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00:00By the mid-fourth century, this was one of the most awe-inspiring and spectacular places in the entire ancient world.
00:21Its combination of art, religion, money made it in modern-day terms the equivalent of the wealth of the Swiss banks,
00:28the religious power of the Vatican, the advertising potential of the World Cup and the historical importance of all the world's museums combined.
00:37This is Delphi, on the slope of Mount Parnassus in central Greece.
00:43Home of the great Oracle of Apollo, Delphi was the omphalos, the belly button, the centre of the ancient world.
00:52According to ancient myth, Zeus sent two eagles from opposite ends of the earth, and this is where they met.
01:01It was several days' journey from the main cities of the ancient Greek world.
01:07Yet for centuries, not just ordinary people, but kings and ambassadors from great cities and empires struggled up here,
01:14in search of answers to their most puzzling questions.
01:21Fundamentally, they came here to ask the oracle of the god Apollo about the future.
01:26But however unwelcome, unhelpful, indeed awful, those responses were, they kept coming.
01:33Why? And why do we still come here as tourists today?
01:37For me, it was because Delphi told the ancient Greeks something about themselves.
01:43Indeed, above the entrance to the temple of Apollo, where they went to see the oracle, was a simple inscription.
01:48It said, Gnothi seauton, know thyself.
01:52And that message, I think, isn't just important to the ancient Greeks.
01:57I believe that know thyself, the message of Delphi and everything that was incarnate in this place,
02:03still has meaning and importance for us today.
02:06What the tourists see here at Delphi has only been like this for just over a century.
02:27Before that, it was a lost world.
02:33Others knew that Delphi had been one of the most important sanctuaries in ancient Greece.
02:38But it was buried beneath earth, rocks and centuries of legend.
02:49The answer was to dig, and just about everybody had their shovels at the ready.
02:55Ever since the Renaissance, Europeans had looked to ancient Greece as the foundation of Western culture.
03:01By the 1890s, American, French and German teams were negotiating with the Greek government for the right to excavate.
03:10Eventually, in 1892, the French won the race.
03:13They sweetened the deal by lowering tariffs on imported Greek currants and olive oil.
03:20Ever since, they have led the search for ancient Delphi.
03:28When I first began studying the sanctuary as a young post-graduate, French scholars like Dominic Moulier were an enormous inspiration.
03:35In fact, I think everyone could have a wish to destroy Delphi.
03:40Because it was the center of the world.
03:41Because it was the place where there was the oracle the most real.
03:45So everyone could have a wish.
03:47There were moments where the other countries expressed some interest, the Americans and the Germans.
03:54Yes, in the last few years, because it's a process that lasts a long time,
03:59we see the German interests that manifest.
04:02We see the American interests.
04:04There is even a kind of big foundation that is created to reunite fonds,
04:08to try to launch an American expedition on Delft.
04:12The first problem for the archaeologists
04:14was that there were people still living right on top of the ancient sanctuary.
04:18There is no other solution than to expropriate the owners,
04:23to indemnise them, to demolish the village, to build them again, before being able to escape.
04:30But what is clear is that the villagers were crazy here.
04:34As they felt in the 19th century that the interest of the sanctuary was growing,
04:41they made the prices up.
04:44In 1892, they started at a moment where the inhabitants have not yet been indemnised.
04:51Now, the inhabitants are revolted.
04:54They have to call the armed forces to restore the order.
04:57And we can see in the photos of the first files,
05:00that there are gendarmes who are there in arms to protect the archaeologists.
05:04Despite the difficulties, the sanctuary and its lost treasures gradually began to emerge from the soil.
05:16The legend became a real place with an iconic reputation.
05:22In ancient times, it had been a communal sanctuary,
05:25visited freely by people from all over the ancient world.
05:29Now, once again, people flocked to Delphi.
05:35It became a beacon for internationalism, just like the modern Olympic Games,
05:41which were founded at the same time in the 1890s.
05:44And in fact, Delphi still is a beacon for internationalism.
05:48Here's how ICOMOS, the UNESCO organisation, described Delphi when they made it a World Heritage Site in 1986.
05:54This reaffirms that one of the enduring missions of Delphi is to bring together men and women
06:00who otherwise remain divided by material interests.
06:03But is that true?
06:05And if so, how and why did Delphi get such a reputation?
06:09The only way to answer that is to find out what was really going on at this site thousands of years ago.
06:16At its height, the sanctuary at Delphi covered more than 100 acres.
06:38The temple itself was surrounded by hundreds of votive buildings, treasure houses, porticos and statues,
06:53all of them built by grateful visitors.
06:57Some of them had come hundreds of miles.
07:00They included rulers from across the ancient world,
07:03from the legendary King Midas in the 8th century BC,
07:07to the Roman Emperor Hadrian a thousand years later.
07:13And the visitors came for the oracle,
07:16to ask the god Apollo for answers to their questions about the future.
07:21But what actually happened when they got here?
07:24Well, luckily, one of the several accounts we have is the writings of a real insider.
