asia Minor – both Lycia (south of Ephesus), where they were defeated by Bellerophon, and Phrygia, where they fought against Priam, later the king of Troy. In the Trojan War, however, the Amazons took the Trojans’ side against the Greeks, fighting (as Homer admiringly records) ‘like men’. Here, their queen Penthesilea was mortally wounded by Achilles, but as she died Achilles fell in love with her. The late sixth-century BC vase-painter Exekias captured the scene, while the fourth-century AD epic poet Quintus from nearby Smyrna imagined Achilles standing over Penthesilea’s body, gazing on her:
