Delphi: The Bellybutton of the Ancient World

By the mid 4th century, this was one of the most awe-inspiring

and spectacular places in the entire ancient world.

Its combination of art, religion, money made it, in modern day terms,

the equivalent of the wealth of the Swiss banks, the religious power of the Vatican,

the advertising potential of the World Cup

and the historical importance of all the world's museums combined.

This is Delphi, on the slope of Mount Parnassus in central Greece.

Home of the great Oracle of Apollo, Delphi was the Omphalos,

the belly button, the centre of the ancient world.

According to ancient myth,

Zeus sent two eagles from opposite ends of the Earth.

And this is where they met.

It was several days' journey from the main cities of the ancient Greek world.

Yet for centuries,

not just ordinary people, but kings and ambassadors

from great cities and empires struggled up here

in search of answers to their most puzzling questions.

Fundamentally, they came here to ask the Oracle of the god Apollo about the future.

But however unwelcome, unhelpful, indeed awful, those responses were, they kept coming.

Why? And why do we still come here as tourists today?

For me, it was because Delphi told the ancient Greeks something about themselves.

Indeed, above the entrance to the temple of Apollo,

where they went to see the Oracle, was a simple inscription.

It said, "Gnothi seauton". Know thyself.

And that message, I think, isn't just important to the ancient Greeks.

I believe that know thyself, the message of Delphi,

and everything that was incarnate in this place,

still has meaning and importance for us today.

What the tourists see here at Delphi has only been like this for just over a century.

Before that, it was a lost world.

Scholars knew that Delphi had been one of the most important sanctuaries in ancient Greece.

But it was buried beneath earth, rocks and centuries of legend.

The answer was to dig,

and just about everybody had their shovels at the ready.

Ever since the Renaissance, Europeans had looked

to ancient Greece as the foundation of Western culture.

By the 1890s, American, French and German teams were negotiating

with the Greek government for the right to excavate.

Eventually, in 1892, the French won the race.

They sweetened the deal by lowering tariffs on imported Greek currants and olive oil.

Ever since, they have led the search for ancient Delphi.

When I first began studying the sanctuary as a young postgraduate,

French scholars like Dominique Mulliez were an enormous inspiration.

The first problem for the archaeologists was that there

were people still living right on top of the ancient sanctuary.

Despite the difficulties, the sanctuary and its lost treasures

gradually began to emerge from the soil.

The legend became a real place, with an iconic reputation.

In ancient times it had been a communal sanctuary,

visited freely by people from all over the ancient world.

Now, once again, people flocked to Delphi.

It became a beacon for internationalism just like the modern Olympic games,

which were founded at the same time in the 1890s.

And, in fact, Delphi still is a beacon for internationalism.

Here's how ICOMOS, the UNESCO organisation,

described Delphi when they made it a World Heritage Site in 1986.

"This reaffirms that one of the enduring missions

"of Delphi is to bring together men and women who otherwise remain divided by material interests."

But is that true?

And if so, how and why did Delphi get such a reputation?

The only way to answer that is to find out what was really going on at this site thousands of years ago.

At its height, the sanctuary at Delphi covered more than 100 acres.

The temple itself was surrounded by hundreds of votive buildings,

treasure houses, porticoes and statues,

all of them built by grateful visitors.

Some of them had come hundreds of miles.

They included rulers from across the ancient world,

from the legendary King Midas in the 8th century BC,

to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, 1,000 years later.

And the visitors came for the Oracle.

To ask the god Apollo for answers to their questions about the future.

But what actually happened when they got here?

Well, luckily, one of the several accounts we have

is the writings of a real insider.

He was a priest at the temple called Plutarch.

What Plutarch tells us is that the Oracle operated

on only nine days each year.

On those days, crowds of worshippers would queue to ask their question.

Now faced with the front of the temple of Apollo and the inscription "Know thyself,"

the consultant had to decide what their question would be.

Some examples. King Croesus from Lydia in modern-day Turkey

wanted to ask whether he should attack his next-door enemy empire.

Or the Athenians, when they were faced with the Persian invasion,

asked what should they do?

But the thing is, we don't know exactly how the consultation took place.

But if we can get inside the temple, perhaps we can get a better idea.

And here we are, inside the sacred temple of Apollo,

following in the footsteps of the people who came to consult the Oracle.

Moving from the public, front end of the temple, towards the back,

the inner sanctum, the most sacred area.