07:34He was a priest at the temple called Plutarch.
07:39What Plutarch tells us is that the oracle operated on only nine days each year.
07:45On those days, crowds of worshippers would queue to ask their question.
07:51Now faced with the front of the Temple of Apollo and the inscription,
07:58Know Thyself, the consultant had to decide what their question would be.
08:02Some examples, King Croesus from Lydia in modern-day Turkey,
08:05wanted to come and ask whether he should attack his next-door enemy empire.
08:09Or the Athenians, when they were faced with the Persian invasion,
08:12came here to ask, what should they do?
08:14But the thing is, we don't know exactly how the consultation took place.
08:18But if we get inside the temple, perhaps we can get a better idea.
08:31And here we are, inside the sacred Temple of Apollo,
08:35following in the footsteps of the people who came to consult the oracle,
08:38moving from the public front end of the temple towards the back,
08:42the inner sanctum, the most sacred area.
08:44And it's here that French archaeologists in the most recent plan of the temple
08:49have discovered something new.
08:50Here, this rectangular structure, what they're calling an oikos,
08:54which may well be what the literary sources talk about as the aditon,
08:59the home of the Pythian priestess herself.
09:01But the thing is, we still don't know for sure the mechanics of what actually happened in this space.
09:08What we do know is that the oracle was a woman.
09:17The priestess was said to sit on top of a tripod set over a chasm in the rock,
09:22from which vapours rose.
09:24She was reputed to breathe in the vapours and answer in a trance as if inspired by Apollo.
09:39The priestess gave her answers to the applicant's question from within the trance.
09:43And once she had spoken, the applicants then had to try to understand what she had said.
09:54So what was the prophetic vapour that induced trances in the priestess?
09:58Well, we now know that Delphi's geology produced hallucinogenic fumes.
10:08The sanctuary grew up at a place where two geological faults crossed.
10:14And here on the temple floor, you can see the signs of subsidence caused by the two faults.
10:20And right beside the temple and its oracle is a telltale deposit.
10:24This is travertine, formed when water releases hydrocarbons,
10:29which it can only accumulate if it exists around a fault line.
10:33Another sign, another piece of evidence that the geological fault line runs right through the temple here at Delphi.
10:38Recent tests showed that one of those hydrocarbons is the gas ethylene,
10:43which is known to affect the working of the brain.
10:45That could explain the trance.
10:47But geology can only explain why the priestess was here in this exact position.
10:54It can't help us explain why Delphi became such a spectacular sanctuary,
10:59and why it maintained its reputation in the ancient world for over a thousand years.
11:03If we examine Greek religion itself, however, things become clearer.
11:13After all, oracles were a basic element of ancient Greek religious traditions,
11:18and they included some sometimes quite bizarre beliefs.
11:21And to understand the religion of ancient Greece, you have to understand that there were gods in everything and everywhere.
11:29Poseidon in the sea, Hades in the underworld, but nymphs in the grottos and the caves pan around you.
11:35Every tree, every bush had a god.
11:37And in that world, the gods had to be worshipped.
11:41They had to be prayed to, to Demeter to fertilise your fields, or Athena to watch over your city or your industry.
11:46You had to make sacrifices, you met the gods in your dreams, they cured your illnesses.
11:51They were everywhere, and they could be for you or against you.
11:55So you had to do your utmost to ensure that they were on your side.
12:02These ideas go back to the very beginnings of ancient Greece.
12:07I'm on my way to one of the oldest sacred places in the area.
12:11It lies even higher up Parnassus, behind the Delphi peaks, right off the tourist map.
12:19It was one of the many places where the ancients came to make offerings to their many gods.
12:26This is the Carissian Cave, sacred to Pan, the god of the countryside, and to the Muses.
12:33It was only in 1969, some eight decades after Delphi began to be excavated, that scholars began to investigate this place properly.
12:56What they found was amazing.
13:01Some of the objects had been put here nearly 7,000 years ago, long before the oracle at Delphi began to develop.
13:07Most of them weren't as old as that, but all of them were very different from the statues and great buildings which the French had found at Delphi.
13:24They found lots of things like this at the cave, perfume jars, small oil flasks, things like necklaces and rings.
13:42They're all very low-key, very personal, and demonstrate the close and continuous relationship between the local Delphians and their visitors coming here to worship their local gods in this cave.
13:57Offerings in places like this were designed to keep the gods on side.
14:01But the excavators discovered the cave was more than just a place to make offerings.
14:07There was something else found here.
14:09In fact, 25,000 knuckle bones, animal knuckle bones.
14:13Now, knuckle bones in ancient Greece were used by kids as part of a game.
14:17And they may have been dedicated here at the cave as part of a ceremony that symbolized the transition between childhood and adulthood on the eve of marriage, for example.
14:24But about 20% of these knuckle bones were also inscribed with the names of gods, and some of them even started to look like dice.
14:31And in fact, we also found dice, ancient dice here in the cave.
14:35Now, this is interesting because dice are sometimes associated with a cheaper, easier oracle.
