Today we visited the city of Delphi. It was my second time to visit the site, and I must say I was very excited about it. Delphi was my favorite site last time I was in Greece, and I had been looking forward to the opportunity to study it in more detail.
This time around I really enjoyed the museum at Delphi. Near the entrance to the museum there are a lot of really small statues. These statues are not gods, but rather offerings that people would make to the gods. I knew that the greeks performed animal sacrifices, but I didn’t realize that there were many other types of offerings. Also near the entrance of the museum is a large cauldron. These were popular temple gifts, and were useful because the meat from the animal sacrifices could be cooked in the pots.
The museum had statues from the Greek and Roman eras, and these statues were actually quite different. The greeks tended to portray the idealized individual, not a person as they actually were. They would write inscriptions under the statues to tell who a person was. The Romans still appreciated the idealized figure, but tended to make their statues more realistic. Their bodies were more proportional and sometimes faces were made in likeness.
At the Delphi site we walked along the sacred way. In Greek times, only healthy people were allowed to walk this road. They did not want someone dying in the sacred place. For similar reasons, pregnant women were not allowed inside. Before walking the sacred way people would wash and sometimes they would purchase an offering to give to a god. As a person walked along the sacred way they would pass by the treasuries of all the other city states. The walls of the Athenian treasury house are inscribed with ancient music pieces.
The temple itself is where the oracle would have been. Interestingly enough, the temple rested on a fault line where gasses would come up from the earth and make the oracle say strange things. It was up to the men receiving the prophesies to interpret them. The famous prophesies were all up to some interpretation, “you must build a wooden wall”, “if you go to war a great nation will fall”, etc. No one could accuse the oracles of being wrong, only of interpreting them incorrectly.
I found Delphi especially interesting because it is a place where women played a unique and important role. In Athens we learned that women mostly stayed home they did not go out into the agora or participate in politics. In Delphi, the oracle was a woman. People came from all over to hear her shout out prophetic words. Granted, it was up to men to divine meaning from the words, but it is still significant that a position that played such an important role in Greek society belonged to a woman.
After passing the temple we walked up a steep hill to the spot where the Pythian games were held. Any free man from Greece was allowed to compete. These games were held every four years, much like the modern Olympics. I find it fascinating that Greek city states, though constantly warring with one another, can come unite in one spot to worship and compete.