AFTER entering the Gulf of Corinth the first port at which the steamers touch is Patras, the largest city in the Peloponnesus, with about 40,000 inhabitants,—looking across to Missolonghi on the northern shore, where Byron died and where his heart is buried. The only notable thing about Patras in pre-Christian times was its inclusion in the AchÆan League, that last outburst of the Hellenic love of independence. In modern times it has had the distinction to be the first city to raise the national flag in the War of Liberation (1821). Its patron saint is St. Andrew, who has a cathedral dedicated to him, with a crypt in which his bones are said to have their resting-place. It is a prosperous and well-built city, with a picturesque country behind it, rich in vines and olives, and in front of it the inland sea which is the great highway of Greek commerce. But its chief interest for the traveller is the fact that it is the place at which arrangements can best be made for visiting Delphi and Olympia, two of the most attractive spots in Greece.

Delphi is situated on the mainland. To reach it the traveller has to sail across from Patras to Itea, a small port at the head of the famous CrisÆan Gulf. The drive from Itea to Delphi on a fine April day is one of the finest in the world. For a few miles you hold northward along the plain, passing through a long forest of olive trees, with gnarled and twisted trunks, the fresh leaves glistening in the sun and changing colour in the breeze, shafts of glowing light shooting through the branches. In the distance rise hills on hills, crowned by the snowy summit of Parnassus. But it is not till you leave the plain and turn to the right, slowly ascending by a zigzag route to the village of Chryso, the ancient Crisa, that you begin to realise the sublimity of the surroundings. The solemn grandeur of the mountains is above you. Below lies the fertile plain, which was dedicated to Apollo and became the scene of the Pythian Games when they reached their full development. As you look down, the olive wood presents a new appearance and seems to wind, like a great river of oil, towards the sea, whose rock-bound coast, in the opening made by the bay at which you landed, shows the pink, white, and blue houses of Itea sparkling in the sun. The Gulf of Corinth, of which you can only catch glimpses now and then, might pass for a great lake, bordered by the hills of Achaia in the south, and surmounted in the far distance by the glittering summits of Erymanthus and Cyllene, which rise to a height of 7000 or 8000 feet. In the course of the journey you may often come upon a mass of flowers, sometimes covering the slope on the roadside, sometimes running into the field and mingling with the ripe corn, which the rustics are reaping with the old-fashioned hook. The most conspicuous and abundant of all the flowers is the large scarlet poppy, which might be counted by the thousand, and often spreads over a great extent of ground. After passing Crisa, almost the only signs of life we saw on the way were flocks of black goats with their tinkling bells, and a long string of heavy-laden camels, with their young ones running by their side, moving along in solemn procession from the east.

As we approached Delphi, the view presented sterner outlines and a wider range, embracing the dales and gorges of the Pleistus valley, and the rugged hills of Cirphis on the south, as well as the mighty range of Parnassus, with its outlying spurs and precipices. Of these the most remarkable and the most celebrated are the PhÆdriadÆ or shining peaks, overshadowing the ancient sanctuary of Apollo, which was for centuries the religious centre of the Greek world, as the Vatican was to mediÆval Christendom. The world-wide influence exerted by the Delphian oracle is one of the most interesting facts in all history. It was characteristic of the Hellenic as compared with the Hebrew mind that the oracle should hold such a prominent place in the national religion: for it was a religion dominated by the imagination rather than the conscience. At the same time it should not be forgotten that, until its decadence, the oracle was more frequently consulted

for guidance in the practical affairs of life than merely to gratify curiosity as to future events. The Delphian oracle originated, no doubt, in the superstitious awe which the place inspired as the supposed centre of the earth, possessed of mysterious cavities by which it was believed possible to hold communication with the dead. In the earliest times it was connected with the worship of the earth-goddess GÆa or Ge, who sheltered the dead in her bosom. Later, the presiding deity was Themis, the goddess of law and order in the natural world. But during the whole historical period Apollo was the source of inspiration, the god of light and the highest interpreter of the divine will. During the three winter months Dionysus reigned, in the absence of Apollo.

The reverence in which the oracle was held, even in the most enlightened times, was largely due to the wisdom and prudence of the priests—five in number—who belonged to the noblest Delphian families and held office for life. They were brought into contact with leading men who came to consult the oracle from all parts of the Greek-speaking world,—men like Lycurgus and Solon and Socrates and Xenophon and Alexander the Great,—and they appear to have been on terms of intimacy with such national poets as Hesiod and Pindar and Æschylus. Pindar’s iron chair was carefully preserved in the sacred precincts, and the priest of Apollo cried nightly as he closed the temple, “Let Pindar the poet go in unto the supper of the gods.”