It's here that French archaeologists,

in their most recent plan of the temple,

have discovered something new.

Here, this rectangular structure, what they're calling an oikos,

which may well be what the literary sources talk about as the adyton,

the home of the Pythian priestess herself.

But the thing is, we still don't know for sure the mechanics

of what actually happened in this space.

What we do know is that the Oracle was a woman.

The priestess was said to sit on top of a tripod

set over a chasm in the rock, from which vapours rose.

She was reputed to breathe in the vapours and answer in a trance,

as if inspired by Apollo.

The priestess gave her answers to the applicant's question

from within the trance, and once she had spoken,

the applicants then had to try to understand what she had said.

So what was the prophetic vapour that induced trances in the priestess?

Well, we now know that Delphi's geology produced hallucinogenic fumes.

The sanctuary grew up at a place where two geological faults crossed.

And here on the temple floor you can see the signs of subsidence caused by the two faults.

And right beside the temple and its Oracle, is a tell-tale deposit.

This is travertine, formed when water releases hydrocarbons,

which it can only accumulate if it exists around a fault line.

Another sign, another piece of evidence that the geological

fault line runs right through the temple at Delphi.

Recent tests showed that one of those hydrocarbons

is the gas ethylene,

which is known to affect the working of the brain.

That could explain the trance.

But geology can only explain why the priestess was here in this exact position.

It can't help us explain why Delphi became such a spectacular sanctuary,

and why it maintained its reputation

in the ancient world for over 1,000 years.

If we examine Greek religion itself however, things become clearer.

After all, Oracles were a basic element

of ancient Greek religious traditions,

and they included some sometimes quite bizarre beliefs.

And to understand the religion of ancient Greece you have to understand that there were

gods in everything and everywhere.

Poseidon in the sea, Hades in the underworld, nymphs in the grottos and caves, Pan around you.

Every tree, every bush had a god.

And in that world, the gods had to be worshipped.

They had to be prayed to.

Demeter to fertilise your fields, or Athena to watch over your city or your industry.

You had to make sacrifices.

You met the gods in your dreams, they cured your illnesses, they were everywhere

and they could be for you or against you,

so you had to do your utmost to ensure that they were on your side.

These ideas go back to the very beginnings of ancient Greece.

I'm on my way to one of the oldest sacred places in the area.

It lies even higher up Parnassus,

behind the Delphi peaks, right off the tourist map.

It was one of the many places where the ancients came to make offerings to their many gods.

This is the Corycian cave,

sacred to Pan, the god of the countryside, and to the Muses.

It was only in 1969, some eight decades after Delphi began

to be excavated, that scholars began to investigate this place properly.

What they found was amazing.

Some of the objects had been put here nearly 7,000 years ago,

long before the Oracle at Delphi began to develop.

Most of them weren't as old as that, but all of them were very different

from the statues and great buildings the French had found at Delphi.

They found lots of things like this in the cave.

Perfume jars,

small oil flasks, things like...

necklaces,

and rings.

They'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.

Offerings in places like this were designed to keep the gods on-side.

But the excavators discovered the cave was more than just a place to make offerings.

There was something else found here. In fact, 25,000 knucklebones, animal knucklebones.

Now knucklebones in ancient Greece were used by kids as part of a game.

And they may have been dedicated here at the cave

as part of a ceremony that symbolised the transition

between childhood and adulthood, on the eve of marriage, for example.

But about 20% of these knucklebones were also inscribed with the names

of gods, and some of them looked like dice.

In fact, we also found dice, ancient dice, here in the cave.

Now this is interesting, because dice are sometimes associated with

a cheaper, easier Oracle.

So the cave was also used for divination, a simple kind of Oracle.

The aim was to lift the curtain between the natural world and the supernatural world of the gods.

This cave was an arena for spiritual communication going back thousands and thousands of years.

But down below, in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, it was all on a very different scale.

Here you had farmers, shepherds, local villagers coming to consult perhaps a dice Oracle.

Down below you had tyrants, cities, emperors, kings, coming to ask their questions.

Questions that would define the history of the ancient world.

Although the Delphic Oracle emerged from traditions like this,

Delphi itself began as a typical settlement

of the high country of central Greece.

And the earliest remains indicate not a religious centre, but a prosperous town.

According to Catherine Morgan, one of the leading experts on early Delphi,

it was the geography here which may have made the difference.

It's a very well-connected area.

We're pretty close to the major mountain passes coming down from the North.