14:43So the cave was also used for divination, a simple kind of oracle.
14:48The aim was to lift the curtain between the natural world and the supernatural world of the gods.
14:57This cave was an arena for spiritual communication going back thousands and thousands of years.
15:03But down below, in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, it was just all on a very different scale.
15:08Here you had farmers, shepherds, local villagers coming to consult perhaps a dice oracle.
15:12Down below, you had tyrants, cities, emperors, kings coming to ask their questions, questions that would define the history of the ancient world.
15:29Although the Delphic oracle emerged from traditions like this, Delphi itself began as a typical settlement of the high country of central Greece.
15:38And the earliest remains indicate not a religious centre, but a prosperous town.
15:49According to Catherine Morgan, one of the leading experts on early Delphi, it was the geography here which may have made the difference.
15:57It's a very well-connected area.
16:00We're pretty close to the major mountain passes coming down from the north.
16:04We're right on a major east-west waterway.
16:07It's a really major junction.
16:09Here we've got an amazingly fertile plain.
16:12We've got quite a nice harbour.
16:14And then we've got good pasture land up above.
16:17So all the resources are here.
16:19It's a seriously big place.
16:20It's not specifically a place of pilgrimage, a sanctuary, but it is a community with a religious centre.
16:29Its location on long-distance trade routes brought visitors to Delphi in increasing numbers.
16:34And the reputation of Delphi's local oracle began to spread.
16:40From 800 BC onwards, it began to attract interest and offerings from further and further afield.
16:48At first, they were small bronze statues of warriors and praying worshippers.
16:54Later, they ran to giant bronze cauldrons and gold and silver too.
17:03The oracle was heading for stardom.
17:08And the economic effects were enormous.
17:14Almost from the minute you've separated the sanctuary from the local surroundings, you're creating a cuckoo.
17:19You've got something that requires very, very high maintenance.
17:23It's requiring an awful lot of sacrificial animals, lodgings, et cetera, et cetera.
17:28Where are you going to get it from?
17:30You're warping the local economy to do that.
17:33And certainly a lot of what we know implies an increasingly rich pastoral economy supplying Delphi.
17:39So Delphi's international career began for real in the 7th century BC.
17:48And it's a career which still continues today.
17:51In one way, modern Delphi is a reincarnation of the ancient sanctuary.
17:56Hey, Dern, coming live from Delphi!
18:01It still brings people from all over the world.
18:03They come now to learn about the past, not the future, but they bring with them stories about the present.
18:10Canada's gone now pretty scot-free with regards to the economic crisis.
18:14They bring information in huge quantities.
18:18Huge riots.
18:20Every single storefront window was smashed.
18:22To find out what's going on around the world, you hardly need to leave Delphi's cafes.
18:26The new line that they've been promising for at least five years now, the cuts are coming in slowly.
18:33Ancient Delphi was just the same.
18:37A huge mixture of visitors.
18:39And the more people who came, the more information came with them.
18:44Information which the priests and the oracle could use.
18:48So Delphi's answers were better informed and much more likely to make sense.
18:53But the oracle's answers were also famous for their ambiguity.
19:03They were only a basis for interpretation.
19:06And to deal with that, you had to know yourself.
19:10When the Athenians went to ask about what they should do about the Persian invasion,
19:14they were told, trust in your wooden walls.
19:16And they had to figure out what that meant.
19:18They decided it meant the wooden walls of their ships.
19:20And they turned out to be right.
19:22But King Croesus, when he asked about whether or not he should attack his neighbouring empire,
19:27he was told, if you attack, a great empire will fall.
19:30He interpreted that to mean his enemies.
19:33It turned out to be his own.
19:35He even complained to the oracle about the response he had got.
19:38But the response came back to him, saying it was your fault.
19:42Your misinterpretation.
19:43The ambiguity of the response forces the question back on us,
19:48forces us to know ourselves.
19:54Once the oracle took off, Delphi took off with it.
19:58It became the focus for a whole range of other activities
20:03as people began to come here in huge numbers.
20:05And it was all good business for a thriving city which surrounded the sanctuary.
20:14Imagine what this place must have been like at full capacity.
20:18When the games were on, maybe up to 40,000 people in the stadium,
20:23here in the theatre, watching the athletic and musical competitions at night,
20:27gathered around the landscape with around their campfires glittering all over the valley.
20:31The animals that had to be brought here not just to sacrifice but also to feed that many people.
20:37The noise, the smell, all the tourists coming in and out as Delphi became more and more famous.
20:43And in amongst that, the Temple of Apollo and perhaps the consultants waiting desperately
20:49for the next available day to see the oracle.
20:52All that crammed into one crag of the Parnassian Mountains.
20:56Perhaps the most important international event at Delphi was the athletic festival called the Pythian Games.
21:09It took place every four years and rivalled the Olympics.
21:15At the top of the sanctuary there was a spectacular stadium.
21:19Here they ran running races.
21:21Elsewhere there was boxing, all-in wrestling and chariot racing.