The priests put their own interpretations on the ecstatic utterances of the prophetess, which she delivered in their hearing and in the presence of the inquirer after she had drunk the holy water, chewed the laurel-leaf, and mounted the tripod to inhale the narcotic vapour which arose from the chasm beneath. These interpretations they embodied in hexameter verses, generally disappointing from a poetical point of view, considering the auspices under which they were delivered, and frequently ambiguous in their terms, when it did not seem advisable for the oracle to commit itself to a definite opinion. One of the best known and most interesting cases of this sort was the answer given to Croesus, King of Sardis, when he was deliberating whether he ought to go to war with Persia. Before inquiring on so important a point he resolved to test all the chief oracles, six in number, by asking each of them through a special messenger to say what he was doing on a specified day, on which the question was to be put. The oracle that best stood the test was Delphi, and Croesus proceeded to ask advice on the momentous question about which he was so anxious, bestowing on the temple of Apollo at the same time magnificent gifts of solid gold and silver, and immense offerings for sacrifice. The answer was that if he went to war with Persia he would destroy a great empire, which he at once took in a favourable sense. He was defeated, however, and Cyrus became master of his city and kingdom, thus fulfilling the oracle in an unexpected sense. He would have been put to death by his conqueror had it not been that when he lay bound upon a funeral pile, which had been already kindled, his exclamations led Cyrus to inquire what he was speaking of, and on hearing of Solon’s warning as to the instability of human greatness, which the fallen monarch had been calling to mind, Cyrus gave orders that Croesus should be at once released. The flames had taken such hold of the wood, however, that he would still have perished if Apollo had not heard his prayers and sent a heavy shower of rain, which extinguished the fire. The disappointment of his hopes gave such a shock to Croesus’ faith that, by the leave of Cyrus, he sent to Delphi the chains in which he had been bound to the pile, with a message asking if that was the way in which Apollo treated his faithful votaries. In the reply he was reminded that Apollo had saved his life, and was told that he had not been careful enough in his interpretation of the oracle, and that it had been impossible any longer to avert the doom which rested on him as the fifth in descent from an ancestor who had incurred the divine wrath by the murder of his master and the usurpation of his throne.

With one exception—the encouragement which it gave on certain rare occasions to human sacrifice—the general influence of the oracle was salutary, from a social and political as well as an ethical point of view. On the walls of the temple were inscribed some of the sayings of the wise men of Greece, such as “Know thyself,” “Nothing to excess.” The oracle did much for the protection of rights where no legal sanction was available. It checked blood-feuds, and gave its sanction to the purification and pardon of those who had committed homicide under extenuating circumstances. It could even dispense with ritual observance altogether where there was no real guilt. For example, to a good man who had slain his friend in defending him against robbers, and had fled to the sanctuary in great distress of mind, its answer was: “Thou didst slay thy friend striving to save his life; go hence, thou art purer than thou wert before.” It confirmed the sanctity of oaths. Herodotus gives a striking instance of its high standard of morality when, in answer to an inquirer who asked whether by repudiating his oath he might claim a large sum of money which had been deposited with him, the prophetess declared that to tempt the god as he had done and to commit the crime was the same thing, and that the divine judgment would descend on him and on his house. For “there is a nameless son of Perjury, who has neither hands nor feet; he pursues swiftly, until he seizes and destroys the whole race and all the house.” It also rendered good service, as many inscriptions show, in connection with the emancipation of slaves, whose deposits it took care of, until a sufficient sum was available for the purchase of their freedom from their masters, who were interdicted from making any further claim upon their services. Besides the light and leading which the oracle afforded to some of the early lawgivers of Greece, and the wise counsels which it gave on questions of peace or war, it was specially useful in advising cities on all projects of colonisation.

It seems to have been almost the invariable practice for Greeks to consult the oracle before resolving to plant a colony, so much so that Delphi is declared to have been “the best-informed agency for emigration that any State has ever possessed.”

Its prestige declined owing to several causes. The priests were not always proof against bribery; and when it became known at any time that they had thus abused their office, it produced a deep feeling of indignation and distrust. There are several well-attested cases of corruption, chiefly on the part of Spartans. One of their kings, Cleomenes, procured the deposition of his brother-king Demaratus by bringing private influence to bear at Delphi. When the facts of the case came to light, the prophetess was deposed from her office, and her chief adviser at Delphi had to take to flight. Another Spartan king, Pleistoanax, who had been exiled for accepting bribes from Pericles, succeeded, after eighteen years’ residence in Arcadia (where, for safety, half of his dwelling-house was within the enclosure of a temple), in obtaining his recall to Sparta with great honour, owing to the injunctions to this effect, which were repeatedly given by the oracle as the result of bribes. Lysander, the great Spartan general, after he was deprived of his command, concerted a scheme with the authorities at Delphi for getting himself recognised as king through the publication of fabricated records, alleged to be of great antiquity, and only to be opened by a genuine son of Apollo. Such a pretender they secured, but the scheme broke down owing to the timidity of one of the conspirators.