We're right on a major east-west waterway. The really major junction.

Here we've got an amazingly fertile plain.

We've got quite a nice harbour, and then we've got good pasture land up above.

So all the resources are here.

It's a seriously big place.

It's not specifically a place of pilgrimage and sanctuary,

but it is a community with a religious centre.

Its location on long distance trade routes brought visitors to Delphi

in increasing numbers.

And the reputation of Delphi's local Oracle began to spread.

From 800 BC onwards, it began to attract interest and offerings

from further and further afield.

At first, they were small bronze statues of warriors

and praying worshippers.

Later they ran to giant bronze cauldrons, and gold and silver, too.

The Oracle was heading for stardom.

And the economic effects were enormous.

Almost from the minute you've separated the sanctuary from the local surroundings,

you're creating a cuckoo.

You've got something that requires very, very high maintenance.

It's requiring an awful lot of sacrificial animals, lodgings, etcetera.

Where are you going to get it from?

You're warping the local economy to do that,

and certainly a lot of what we know implies an increasingly rich,

pastoral economy supplying Delphi.

So Delphi's international career began for real

in the seventh century BC,

and it's a career which still continues today.

In one way, modern Delphi is a reincarnation of the ancient sanctuary.

How you doing?

Coming live from Delphi!

It still brings people from all over the world.

They come now to learn about the past, not the future, but they bring with them stories about the present.

Canada's gotten off pretty scot-free with regards to the economic crisis.

They bring information, in huge quantities.

Huge riots, every single store front window was smashed.

To find out what's going on around the world, you hardly need to leave Delphi's cafes.

The new line that they've been promising for at least five years now. The cuts are coming in slowly.

Ancient Delphi was just the same.

A huge mixture of visitors.

And the more people who came, the more information came with them,

information which the priests and the Oracle could use.

So Delphi's answers were better informed,

and much more likely to make sense.

But the Oracle's answers were also famous for their ambiguity.

They were only a basis for interpretation,

and to deal with that, you had to know yourself.

When the Athenians went to ask about what they should do about

the Persian invasion they were told "Trust in your wooden walls."

Now they had to figure out what that meant.

They decided it meant the wooden walls of their ships,

and that turned out to be right. But King Croesus, when he asked

if he should attack his neighbouring empire, he was told,

"If you attack, a great empire will fall."

He interpreted that to mean his enemies.

It turned out to be his own.

He even complained to the Oracle about the response he had got,

but the response came back to him saying,

"It was your fault, your misinterpretation."

The ambiguity of the response forces the question back on us,

forces us to know ourselves.

Once the Oracle took off, Delphi took off with it.

It became the focus for a whole range of other activities,

as people began to come here in huge numbers.

And it was all good business for a thriving city,

which surrounded the sanctuary.

Imagine what this place must have been like at full capacity.

When the games were on, maybe up to 40,000 people in the stadium,

here in the theatre watching the athletic and musical competitions.

At night, gathered around the landscape, with their campfires

glittering all over the valley.

The animals that had to be brought here, not just to sacrifice,

but also to feed that many people.

The noise, the smell, all the tourists coming in and out

as Delphi became more and more famous.

And in amongst that, the temple of Apollo.

And perhaps the consultants, waiting desperately for the next available day to see the Oracle.

All that crammed into one crag of the Parnassian mountains.

Perhaps the most important international event at Delphi

was the athletic festival called the Pythian Games.

It took place every four years, and rivalled the Olympics.

At the top of the sanctuary, there was a spectacular stadium.

Here they ran running races.

Elsewhere there was boxing, all-in wrestling and chariot racing.

The athletes competed naked and their struggles for victory

attracted spectators from all over the Greek world.

And the winners dedicated monuments to celebrate their victory.

One of Delphi's most famous treasures is the Charioteer.

It was discovered in three separate pieces right at the beginning of the excavation.

Six feet high, it's one of the few Greek sculptures to survive

in bronze, and the statue still preserves its original inlayed eyes,

bits of the silver and copper headband, and even some silver teeth.

The Charioteer was a magnificent cry of triumph

in honour of a tyrant from far away Sicily.

His horses had won the chariot race, and he wanted the world to know it.

But the triumphant horses are missing, and all that is left

to us is the clothed figure of the slave who drove them to victory.

Athletics and religion may seem for us like uncomfortable bedfellows,

but it couldn't have been more natural.