21:24The athletes competed naked and their struggles for victory attracted spectators from all over the Greek world.
21:36And the winners dedicated monuments to celebrate their victory.
21:42One of Delphi's most famous treasures is the charioteer.
21:49It was discovered in three separate pieces right at the beginning of the excavation.
21:54Six feet high, it's one of the few Greek sculptures to survive in bronze.
22:01And the statue still preserves its original inlaid eyes, bits of the silver and copper headband and even some silver teeth.
22:09The charioteer was a magnificent cry of triumph in honour of a tyrant from far away Sicily.
22:18His horses had won the chariot race and he wanted the world to know it.
22:23But the triumphant horses are missing.
22:27And all that is left to us is the clothed figure of the slave who drove them to victory.
22:35Athletics and religion may seem for us like uncomfortable bedfellows, but for the ancient Greeks it couldn't have been more natural.
22:41People came to sanctuaries to honour and worship the gods and athletic and musical competitions were a great way of doing that.
22:46In fact, over here is one of the best examples of just how tight that relationship between religion and athletics was.
22:54It's an instruction in the wall of the stadium saying that wine, to oinon, may not be taken out, out of the stadium.
23:05Not into, as we might expect, out of the stadium, because they were actually making sacrificial wine inside the stadium to use in sacrifices that would have preceded the athletic competitions.
23:16And if you did take that wine out of the stadium, you got fined at least five drachmas and had to make additional sacrifices to the god.
23:23Competition in the stadium wasn't the only kind going on at Delphi.
23:34Down below in the sanctuary, peoples and cities vied with one another to shower the gods with ever grander dedications.
23:42They turned the whole place into an echo chamber of competing voices coming alive from Delphi, a giant information exchange.
23:54It wasn't just that information was coming into Delphi, it was also being broadcast in a very public way.
24:00In a world without mass communication technology, Delphi was the giant notice board, the ancient equivalent of Piccadilly Circus, Times Square New York, or even the advert breaks in Britain's Got Talent.
24:10If you had a message to get across, Delphi was the place to do it.
24:23That message could be carried in many ways, through elegant sculpture or expensive buildings or precious vases.
24:33But more simply, it could also be done through a text.
24:37Everywhere there are inscriptions on the buildings.
24:40So far, scholars have counted more than 3,000 individual texts, some of them running to hundreds of words.
24:49Literally, Delphi was the Greek world's notice board.
24:53And these dedications, in all their forms, came from individuals and cities near and far.
25:01Dedications arrived from cities more than 1,000 miles away, like the Greek colony at Marseille in France.
25:11They came from all kinds of places, and all kinds of people.
25:15Plutarch, in his descriptions of his travels and visits to the sanctuary, talks about one evening when he was walking with friends, and they came across the dedication of a certain Rhodopis.
25:25Rhodopis from the city of Naucratis in Egypt.
25:28Now, Rhodopis was a prostitute, a courtesan, and she'd made so much money that she had dedicated piles of iron spits in the sanctuary, along with an inscription saying just how she'd earned it.
25:38Plutarch's friends were indignant.
25:48So if the Greeks came here to know themselves, what did they learn from the myriad of messages that were being broadcast from this place?
25:55Lesson number one seems actually to have been, show thyself.
26:01And the bigger and bolder, the better.
26:10In around 550 BC, the people of the tiny island of Sifnos discovered gold and silver mines on their island.
26:18In Thanksgiving, they built themselves a treasure house to hold their offerings to Apollo at Delphi.
26:26It was packed with gold, silver, and other rich gifts.
26:31Even in the context of this opulent sanctuary, it was a spectacular building.
26:37But today, there's always nothing left to see.
26:39So even though I'm no artist, I find it helps to try to draw what was once there to get some idea of its magnificence.
26:52What you can see here today is just the foundations.
26:54It was on top of those that they placed the Sifnian marble, brought all the way from their home island.
26:59This was, in fact, the first building at Delphi to be made entirely of marble.
27:02And on top of the Sifnian marble walls, sculpture in marble.
27:07And they didn't stint there either with the decoration.
27:12They commissioned some of Greece's finest sculptors to adorn their treasury.
27:16And they put the most spectacular scene on the wall facing the path up to the temple where everyone could see it.
27:25It depicted the great Greek myth about the war between the gods and the giants.
27:29Carved with incredible depth and skill to make the figures leap out at the viewer.
27:34The ancient equivalent of the 3D movies.
27:39In front, the portico was supported by two enormous caryatid columns.
27:44And unlike what we see today, all the sculpture was brightly painted and inlaid with precious metals to make the details of the sculpture stand out.
27:52And if that seems flashy, well, that's exactly what it was meant to be.
27:55Over time, this kind of thing gave Delphi a collection of sculpture almost unparalleled in the ancient world.
28:02But we also have to remember this.
28:05For the Greeks, statues were not just stone.
28:08They were potentially animate.
28:10They lived, they breathed, they responded.