Another drawback was that the growing power of rival states rendered it increasingly difficult for the oracle to hold the balance with any fairness between them, and at the same time maintain its old and intimate relations with Sparta. Its dignity was also lowered when, instead of being open for consultation for a month once a year, more frequent opportunities were afforded and trivial questions entertained. But perhaps the most serious difficulty they had to contend with was the growing intercourse and correspondence of the different cities of Greece, both with one another and with foreign cities, and the general spread of knowledge, which tended to impair the reverence in which the oracle had been held, and deprived its priests of the monopoly of general information which they seem to have at one time virtually enjoyed. By the time the Christian era began, the Greek oracles had been practically superseded by the ChaldÆan astrologers; and when Julian the Apostate in the fourth century tried to revive the glory of Delphi, he received the answer, “Tell the king the earth has fallen, the beautiful mansion; no longer has Phoebus a home, nor a prophetic laurel, nor a font that speaks: gone dry is the talking water.” It was finally suppressed by the Emperor Theodosius towards the end of the fourth century.

Like the still older sanctuary of Dodona (where revelations were supposed to be given through the rustling of a sacred oak), Delphi was, alternately with ThermopylÆ, the seat in historic times of an Amphictyony or union of states, which existed for the worship of the deity whose shrine they were pledged to defend, as well as for mutual friendship and protection. Unfortunately the history of the oracle, although a national institution, was marked at various times by deadly strife among the different Hellenic tribes whose interests were involved. At first the management of the oracle seems to have been in the hands of the people of Crisa, who were Phocians, but after the protracted war waged by the Amphictyony against the natives of Cirrha, the adjacent sea-port, on account of the extortions they practised on the pilgrims to the shrine and the outrages they sometimes perpetrated on them, the trust was committed by the federation to the inhabitants of Delphi, who were of Dorian extraction. Cirrha was laid waste, the whole CrisÆan plain was dedicated to Apollo, and the spoils of Cirrha were used to establish the Pythian games on a more ambitious footing than had been possible when they were held in the limited space available at Delphi.

A second Sacred War, as it was called, broke out in 357 B.C., when the Amphictyonic Council, after imposing a fine on the Phocians at the instigation of their enemies the Thebans, which remained unpaid, proceeded to confiscate their territory. The Phocians offered a long and desperate resistance, asserting their old right to administer the affairs of the sanctuary. In the course of the war their leaders had recourse to the treasures of the temple again and again, melting and coining the precious metals, and turning the brass and iron into arms. Altogether they are said to have appropriated no less than £2,300,000, which was required to keep up their large mercenary army.

The fabulous wealth of the place had often tempted the cupidity of foreign foes, but on every occasion the god had been found able to protect himself. When Xerxes sent a detachment of his huge army to despoil the shrine, his soldiers were thrown into a panic and put utterly to flight by great rocks tumbling down upon them from the cliffs of Parnassus in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm. The rocks were shown to Herodotus in the precincts of the temple of Athena,—perhaps the same as are still to be seen in the low ground to the south of the public road. A similar experience is said to have befallen the Gauls under Brennus about two hundred years afterwards. At an intermediate date (370 B.C.), when Jason of PherÆ, the powerful ruler of Thessaly, set out for Delphi with, as it was believed, a hostile intent, under colour of sacrificing to the god a thousand bulls and ten thousand sheep, goats, and swine, he was suddenly cut off in the prime of life by a treacherous band of assassins.

There was yet a third Sacred War, a few years afterwards. The objects of Amphictyonic wrath on this occasion were not the Phocians but the Locrians of Amphissa (now Salona), who had taken possession of Cirrha and repeated the old offence of using part of the consecrated ground for their own secular purposes.

The sympathies of Greece were divided in this war, and the final outcome of the struggle was that Philip of Macedonia, who had been called in to finish the previous war, and had been admitted a member of the Amphictyony in place of the dispossessed Phocian tribe, now became master of Greece by reason of his victory over the combined forces of Athens and Thebes at the fateful battle of ChÆronea in 338 B.C.