People came to sanctuaries to honour and worship the gods,

and athletic and musical competitions were a great way of doing that.

In fact, over here is one of the best examples of just how tight

that relationship between religion and athletics was.

It's an instruction, in the wall of the stadium, saying that wine,

"to oinon maerfaren," may not be taken out - OUT - of the stadium!

Not 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.

And 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.

Competition in the stadium wasn't the only kind going on at Delphi.

Down below, in the sanctuary, peoples and cities vied with one another

to shower the gods with ever-grander dedications.

They turned the whole place into an echo chamber of competing voices

coming live from Delphi, a giant information exchange.

It wasn't just that information was coming in to Delphi,

it was also being broadcast in a very public way.

In 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.

If you had a message to get across, Delphi was the place to do it.

That message could be carried in many ways.

Through elegant sculpture, or expensive buildings or precious vases.

But more simply, it could also be done through a text.

Everywhere there are inscriptions on the buildings.

So far, scholars have counted more than 3,000 individual texts.

Some of them running to hundreds of words.

Literally, Delphi was the Greek world's notice board.

And these dedications, in all their forms, came from individuals

and cities near and far.

Dedications arrived from cities more than 1,000 miles away,

like the Greek colony at Marseilles in France.

They came from all kinds of places and all kinds of people.

Plutarch, in this description of his travels and his visits to the sanctuary, talks about

one evening when he was walking with friends, and they came across the dedication of a certain Rhodopis.

Rhodopis, from the city of Naucratis in Egypt.

Now 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.

Plutarch's friends were indignant.

So, if the Greeks came here to "know themselves," what did they learn from

the myriad of messages which were being broadcast from this place?

Lesson number one seems actually to have been "show thyself."

And the bigger and bolder, the better.

In around 550 BC, the people of the tiny island of Siphnos

discovered gold and silver mines on their island.

In thanksgiving, they built themselves a treasure house

to hold their offerings to Apollo at Delphi.

It was packed with gold, silver and other rich gifts.

Even in the context of this opulent sanctuary,

it was a spectacular building.

But today, there's almost nothing left to see.

So 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.

What you can see here today is just the foundations.

It was on top of those that they placed the Siphnian marble, brought all the way from their home island.

This was the first building at Delphi to be made entirely of marble.

And on top of the Siphnian marble walls, sculpture in marble,

and they didn't stint there either with the decoration.

They commissioned some of Greece's finest sculptors to adorn the treasury.

And they put their most spectacular scene on the wall facing the path

up to the temple where everyone could see it.

It depicted the great Greek myth about the war between the gods and the giants.

Carved with incredible depth and skill to make the figures leap out at the viewer.

The ancient equivalent of the 3D movies.

In front, the portico was supported by two enormous caryatid columns.

And 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.

And if that seems flashy,

well, that's exactly what it was meant to be.

Over time this kind of thing gave Delphi a collection of sculpture

almost unparalleled in the ancient world.

But we also have to remember this.

For the Greeks, statues were not just stone.

They were potentially animate.

They lived, they breathed, they responded.

So when we look around here, we shouldn't see statues made

of dead stone or bronze, but statues shimmering with life.

The Siphnian treasury marks the cusp of the classical age of ancient Greece.

An age of which Delphi was going to be the beating heart.

But it was more than that.

Delphi was the historical logbook of the age.

As every key moment in history was represented here in bronze, gold,

marble, so that history began to accumulate a power of its own.

And 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.

At this time, the answer seemed to be that they were winners.

The sanctuary became a kind of trophy chest of Greek victories in war.

And, in particular, their victories in their epic struggle against the Persians.

The initial Athenian victory at Marathon in 490 BC,

and the clinching victories at Salamis in 480 BC

and Plataea the following year.

In celebrating these victories, they created an ideal.

That of Greek Unity.

And it was first celebrated, where else, but right here at the Ompholos at Delphi.

I worked beside Anne Jacquemin when I first began to study the sanctuary.

Now she and her colleagues have made an extraordinary discovery,

which has finally confirmed the importance of Delphi

as a unifying space.

It concerns the inscription on the base of the giant statue of Apollo,

which the cities who fought at Salamis put up outside the temple.

Unfortunately, the statue's dedicating inscription is damaged.

The first word identifying the dedicator is missing.

Until this time, almost all dedications had been by individual people or cities.

But here we know that the last word, anethen, is in the plural.

And the physical alignment of the letters cuts down the possibilities.

