Original subtitles

(electronic flares whooshing)

(majestic music)

By the mid-fourth 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 center 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 the 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.

(mysterious music)

(footsteps crunching gravel)

What the tourists see here at Delphi

has only been like this for just over a century.

Before that it was a lost world.

(crowd chattering)

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, the 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.

(men speaking French)

When I first began studying the sanctuary

as a young post graduate, French scholars

like Dominique Mulliez were an enormous inspiration.

The first problem for the archeologists

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 organization,

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.

(sweeping majestic music)

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 eighth century B.C., to the Roman Emperor,

Hadrian, a thousand 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 worshipers

would queue to ask their question.

Now faced with the front of the Temple of Apollo,

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 come and ask

whether he should attack his next-door enemy empire.

Or the Athenians, when they were faced

with the Persian invasion came here to ask

what should they do.

But the thing is, we don't know

exactly how the consultation took place.

But if we get inside the temple,

perhaps we can get a better idea.

(insects rattling)

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.

And it's here that French archeologists,

in the 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.

(woman singing operatically)

The priestess was said to sit

on top of a tripod set over a chasm

in the rock from which vapors rose.

She was reputed to breathe in the vapors

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 vapor

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 telltale 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 here 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.

(mysterious music)

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,

Poseiden in the sea, Hades in the underworld,

but nymphs in the grottoes and the caves,

Pan around you.

Every tree, every bush had a god.

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

They had to be prayed to,

to Demeter to fertilize 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.

(car rumbling on gravel)

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.

(mysterious music)

(water trickling)

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

which the French had found at Delphi.

They found lots of things like this at the cave.

Perfume jars,

small oil flasks.

Things like necklaces and rings.

They were 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 symbolized 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 even started to look like dice.

And 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 just 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 center, 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.

It's a really major junction.

Here, we've got an amazingly fertile plain.

We've got quite a nice harbor.

And then we've got good pastureland up above.

So all resources are here.

It's a seriously big place.

It's not specifically a place of

pilgrimage or sanctuary, but it is

a community with a religious center.

(serene music)

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 B.C. onwards it began to attract

interest and offerings from further and further afield.

At first they were small bronze statues

of warriors and praying worshipers.

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 cocoon.

You've got something that requires,

is very, very high maintenance.

It's requiring an awful lot of sacrificial animals,

lodgings, et cetera, et cetera.

Where you gonna 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.

(bus engine rumbling)

So Delphi's international career

began for real in the seventh century B.C.,

and it's a career which still continues today.

In one way, modern Delphi is a reincarnation

of the ancient sanctuary.

How ya doin'?

Comin' live from Delphi.

(people laughing)

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, it's,

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.

(tourists chattering)

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.

They had to figure out what that meant.

They decided it meant the wooden walls of their ships,

and they turned out to be right.

But King Croesus, when he asked about

whether or not he should attack

his neighboring 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.

(mellow music)

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 theater

watching the athletic and musical competitions.

At night, gathered around the landscape,

around 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.

(light bouncy music)

Perhaps the most important international event

at Delphi was the athletic festival

called the Pythian Games.

(crowd cheering)

It took place every four years

and rivaled 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.

(crowd cheering vigorously)

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 inlaid eyes,

bits of the silver and copper headband,

and even some silver teeth.

The Charioteer was a magnificent cry of triumph

in honor of a tyrant from faraway 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 for the ancient Greeks it couldn't

have been more natural.

People came to sanctuaries to honor 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, (speaks Greek),

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.

(majestic music)

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 alive from Delphi, a giant information exchange.

It wasn't just that information

was coming into 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.

(strong dramatic music)

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 Marseille in France.

They came from all kinds of places

and all kinds of people.

And Plutarch 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,

Rhodopis from the city of Naucratis in Egypt.

Now, Rhodopis was a prostitute, or 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.

(dramatic music)

Some of the Greeks came here to know themselves.