28:12So when we look around here, we shouldn't see statues made of dead stone or bronze, but statues shimmering with life.
28:25The Sifnian treasury marks the cusp of the classical age of ancient Greece, an age of which Delphi was going to be the beating heart.
28:31But it was more than that.
28:34Delphi was the historical logbook of the age.
28:37As every key moment in history was represented here in bronze, gold, marble, so that history began to accumulate a power of its own.
28:45And when the Greeks came here to ask the oracle who they were, as the oracle demanded, Delphi itself provided a kind of answer, an answer that was growing all the time.
28:59At this time, the answer seemed to be that they were winners.
29:05The sanctuary became a kind of trophy chest of Greek victories in war, and in particular their victories in the epic struggle against the Persians.
29:16The initial Athenian victory at Marathon in 490 BC, and the clinching victories at Salamis in 480 BC and Plataea the following year.
29:29In celebrating these victories, they created an ideal, that of Greek unity.
29:38And it was first celebrated where else, but right here at the Omphalos, at Delphi.
29:47I worked beside Anne Jacquemin when I first began to study the sanctuary.
29:51Now she and her colleagues have made an extraordinary discovery, which has finally confirmed the importance of Delphi as a unifying space.
30:00It concerns the inscription on the base of the giant statue of Apollo, which the cities who fought at Salamis put up outside the temple.
30:07It was a statue of large size, since we have the traces of two feet, and you have the mortise, which shows that we have a large statue.
30:22These feet have 90 cm long, which makes us a statue of about 6 m tall.
30:28Unfortunately, the statue's dedicating inscription is damaged. The first word identifying the dedicator is missing.
30:38The first line, which is the most important for us, we read Topoloni, that is Apollon, and then Anetene.
30:54So we have to find the name in the lacune.
30:59Until this time, almost all dedications had been by individual people or cities.
31:05But here we know that the last word, Anetene, is in the plural, and the physical alignment of the letters cuts down the possibilities.
31:14How many letters must be?
31:16Yes, because because of the alignment of the lines, we know that we have to find something that makes 8 letters.
31:26Or, if it's Apollon de Salamines, it's an offering collective.
31:31It's called Hellanes, to use the dialect in usage here, and with the fact that we have the 8 letters that we seek.
31:44What does that mean? If the name of the dedicator is Hellanes, on this statue, at this point in the history of the sanctuary,
31:51what does that mean for the idea of unity and community?
31:53Well, it's the first time that we see a dedication in the name of the Greeks,
31:58that is, the expression of a Greek unit.
32:02It's a very important moment in the Greek history.
32:07So the Salamis monument was saying something completely new,
32:11that there was a community who thought of themselves as Greeks,
32:15and it was not only united, but victorious.
32:18Yes.
32:22This is exactly the kind of unifying message that so excited the original excavators,
32:27and indeed still excites UNESCO and other international bodies today.
32:30the idea that Greece in the ancient world was one nation, one country, one idea.
32:35And it is an amazing idea.
32:37Greece in the ancient world, most Greek cities spend all their time at each other's throats,
32:41not in unity.
32:43And this statue became a crucial marker in the sanctuary as a result.
32:46It was known as Megale Andras, the big man.
32:56This idea of Greek unity continued to inspire dedications at Delphi.
33:04On the same terrace, a year or two later, another dedication went up.
33:07It became the most famous of all Delphi's monuments.
33:16It celebrated the victory against the Persians at Plataea.
33:20And on it were carved the names of the cities who had contributed soldiers.
33:24It was a huge bronze column made of three coiled serpents supporting at the top a golden tripod bowl.
33:36The serpent column was a staggering nine metres high.
33:41And it was to become the defining icon of Delphi.
33:45But today in Delphi, there's only a replica five feet tall.
33:54The victory at Plataea was an amazing moment.
34:03Individual little cities of Greece had managed to defeat the greatest empire in the Mediterranean.
34:08And from that point, Greek unity would be sung as an ideal by the poets,
34:13praised by the philosophers, aimed at by the politicians.
34:16But it was always an ideal at risk from the traditional rivalries that made Greece what it was.
34:24It was always an ideal.
34:25It was always an ideal.
34:26It was always an ideal.
34:27It was always an ideal.
34:29Even on the terrace surrounding the serpent column,
34:32individual cities put up still bigger monuments to their own glory.
34:37Despite the idealism, the competition continued.
34:40In that competition, one city took the lead, Athens, which ruled the roost for four decades, from 480 BC to 440 BC.
34:56It was Delphi's advice to the Athenians to rely on the wooden walls of their fleet, which had helped preserve the city in the Persian Wars.
35:06And that fed an Athenian cultural explosion which can still be heard today, as classical art, philosophy and literature were transformed.
35:15Modern Greece has always looked back at that time as a golden age.
35:25Even today, there is a nod to the Delphian way of doing things.
35:29Just as in Delphi, ancient Greeks put up statues and inscriptions about their victories, here on the podium of the parliament building in Athens are the battle honours of the modern Greeks, right up to Alamein and Korea.