So the Salamis monument was saying something completely new.

That there was a community who thought of themselves as Greeks,

and it was not only united, but victorious.

This is exactly the kind of unifying message that

so excited the original excavators, and indeed still excites UNESCO and other international bodies today.

The idea that Greece and the ancient world was one nation, one country, one idea. And it is an amazing idea.

Greece in the ancient world, most of the Greek cities

spent all their time at each other's throats, not in unity.

And this statue became a crucial marker in the sanctuary as a result.

It was known as Megale Andras, the Big Man.

This idea of Greek unity continued to inspire dedications at Delphi.

On the same terrace, a year or two later, another dedication went up.

It became the most famous of all Delphi's monuments.

It celebrated the victory against the Persians at Plataea.

And on it were carved the names of the cities who had contributed soldiers.

It was a huge bronze column made of three coiled serpents

supporting at the top a golden tripod bowl.

The serpent column was a staggering nine metres high

and it was to become the defining icon of Delphi.

But today in Delphi, there's only a replica, five feet tall.

The victory at Plataea was an amazing moment.

Individual little cities of Greece had managed to defeat the greatest empire in the Mediterranean.

And from that point, Greek unity would be sung as an ideal

by the poets, praised by the philosophers,

aimed at by the politicians.

But it was always an ideal at risk from the traditional rivalries that made Greece what it was.

Rivalries on display here in the sanctuary.

Even on the terrace surrounding the serpent column,

individual cities put up still bigger monuments to their own glory.

Despite the idealism, the competition continued.

In that competition, one city took the lead,

Athens, which ruled the roost for four decades from 480BC to 440BC.

It 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.

And that fed an Athenian cultural explosion which can still be heard

today, as classical art, philosophy and literature were transformed.

Modern Greece has always looked back at that time as a golden age.

Even today, there is a nod to the Delphian way of doing things.

Just 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.

It'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.

They had their fleet, they took the fight to the enemy and then

they created an empire that spanned much of the ancient Greek world.

Success allowed the Athenians to decorate their city

with some of the most beautiful buildings the world has ever seen.

And to fund a political system whose ideals we still live by today,

and even fight wars over more than 2,500 years later.

It was in Athens that democracy was born and the idea that votes,

not wealth or breeding, should determine politics.

Not 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.

And astonishingly enough, the speakers' podium still survives,

here in the middle of the flat space where the citizens stood.

Most people think of the Parthenon as the centre of ancient Athens,

but I believe that this place is much more important.

This was the assembly of the ancient Athenians where they came to make

every decision including going to war.

This was the place that allowed Pericles later to claim that Athens was an education to all of Greece.

And, in fact, just centuries later, it was the governing council at Delphi who put it perhaps best.

"It was the Athenian people

being the font and origins of all things

beneficial to humanity, who raised mankind from a bestial existence to a state of civilization".

For 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.

From then on, "know thyself" meant knowing ancient Greece.

Amazingly, we do know an enormous amount about that democracy.

We can actually see it in action.

In a remote corner of the university district

is the state epigraphic museum.

I like it because it contains direct evidence of how the Athenian democracy worked.

Here is the machine which decided

by lot who was to sit on the 500-strong grand juries.

Rather like a lottery machine today.

Here is a list of those,

rich and poor, who died in battle for the democracy.

It even names individuals like Nikostratos and Philokomos,

who were killed near the Black Sea.

Here are pottery shards, which bare the names of Athens'

most famous politicians Themistokles and Pericles.

But here, too, is an eight-foot high list of the cities who had to pay up

as members of the Athenian empire.

It's evidence of how the unity of Greece proclaimed at Delphi

was beginning to turn into domination by one city.

For democrats, this is an inspiring place, coming face to face with

the realities and mechanics of Athenian democracy.

But we shouldn't get too carried away about Athenian democracy.

For one, it excluded women, foreigners and slaves.

And secondly, it was the Athenian democracy that ran the oppressive

Athenian empire, which some cities saw not as the bringer of freedom, but of tyranny.

From the Persian wars onwards,

Athens festooned the sanctuary at Delphi

with monuments in order to hammer home their dominance over Greece.

It began with a new treasury to celebrate their victory at Marathon.

On it, an Athenian hero, Theseus, slayer of the minotaur,

got equal billing with Heracles, hero to all of Greece.

The message of the treasury was, for Greece, read Athens.

But this unsubtle display of ego didn't stop there.

