Temple Of Apollo at Delphi

Delphi occupies a shelf of Mount Parnassus some 600 metres above the Gulf of Corinth, and for the better part of a thousand years it was where Greeks went to ask what they should do next. The Temple of Apollo is the building at the centre of that sanctuary. The oracle spoke from inside it, and everything else on the site - the treasuries, the theatre, the stadium - was arranged around it.

Apollo and the oracle

Apollo was the god of prophecy, music, archery and healing, and Delphi was his principal Panhellenic sanctuary; the temple is sometimes referred to as the Apollonion. Here the Greeks kept the omphalos, the carved stone that marked the navel of the earth, which is why ancient writers describe Delphi as the centre of the world. The omphalos is thought to have stood inside the temple itself, flanked by two golden eagles.

Prophecies were delivered by the Pythia, a priestess seated on a tripod in the adyton, the inner chamber closed to everyone but the priesthood. Ancient accounts have her inhaling vapours that rose from a fissure in the rock and answering in Apollo's voice; her replies were relayed and interpreted by the priests. Modern attempts to explain the vapours point to ethylene or other hydrocarbons seeping up along the faults that cross the site, though the local geology is limestone and the theory is still contested.

Consultation was open to anyone who could pay the fee and provide the sacrifice, from private individuals to city-states deciding on war, colonies or laws. That is the source of the sanctuary's real power: an answer from Delphi could commit a city to a policy, and the priesthood knew the political situation of every state that came to ask.

The adyton also held a gold statue of Apollo, sacred armour and an altar with a fire of pine wood. Three maxims were inscribed in the pronaos - know thyself, nothing in excess, and surety brings ruin - along with a large letter E whose meaning was already a puzzle by the first century AD, when Plutarch, a priest at Delphi, wrote an essay trying to solve it.

Five temples on one spot

Greek tradition counted five successive temples at Delphi, and the sequence is as much a story about the sanctuary's self-image as a building record. The first was a hut of laurel branches carried from the Vale of Tempe, laurel being Apollo's tree. The second was a gift from Apollo to the Hyperboreans, built either of beeswax and feathers or, in another version, of ferns by a Delphian named Pteras. The third was bronze, the work of Hephaestus, and was destroyed by fire or earthquake. The fourth was the first that can be called architecture: a stone building credited to Trophonios and Agamedes, which burned down in 548 BC.

The fifth was raised around 510 BC with money subscribed across the Greek world and the work managed by the Alcmaeonid family of Athens. It was standing and fully operational by 490 BC, and its external sculpture was completed during the fifth century. An earthquake brought it down in 373 BC. The rebuilding, finished in 330 BC under the architect Spintharos of Corinth, followed the older plan and proportions closely, and it is those foundations and re-erected columns that a visitor sees today.

The design

The temple is Doric: a peristyle of six columns across the front and back and fifteen down each flank. The core was built of local limestone, with the columns faced in white Parian marble once the building fund allowed the upgrade. The sober proportions of the Doric order suited a building whose authority came from age rather than display, and the sculpture and painting on its walls carried the legends of Apollo.

The sanctuary around it

The approach is the Sacred Way, a zigzag ramp climbing to the temple terrace between rows of votive statues and treasuries. The treasuries were small marble buildings put up by individual cities to house their offerings, and they doubled as advertisements for the state that paid. The Athenian Treasury commemorates the victory at Marathon in 490 BC. There are also treasuries of the Siphnians, who funded theirs from a tithe on their silver mines, the Sicyonians, the Thebans, the Boeotians and the Massaliots of what is now Marseille.

Above the temple stands the theatre, built in the fourth century BC and seating about 4,500, and higher up the stadium, with room for around 6,500 and a track 177 metres long by 25.5 metres wide. Both were used for the Pythian Games. In the ravine between the Phaidriades, the two cliffs that close the site on the north-east, is the Castalian Spring, where those coming to consult the oracle washed before going up.

Delphi's reach went well beyond Greece. Lydian kings and later Roman emperors sent offerings, and the treasure that accumulated made the sanctuary a target as often as a refuge. The oracle's working life ended in AD 390, when Theodosius I ordered pagan temples closed.

The site now

Delphi was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1987, and excavation and conservation have continued on the slope since the French School began systematic work there in the 1890s. Alongside the ruins is the Delphi Archaeological Museum, which holds the finds: the frieze and sculpture from the Siphnian Treasury, the metopes of the Athenian Treasury, an omphalos stone, and the Charioteer of Delphi, a life-size bronze of 478 or 474 BC that survived because a rockfall buried it.

The sanctuary is inland, but not by much. The port of Itea on the Gulf of Corinth lies about 15 kilometres downhill through the olive plain of Amfissa, which puts Delphi within a half-day round trip for anyone exploring Greece's coast by boat along the northern shore of the gulf.