The Pillars of Hercules

Delphi had not been operational since the time of Christ. In the reign of Claudius (A.D. 51), “the site was impoverished and half-deserted,” Michael Grant writes in his Guide to the Ancient World, “and Nero was said to have carried 500 statues away.” Delphi was officially shut down and cleared by the Emperor Theodosius (379–95), who was an active campaigner for Christianity. It is no wonder that what remains of Delphi are some stumpy columns and the vague foundations of the temples—hardly anything in fact except a stony hillside and a guide’s Hellenistic sales pitch. Anyone inspired to visit Delphi on the basis of Henry Miller’s manic and stuttering flapdoodle in The Colossus of Maroussi would be in for a disappointment.

The Greeks had not taken very much interest in their past until Europeans became enthusiastic discoverers and diggers of their ruins. And why should they have cared? The Greeks were not Greek, but rather the illiterate descendants of Slavs and Albanian fishermen, who spoke a debased Greek dialect and had little interest in the broken columns and temples except as places to graze their sheep. The true philhellenists were the English—of whom Byron was the epitome—and the French, who were passionate to link themselves with the Greek ideal. This rampant and irrational phili-Hellenism, which amounted almost to a religion, was also a reaction to the confident dominance of the Ottoman Turks, who were widely regarded as savages and heathens. The Turks had brought their whole culture, their language, the Muslim religion, and their distinctive cuisine not only here but throughout the Middle East and into Europe, as far as Budapest. The contradiction persists, even today: Greek food is actually Turkish food, and many words we think of as distinctively Greek, are in reality Turkish—kebab, doner, kofta, meze, taramasalata, dolma, yogurt, moussaka, and so forth; all Turkish.

Signs at the entrance to Delphi said, Show proper respect and It is forbidden to sing or make loud noises and Do not pose in front of ancient stones.

I saw a pair of rambunctious Greek youths being reprimanded by an officious little man, for flinging their arms out and posing for pictures. The man twitched a stick at them and sent them away.

Why was this? It was just what you would expect to happen if you put a pack of ignoramuses in charge of a jumble of marble artifacts they had no way of comprehending. They would in their impressionable stupidity begin to venerate the mute stones and make up a lot of silly rules. This Show proper respect business and No posing was an absurd and desperate transfer of the orthodoxies of the Greeks’ tenacious Christianity, as they applied the severe prohibitions of their church to the ruins. Understanding little of the meaning of the stones, they could only see them in terms of their present religious belief; and so they imposed a sort of sanctity on the ruins. This ludicrous solemnity was universal in Greece. Women whose shorts were too tight and men wearing bathing suits were not allowed to enter the stadium above Delphi, where the ancients had run races stark ballocky naked. In some Greek places photography of ruins was banned as sacrilegious.

In spite of this irrationality, the place was magical, because of its natural setting, the valley below Delphi, the edge of a steep slope, the pines, the shimmering hills of brilliant rock, the glimpse of Mount Parnassus. Delphi was magnificent for the view it commanded, for the way it looked outward on the world. The site had also been chosen for the smoking crack in the earth that it straddled, that made the Oracle, a crone balancing on her tripod, choke and gasp and deliver riddles.

“‘What kind of child will I give birth to?’ someone would ask the Oracle,” Clea said. “And the Oracle was clever. She would say, ‘Boy not girl,’ and that could mean boy or girl, because of the inflection.”

“I don’t get it,” someone said. “If the Oracle could see the future, why did she bother to speak in riddles?”

“To make the people wonder.”

“But if she really was an Oracle, huh, why didn’t she just tell the truth?”

“It was the way that oracles spoke in those days,” Clea said feebly.

“Doesn’t that mean she really didn’t know the answer?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t that mean she was just making the whole thing up?”

This made Clea cross. But the scholar Michael Grant describes how the prophecies were conservative and adaptable to circumstances, and he writes of the Oracle, “Some have … preferred to ascribe the entire phenomenon to clever stage management, aided by an effective information system.”