Delphi and the Decline of Modern Greece

Memories of the cool, clean air of our Monday in Δελφοί linger in my mind. What we experienced firsthand, and what we also imagined of ancient days when visits to Apollo’s oracle made the city famous, stay with me. Moreover, reflection on our time in Delphi gives me an inspiring vantage point from which to observe, alas more drearily, the political chaos and spiritual lethargy into which modern Greece is descending.

Here, at the navel of the earth under the regal gaze of Mt. Parnassus, we cast our eyes toward the deep blue Ionian Sea far below the mountainside village, foregrounded by the blue green hue of an olive grove of over a million trees. By early afternoon, the Nine Muses, or maybe but a few of them, must have descended the mountain and whispered gracious words to us, for everything we saw, smelled, ate, heard and said seemed charmed. I mean it truly.

The ruins of Delphi themselves keep a solemn silence that not even the passing tourist buses completely drown out with their diesel clatters and whining, downshifting gears. In long gone centuries, when suppliants shuffled up the Sacred Way seeking the always ambiguous counsel of the Pythia, their quiet passages must have been punctuated too, by metallic clinks of chisels on marble, the calling out of greetings, and far harsher noise during games and festivals.

Here, in ancient Delphi, history witnessed more plainly than anywhere else I know the flowering of a Panhellenic political identity that was tightly bound together with shared religious understanding and practice. The lavish monuments and treasuries along the Sacred Way constructed by Greek cities near and far, put together with widespread regard for the cult of Apollo and readiness to seek the oracle’s counsel, produce the impression of an ancient Panhellenism that overshadows today’s modern nation-state.

That last comment needs explanation. I have two things in mind.

The first is that the Greeks seem more divided now than they have been in nearly forty years, when the oppressive dictatorship of the military junta ended in 1974. Sights and sounds of tearing social fabric confront us all around. We have seen the worst of the political garment-rending only on television broadcasts of the riots in Athens’ Syntagma Square, all of which transpired after our group safely left Athens. We are now in Thessaloniki, and here we see protest graffiti and signs adorning every conceivable surface, mounds of uncollected garbage (because of the strike), and the semi-permanent pitched tents of squatting local demonstrators adjacent to the White Tower.

Although the MPs in Parliament, whatever their position on the newly proposed austerity measures happens to be, appeal to Greek identity and national ideals as warrants for their votes, it all appears more like an individualistic free-for-all so far as I can discern. In fact, taking the last five decades as the measure, modern Greece has fairly well exemplified the two worst political regimes that Plato identifies in the Republic. Tyranny by a few unjust leaders (the junta of the late sixties and early seventies), and tyranny by the excessive desires and mistaken self-interests of everyone (post-1974 Greece) are both politically tragic. Apart from a more substantive and more widely shared sense of the common good, life is bound to become all the more trying for the Greeks.

Unfortunately, the second thing I have noticed is that one of the great past resources for Panhellenic identity, the sort that might underwrite a sustainable commonwealth, seems to be used up. Even when Athenian hegemony over lesser cities of the fifth century B.C. divided Greek against Greek and played out in thirty years of debilitating conflict in the Peloponnesian War, everyone kept up the practice of the old pagan sacrifices. Devotion to the gods grew during those difficult days. The Greek Orthodox Church of the twenty-first century seems relatively less important.

Obviously, wondrous Byzantine basilicas and churches dot Greece today, and we have visited a few of them. On Tuesday we saw the gravity-defying monasteries perched atop the outstretched geological fingers at Meteora, and again, we visited a few of them. But in every case they have too much the quality of museums and too little the character of places of popular prayer.

I do not question the piety of the few that gather in these holy settings and make their abject confessions, earnest petitions, and sincere thanksgiving to God. May the Lord have mercy on them and bless them. Yet they are too few in number, and they are too little accompanied by the majority of the Greeks, to give me hope for a revived Panhellenic life reshaped by fidelity to Orthodox Christianity.

Will Delphi be joined by new Greek ruins, by places where fallen columns and faded memories remind travelers centuries from now of a people whose time has passed? For the sake of the warm, hospitable people in whose company we have delighted these past few weeks, I hope the answer is όχι, or at least not yet.

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