35:45It's no surprise that the modern-day capital of Greece is Athens, for in the balmy days after the Persian Wars, it was the city of Athens that benefited most.
35:59They had their fleet, they took the fight to the enemy and then they created an empire that spanned much of the ancient Greek world.
36:15Success allowed the Athenians to decorate their city with some of the most beautiful buildings the world has ever seen.
36:24And to fund a political system whose ideals we still live by today, and even fight wars over more than two and a half thousand years later.
36:34It was in Athens that democracy was born, and the idea that votes, not wealth or breeding, should determine politics.
36:45Not far from the city centre, you can climb a hill where it all happened, where the state assembly met, composed of the whole voting population.
36:55And astonishingly enough, the speaker's podium still survives, here in the middle of the flat space where the citizens stood.
37:03Most people think of the Parthenon as the centre of ancient Athens, but I believe that this place is much more important.
37:10This was the assembly of the ancient Athenians, where they came to make every decision, including going to war.
37:17This was the place that allowed Pericles later to claim that Athens was an education to all of Greece.
37:23And in fact, just centuries later, it was the governing council at Delphi who put it perhaps best.
37:28It was the Athenian people, being the font and origins of all things beneficial to humanity, who raise mankind from a bestial existence to a state of civilisation.
37:42For those who built the modern state of Greece, and for those who excavated at Delphi, that idea was an irresistible call to unpack the ancient world and to make it part of their and our identity.
37:56From then on, know thyself meant knowing ancient Greece.
38:00Amazingly, we do know an enormous amount about that democracy. We can actually see it in action.
38:16In a remote corner of the university district is the state epigraphic museum.
38:23I like it because it contains direct evidence of how the Athenian democracy worked.
38:32Here is the machine which decided by lot who was to sit on the 500 strong grand juries, rather like a lottery machine today.
38:50Here is a list of those, rich and poor, who died in battle for the democracy.
38:55It even names individuals, Nicostratos and Philokomos, who were killed near the Black Sea.
39:04Here are pottery sherds which bear the names of Athens' most famous politicians, Themistocles and Pericles.
39:12But here too is an eight-foot-high list of the cities who had to pay up as members of the Athenian Empire.
39:20It's evidence of how the unity of Greece proclaimed at Delphi was beginning to turn into domination by one city.
39:34For Democrats, this is an inspiring place, coming face to face with the realities and mechanics of Athenian democracy.
39:41But we shouldn't get too carried away about Athenian democracy.
39:44For one, it excluded women, foreigners and slaves.
39:47And secondly, it was the Athenian democracy that ran the oppressive Athenian Empire,
39:52which some cities saw not as the bringer of freedom, but of tyranny.
39:59From the Persian Wars onwards, Athens festooned the sanctuary at Delphi with monuments
40:04in order to hammer home their dominance over Greece.
40:07It began with a new treasury to celebrate their victory at Marathon.
40:16On it, an Athenian hero, Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, got equal billing with Heracles,
40:24hero to all of Greece.
40:26The message of the treasury was, for Greece, read Athens.
40:35But this unsubtle display of ego didn't stop there.
40:40We're at the entrance to the sanctuary.
40:43And it was here in the mid-5th century, at the height of their empire,
40:46that the Athenians built a monument that would take pole position,
40:50that would be the first thing that people saw as they came into the sanctuary.
40:54And it was an interesting monument.
40:56It wasn't just statues of gods, but also statues of the founding heroes of Athens itself.
41:01All these monuments were saying,
41:11we dominate the sanctuary just as we dominate Greece.
41:16The ancient Greeks had a word for this kind of arrogance.
41:19We still use it today, hubris.
41:22Athens was riding for a fall.
41:31The Athenian expansion was underpinned by the Athenian fleet.
41:39But eventually some of the other cities of Greece could stand Athenian arrogance no longer.
41:49One of them was Sparta, which had been supreme on land for most of the century.
41:56War broke out.
41:58It was a titanic struggle.
42:02Battles were fought right across the Mediterranean, from Sicily to the Black Sea,
42:06and it changed the Greek world, and Delphi too, forever.
42:13In the end, after 50 years of on-off conflict,
42:15the Spartans, with the help of Persian money, built a fleet
42:18that was able to cut off the Athenian grain supply
42:20and then defeat the Athenian fleet in battle.
42:23The result was a famous scene.
42:25The Spartans came into Athens and they forced the Athenians to knock down their own stout walls
42:30that had defended the city.
42:31But one of the best ways to see how the Spartans celebrated their great victory
42:35is back over there at Delphi.
42:37Now, for the first time, the Spartans began to build at Delphi.
42:47And they deliberately targeted the monuments Athens had built.
42:51The Athenian monument at the entrance was a gift to Apollo.
43:04So the Spartans couldn't just knock it down.
43:07Instead, they upstaged it.
43:14They started by deliberately obscuring the Athenian monument
43:18with a collection of 38 statues of their own victorious generals.
43:23Then they built a dominating portico on the opposite side of the sacred way.