We're at the entrance to the sanctuary, and it was here in

the mid-fifth century at the height of their empire that the Athenians

built a monument that would take pole position,

that would be the first thing that people saw as they came into the sanctuary.

And it was an interesting monument. It wasn't just statues of gods,

but also statues of the founding heroes of Athens itself.

All these monuments were saying,

we dominate the sanctuary, just as we dominate Greece.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this kind of arrogance -

we still use it today - hubris.

Athens was riding for a fall.

The Athenian expansion was underpinned by the Athenian fleet.

But eventually some of the other cities of Greece could stand Athenian arrogance no longer.

One of them was Sparta,

which had been supreme on land for most of the century.

War broke out.

It was a titanic struggle.

Battles were fought right across the Mediterranean, from Sicily

to the Black Sea and it changed the Greek world and Delphi, too, forever.

In the end, after 50 years of on-off conflict,

the Spartans with the help of Persian money built a fleet

that was able to cut off the Athenian grain supply

and then defeat the Athenian fleet in battle.

The result was a famous scene.

The Spartans came into Athens and they forced the Athenians

to knock down their own stout walls that had defended the city.

But one of the best ways to see how the Spartans celebrated

their great victory is back over there, at Delphi.

Now, for the first time, the Spartans began to build at Delphi.

And they deliberately targeted the monuments Athens had built.

The Athenian monument at the entrance was a gift to Apollo.

So the Spartans couldn't just knock it down.

Instead, they upstaged it.

They started by deliberately obscuring the Athenian monument

with a collection of 38 statues of their own victorious generals.

Then they built a dominating portico on the opposite side of the sacred way.

But the struggles between the Greek cities didn't stop.

And in time, even the Spartans were defeated.

Right on cue, their enemies, the Arcadians, put up a monument

of their own which ruined the view of Spartan portico.

It's not just that these real-life wars were represented by these monuments here.

These monuments lived those battles themselves.

Remember I said that for the Greeks, statues weren't just pieces of stone, they shimmered with life.

And in the later writers, we hear stories of these statues

actually dying when their real life dedicators died in battle.

So when the Spartan power finally faded and their general, Lysander,

was finally killed, his statue was said to have crumbled.

The battles rolled on. The cities of Greece were in near permanent conflict for 100 years.

And at every stage, they put up monuments at Delphi to celebrate the struggle.

Delphi was one of the few places where Greeks could come together in common worship.

But, ironically, it became the place where they also expressed their differences most extremely.

"Know thyself."

Increasingly, the story Delphi told the Greeks

was not once as it had been with the Salamis Apollo about Greek unity.

Instead, it was about ungovernable ambition.

A storyboard of mutual hostility.

And, so, it's not without irony that amongst all these scenes

of extravagant put-downs and one-upmanship, right next door to the maxim "know thyself"

on the temple, was another and it read simply "Nothing in excess."

Over time, this competition of excessive display

and monument building created something very special.

Nothing could be destroyed because it all belonged to Apollo.

So these monuments had to remain here for all time.

As the centuries unfolded, each one was represented in the sanctuary.

So walking through Delphi is like walking through the story of ancient Greece.

The story of one of the most important periods in human history,

told in the form of some of its most spectacular artistic creations.

But by mid fourth century, a new power began to take over Greece, that of Macedon.

Phillip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, who would come and take

over not just much of Greece but much of the ancient world.

In Greece itself, politics was transformed.

These Macedonian Greek kings and their successors imposed order

and peace on the squabbling Greek cities.

The age of competition was over.

So they came here to Delphi to go live and declare their power directly to the people.

For Delphi, that was business as usual.

What's more, in the sanctuary we find a new and revealing practice.

Beneath the temple terrace stands a retaining wall of polygonal masonry.

And there people came to write still more messages.

But this time, the messages had legal force. They were contracts.

Contracts confirming the freedom of individual slaves.

Dominique Mulliez has been studying them for decades.

The process was this. These slaves had managed to buy their freedom.

But because they had no legal rights until they were free,

the owners gave them to the god, in order to make them free,

and that's what the contracts describe.

These carvings are certainly not a declaration of human rights,

but it's telling that even lowly slaves came to take their place here

amongst the great and good who had been commemorated at Delphi over 700 years of Greek history.

But then, in 168 BC, everything changed.

A new power took over.

Rome.

For Greeks, the Roman conquest meant the end of their independence.