What did they learn from the myriad of messages

that 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 B.C., the people of

the tiny island of Sifnos 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, in fact, 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 their treasury

and they put the 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 log book 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 the epic struggle against the Persians.

The initial Athenian victory at Marathon

in 490 B.C., and the clinching victories

at Salamis in 480 B.C., 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 omphalos 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 in the ancient world

was one nation, one country, one idea.

And it is an amazing idea.

Greece in the ancient world, most 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 (speaks Greek), 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.

(ethereal music)

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 meters 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.

(middle eastern music)

In that competition, one city took the lead,

Athens, which ruled the roost for four decades

from 480 B.C. to 440 B.C.

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.

(Greek folk music)

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 honors of the modern Greeks,

right up to Alamein and Korea.

(rhythmic clapping)

It's no surprise that the modern day

capital of Greece is Athens.

From 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.

(majestic music)

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 two and half thousand 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 center, you can climb

a hill where it all happened,

where the state assembly met, composed of

the whole voting population,

and astonishingly enough, the speaker's podium

still survives here in the middle

of the flat space where the citizens stood.

Most people think of the Parthenon

as the center 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 fount

"and origins of all things beneficial to humanity

"that 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 a 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.

(birds chirping)

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 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, Nicostratos

and Philokomos who were killed near the Black Sea.

Here are pottery sherds which bear the names

of Athens's most famous politicians,

Themistocles 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.

(speaks Greek)

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 Perisan Wars onwards, Athens festooned

the sanctuary at Delphi with monuments

in order to hammer home their dominance over Greece.

(foreboding music)

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 the 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.

(dramatic music)

(water splashing)

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.

(ethereal music)

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 the Spartan portico.

(pencil scratching)

It's not just that these real-life wars

were represented by the 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.

By increasingly, the story that 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.

(people chattering) (light airy music)

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 the mid-fourth century,

a new power began to take over Greece,

that of Macedon, Philip of Macedon and his son,

Alexander the Great who would come

to take over not just 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 B.C., everything changed.

A new power took over, Rome.

(dramatic music)

For Greeks, the Roman conquest meant

the end of their independence.

But Greece's prestige meant that Roman leaders

still found it useful to emphasize their power

at Delphi with a series of magnificent monuments.

Moreover, 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

eight characteristically Roman plunge pools.

Yet something had changed.

Delphi was no longer in the political mainstream.

By the first century A.D. 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 world

tried to justify their importance

by placing themselves here at Delphi.

The ironies of those mottoes, 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.

(men chanting)

In the fourth century A.D., 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 long 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 360 A.D. the last pagan emperor, Julian,

sent a question to the oracle back at Delphi.

But the sources say that this is 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.

(choir singing in foreign language)

Now a museum, once a mosque, this building

began life as the 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 center

of the world, the omphalos,

was no longer at Delphi, it was here.

The emperors were crowned here at 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 a 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 omphalos,

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 center 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.

Within the middle, where everyone could see it,

cultural booty from all around 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 B.C. that stood

opposite the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

And the names still just barely legible

on the coils are 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, and this creature

would have a lot of stories to tell.

Not just the 800 years or so it spent at Delphi,

but its history after that.

That it came here to Constantinople, one day Istanbul.

It was placed in the Hippodrome,

the charioteers it saw racing around it.

The wars, the crusades.

It got turned into a fountain at one point.

And it's incredibly sad sight to see it

now today, forgotten in something

almost akin to a bit of a 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.

(majestic orchestral music)

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

in relation to others.

Delphi is referred to in the ancient world

often as a theatrum, their word for spectacle,

our word for theater, a place where

people came to watch, but also

to be seen, to discuss, to debate,

to think about themselves and about

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-edgeness

that Delphi has, that ambiguity

and yet, clarity, that unity and yet rivalry,

the constant reinvention of what Delphi is

that forces the question in the reflection

back on us and makes us think about ourselves,

our limitations, and ultimately

about our own humanity.

(sweeping majestic music)

(electronic flares whooshing)