43:28But the struggles between the Greek cities didn't stop.
43:32And in time, even the Spartans were defeated.
43:35Right on cue, their enemies, the Arcadians, put up a monument of their own
43:39which ruined the view of the Spartan portico.
43:50It's not just that these real-life wars were represented by the monuments here.
43:55These monuments lived those battles themselves.
43:58Remember I said that for the Greeks, statues weren't just pieces of stone.
44:02They shimmered with life.
44:04And in the later writers, we hear stories of these statues actually dying
44:08when their real-life dedicators died in battle.
44:10So when the Spartan power finally faded and their general Lysander was finally killed,
44:15his statue was said to have crumbled.
44:17The battles rolled on.
44:20The cities of Greece were in near-permanent conflict for a hundred years.
44:27And at every stage, they put up monuments at Delphi to celebrate the struggle.
44:32Delphi was one of the few places where Greeks could come together in common worship.
44:36But ironically, it became the place where they also expressed their differences most extremely.
44:45Know thyself.
44:47But increasingly, the story that Delphi told the Greeks was not once as it had been
44:51with the Salamis Apollo about Greek unity.
44:53Instead, it was about ungovernable ambition, a storyboard of mutual hostility.
44:58And so it's not without irony that amongst all these scenes of extravagant put-downs and one-upmanship,
45:07right next door to the maxim know thyself on the temple was another.
45:12And it read simply, nothing in excess.
45:15Over time, this competition of excessive display and monument building created something very special.
45:30Nothing could be destroyed because it all belonged to Apollo,
45:34so these monuments had to remain here for all time.
45:37As the centuries unfolded, each one was represented in the sanctuary.
45:49So walking through Delphi is like walking through the story of ancient Greece,
45:54the story of one of the most important periods in human history,
45:58told in the form of some of its most spectacular artistic creations.
46:04But by the mid-fourth century, a new power began to take over Greece,
46:09that of Macedon, Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great,
46:14who would come to take over not just Greece but much of the ancient world.
46:21In Greece itself, politics was transformed.
46:26These Macedonian Greek kings and their successors imposed order and peace
46:31on the squabbling Greek cities.
46:34The age of competition was over.
46:37So they came here to Delphi to go live and declare their power directly to the people.
46:43For Delphi, that was business as usual.
46:48What's more, in the sanctuary we find a new and revealing practice.
46:52Beneath the temple terrace stands a retaining wall of polygonal masonry,
46:57and there people came to write still more messages.
47:01But this time, the messages had legal force.
47:04They were contracts.
47:06Contracts confirming the freedom of individual slaves.
47:10Dominique Moulier has been studying them for decades.
47:14The process was this.
47:31These slaves had managed to buy their freedom.
47:34But because they had no legal rights until they were free,
47:37the owners gave them to the god in order to make them free.
47:40And that's what the contracts describe.
47:43My favorite is first because, from a point of view aesthetic,
47:46it's one of the most beautiful.
47:48So we have an infringement, by consacration,
47:51but that comes in a way to the end of a testament,
47:54which is that this Alkésipos,
47:55which chose to come, visible, to install at Delphi,
47:58and to mourir at Delphi.
47:59I always think of this slave,
48:02or these slaves who were liberated
48:05and who were proud of their names and their contracts
48:10are marked by this new statute.
48:13At the same time,
48:15we have to get into the idea
48:17that an infringement is the best engine of slavery.
48:22That is, by infringing an slave,
48:25we receive money, we receive capital,
48:28and we can reinvest it by buying an slave.
48:30It allows us to renew the service force.
48:33These carvings are certainly not a declaration of human rights,
48:40but it's telling that even lowly slaves came to take their place here
48:44amongst the great and good who had been commemorated at Delphi
48:48over 700 years of Greek history.
48:51But then, in 168 BC, everything changed.
48:56A new power took over.
48:59Rome.
49:10For Greeks, the Roman conquest meant the end of their independence.
49:15But Greece's prestige meant that Roman leaders
49:18still found it useful to emphasise their power at Delphi
49:22with a series of magnificent monuments.
49:25Moreover, their religious outlook was very similar,
49:28so some of the sanctuary's most beautiful treasures date from that time.
49:32The stadium was rebuilt in stone
49:34and the Temple of Apollo restored.
49:37They even expanded the gymnasium
49:39and added a characteristically Roman plunge pool.
49:43Yet something had changed.
49:48Delphi was no longer in the political mainstream.
49:51By the first century AD,
49:53we find even Plutarch and his friends lamenting
49:56that the Oracle was no longer the political arbiter it had been.
50:02But even though the Oracle was no longer being heeded on the international stage,
50:06Delphi still had its place.
50:08Even the most important people in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds
50:11tried to justify their importance
50:13by placing themselves here at Delphi.
50:15The ironies of those mottos
50:17know thyself and nothing in excess continued.
50:19But then, something happened
50:22which did finally bring a halt to Delphi's story.
50:25And to understand what that was,
50:27we need to go a very long way indeed.