But Greece's prestige meant that Roman leaders still found it useful

to emphasise their power at Delphi

with a series of magnificent monuments.

More over, their religious outlook was very similar, so some of

the sanctuary's most beautiful treasures date from that time.

The stadium was rebuilt in stone and the temple of Apollo restored.

They even expanded the gymnasium and added a characteristically Roman plunge pool.

Yet something had changed.

Delphi was no longer in the political mainstream.

By the 1st century AD, we find even Plutarch and his friends lamenting

that the Oracle was no longer the political arbiter it had been.

But even though the Oracle was no longer being heeded

on the international stage, Delphi still had its place.

Even the most important people in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds

tried to justify their importance by placing themselves here at Delphi.

The irony of those mottos "know thyself" and "nothing in excess" continued.

But then something happened which did finally bring a halt to Delphi's story,

and to understand what that was, we need to go a very long way indeed.

In the fourth century AD, the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity.

He founded a new capital for the Empire.

It's now known as Istanbul,

but the emperor renamed it Constantinople, after himself.

And it was a Christian capital.

Not longer afterwards, one of his successors banned divination in the political field.

And a decade after that,

another Roman emperor banned the ancient gods completely.

In 360AD, the last pagan emperor, Julian, sent a question to the Oracle back at Delphi.

But the sources say that this was the only response he received.

"Tell the king the fair-wrought hall has fallen to the ground.

"The water of speech, even, is quenched."

The Oracle at Delphi had finally fallen silent.

Now a museum, once a mosque,

this building began life as a great church of Hagia Sophia.

It was built by one of Constantine's successors as the state church of the new Christian empire.

The emperors decreed that the centre of the world, the Ompholos,

was no longer in Delphi. It was here.

The emperors were crowned here in Hagia Sophia,

in a place they called the Omphalion.

The architecture and symbolism here show all too clearly

how the world of classical Greece had been transformed forever.

This place's name, Hagia Sophia, means holy wisdom.

But not the kind of wisdom, that edgy self-awareness, that was on display at Delphi.

Here, that wisdom is part of monotheistic religious orthodoxy,

and the politics it represents isn't that of the showing off and elbow shoving of the classical Greeks.

Here, it's all about an absolute, incontestable autocracy.

And in that very new world, the Ompholos

is now the place where the Byzantine emperors themselves were crowned.

But, astonishingly, here in this city,

there is still a direct link back to the days when Delphi had been the centre of the ancient world.

In the emperor's new capital,

there had to be a stadium for chariot races.

Bigger and better than racetracks anywhere else, including Rome.

With, in the middle where everyone could see it,

cultural booty from all round the empire.

And from Delphi they brought perhaps the most potent symbol of all,

the serpent column, symbol of Greek unity and of Greece's heroic past.

And here it is,

battered and broken, imprisoned, overshadowed by the obelisks

on either side, forgotten.

The serpent column of Plataea, from the fifth century BC that stood

opposite the temple of Apollo at Delphi.

And the names still just barely legible on the coils of those cities and states who came together

to fight against the Persian invasion of Greece.

You know, I often wonder that if the bronze and stones of

the ancient world could talk, what would they say to us?

This creature would have a lot of stories to tell.

Not just the 800 years it spent at Delphi, but its history after that.

It came here to Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, and was placed in the Hippodrome,

the charioteers it saw racing round it, the wars, the crusades, got turned into a fountain at one point.

It's an incredibly sad sight to see it now, today,

forgotten in something almost akin to a bit of rubbish dump.

But we have to remember, this piece is almost 2,500 years old.

And, for me, that makes it a miracle that it's here at all.

For this small town on the side of a Greek mountain,

it's been an astonishing career.

Delphi has been a local shrine and an arbiter of international events.

A focus of national unity and an arena for intense political rivalry.

And its messages, "know thyself" and "nothing in excess,"

still reverberate.

For me, the message is actually think about yourselves in relation

to others and understand yourselves.

Delphi is referred to in the ancient world often as a theatron,

their word for spectacle, out word for theatre.

A place where people came to watch, but also to be seen,

to discuss, to debate, to think about themselves and the world around them.

And Delphi is still doing that for us today.

It's broadcasting many different messages to many different people.

But for me, it's about that double-edgedness that Delphi has,

that ambiguity and yet clarity,

that unity and yet rivalry, the constant reinvention

of what Delphi is that forces the question and reflection back on us.

It makes us think about ourselves, our limitations and, ultimately,

about our own humanity.

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