Within the past few years French archÆologists have done wonderful work at Delphi. By the removal of the modern village of Castri, the foundations of the temple and the remains of many of the surrounding buildings and monuments have been brought to light. As you pass along the “Sacred Way” you can identify many of the sites mentioned by Pausanias, in the very order in which he describes them. In most places the old pavement still remains, with grooves to keep the feet from slipping. Some of the most precious relics have been removed to the Museum, where there are also models of many of the most beautiful works of art that have perished. Among the former is the famous Omphalos or “Navel-stone,” on which Apollo is often represented as sitting. It marked the spot at which two eagles met, which had been sent out by Jupiter from extreme east and west, of equal speed in flight, to determine the exact centre of the earth. The marble stone which is now shown, although apparently identical with that seen by Pausanias,—for it was discovered on the same spot,—may be only an imitation of the original, like another which has also been recently discovered; and the golden eagles which stood beside the Omphalos have also disappeared. The chasm in the temple floor, from which the vapour ascended that was supposed to inspire the prophetess, cannot now be found, having probably been filled up somehow; but a little way off there is a rock with a rift in it, on which the first Sibyl (mentioned by Plutarch) is supposed to have sat and prophesied. The rift may have been the lurking-place of the dragon which Apollo shot with his darts, when he came from Delos, the land of his birth, to inaugurate the ministry of the Cretan travellers, whom he had enlisted in the service of his new sanctuary. According to the legend the skin of the dragon was left to rot, giving rise to the ancient name Pytho, by which Delphi was known in the days of Homer. In the hymn to the Delphian Apollo the scene of the combat is laid in the gorge of the PhÆdriadÆ, but the other conjecture is supported by the proximity to the Sibyl’s rock of an enclosure like a threshing-floor, which is supposed to be the place where the drama was enacted every fourth year.

A little way above the temple is an open-air theatre—one of the best preserved in Greece. It is in the usual horse-shoe form, with its sloping back, enclosing the sitting accommodation for the spectators, resting on a rising ground. The stadium is still higher, right under the cliffs of Parnassus on the north, and shut in by rising grounds on either side, but commanding a magnificent view to the south over valley and mountain. It was the ancient scene of the Pythian games, and is still recognisable as such in almost every feature. Apollo was regarded as the leader of the Muses, and the Pythian festival was originally a musical, not an athletic contest. The prize of laurel wreath was given for the best song in honour of Apollo to the accompaniment of the lyre. At the conclusion of the first Sacred War, nearly 600 B.C., the chariot races (which are deprecated in the Homeric hymn) were inaugurated in the plain beneath. But the higher form of competition still continued, including even poetry and painting—a distinction of which no other pagan cult can boast. Deeply interesting as the ruins are from an archÆological point of view, they bring home a sense of the transitoriness of early glory when one thinks how little remains of the thousand statues and trophies and votive offerings which once filled the spot with “the glory that was Greece.” Time has robbed it of the treasures of art which were to be seen in the days of Pliny, even after the ravages of Sulla and of Nero. Happily, one of the most interesting and beautiful of all the monuments has just been restored, namely the Treasury of the Athenians, which was built of Parian marble in the form of a small Doric temple, from the spoils taken on the field of Marathon. It seems to have been overthrown by an earthquake, but almost all the blocks of which it was constructed have been discovered among the ruins, and have been fitted together with such skill and success as to reproduce the old inscriptions engraved upon the walls, including several hymns to Apollo, with their musical notation. The expense of the restoration has been mainly borne by the city of Athens.

A few hundred yards to the east is the Castalian spring, in the cleft between the lofty PhÆdriadÆ. At one time it was believed to confer the gift of prophecy on those who drank of it; but its rock-hewn basin is now used by the village women for washing clothes. In ancient times its water was used for sacred purposes by the prophetess and her attendants and all who came to consult the oracle. That the purification sought was not merely that of the body may be inferred from a prophetic utterance which has been rendered as follows:—

If the traveller pursue his journey a few hours farther to the east, passing the picturesque little town of Arachova, about 2000 feet above the sea, he will reach the ancient Cleft or Triple Way, in a scene of desolate grandeur at the end of a long, deep, narrow valley. It was there that Œdipus, seeking to escape the destiny which had just been announced to him by the oracle, and unaware of his true parentage, met his father Laius, King of Thebes, on his way to Delphi, and in a fit of anger at the unceremonious way in which he was jostled aside by the royal charioteer, slew the aged king and all his attendants save one,—a crime which was the beginning of those many sorrows in his

family history which were to be the theme of some of the greatest of the Greek tragedies. Pausanias mentions that the tomb of the murdered men, with unhewn stones heaped upon it, was to be seen at the middle of the place where the three roads met: the modern traveller finds a monument with an inscription which tells how Johannes Megas was killed on the same spot in 1856, in an encounter with a band of brigands, which he was seeking to extirpate.