50:41In the 4th century AD,
50:42the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity.
50:46He founded a new capital for the empire.
50:51It's now known as Istanbul,
50:54but the emperor renamed it Constantinople after himself.
50:59And it was a Christian capital.
51:01Not long afterwards,
51:03one of his successors banned divination in the political field.
51:06And a decade after that,
51:08another Roman emperor banned the ancient gods completely.
51:11In 360 AD,
51:16the last pagan emperor Julian
51:18sent a question to the oracle back at Delphi.
51:21But the sources say that this is the only response he received.
51:25Tell the king the fair wrought hall has fallen to the ground.
51:30The water of speech even is quenched.
51:34The oracle at Delphi had finally fallen silent.
51:50Now a museum, once a mosque,
51:52this building began life as the great church of Hagia Sophia.
51:57It was built by one of Constantine's successors
52:01as the state church of the new Christian empire.
52:07The emperors decreed that the center of the world,
52:10the Omphalos,
52:11was no longer at Delphi.
52:13It was here.
52:18The emperors were crowned here in Hagia Sophia,
52:20in a place they called the Omphalaion.
52:23The architecture and symbolism here show all too clearly
52:27how the world of classical Greece had been transformed forever.
52:33This place's name, Hagia Sophia, means holy wisdom.
52:36But not the kind of wisdom,
52:38that edgy self-awareness that was on display at Delphi.
52:41Here that wisdom is part of a monotheistic religious orthodoxy.
52:45And the politics it represents
52:47isn't that of the showing off and elbow-shoving of the classical Greeks.
52:51Here it's all about an absolute, incontestable autocracy.
52:56And in that very new world,
52:58the Omphalos is now the place
53:00where the Byzantine emperors themselves were crowned.
53:05But astonishingly, here, in this city,
53:07there is still a direct link back to the days
53:10when Delphi had been the center of the ancient world.
53:13In the emperor's new capital, there had to be a stadium for chariot races.
53:22Bigger and better than race tracks anywhere else, including Rome.
53:27With, in the middle, where everyone could see it,
53:32cultural booty from all round the empire.
53:38And from Delphi, they brought perhaps the most potent symbol of all.
53:42The serpent column.
53:44Symbol of Greek unity and of Greece's heroic past.
53:48And here it is.
53:53Battered and broken.
53:55Imprisoned.
53:56Overshadowed by the obelisks on either side.
53:59Forgotten.
54:00The serpent column of Plataea from the 5th century B.C.
54:04that stood opposite the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
54:07And the names, still just barely legible on the coils,
54:10of those cities and states who came together
54:12to fight against the Persian invasion of Greece.
54:16You know, I often wonder that if the bronze and stones
54:19of the ancient world could talk, what would they say to us?
54:22And this creature would have a lot of stories to tell.
54:25Not just the 800 years or so it spent at Delphi,
54:27but its history after that.
54:29It came here to Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul,
54:32and was placed in the Hippodrome.
54:33The charioteers it saw racing round it.
54:36The wars, the crusades, got turned into a fountain at one point.
54:41And it's an incredibly sad sight to see it now, today,
54:45forgotten in something almost akin to a bit of a rubbish dump.
54:48But we have to remember this piece is almost 2,500 years old.
54:54And for me, that makes it a miracle that it's here at all.
55:06For this small town on the side of a Greek mountain,
55:11it's been an astonishing career.
55:15Delphi has been a local shrine,
55:17and an arbiter of international events.
55:20A focus of national unity,
55:22and an arena for intense political rivalry.
55:25And its messages,
55:27know thyself,
55:28and nothing in excess,
55:30still reverberate.
55:32In a period of madness,
55:35we can say,
55:36we can say,
55:37we can say that this Medellaghan,
55:40we can say that this Medellaghan,
55:41we can say that we can put it back in value.
55:43It's a lesson of humility.
55:44We can meditate,
55:45and know that even places,
55:46that are considered the center of the world,
55:47can fall into the oublies and get out of the memory of humans.
55:58For me, the message is actually,
55:59think about yourselves in relation to others,
56:02and understand yourselves in relation to others.
56:08Delphi is referred to in the ancient world often as a theatron,
56:12their word for spectacle,
56:13our word for theatre,
56:15a place where people came to watch,
56:17but also to be seen,
56:18to discuss,
56:19to debate,
56:20to think about themselves,
56:21and about the world around them.
56:23And Delphi is still doing that for us today.
56:26It's broadcasting many different messages
56:28to many different people.
56:31But for me,
56:32it's about that double-edgedness that Delphi has,
56:36that ambiguity and yet clarity,
56:39that unity and yet rivalry,
56:41the constant reinvention of what Delphi is,
56:44that forces the question and the reflection back on us,
56:48and makes us think about ourselves,
56:50our limitations,
56:52and ultimately,
56:54about our own humanity.
56:56Staying in Ancient Greece here on BBC HD,
57:08it's Ancient Worlds with Richard Miles next.
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57:24OHL
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