STEPS WALKED: 
May 21, 2020
“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look there”. — Marcus Aurelius
It may sound odd, but you arrive in Delphi unexpectedly. The road down from the ski resort Arachova (there is still snow on the peaks in late May) hugs the mountains at the side of a deep and beautiful valley, which flows majestically into the Corinth Sea. Then around a corner it is there; nestled into the side of the cliffs and with the view obscured by trees. It wasn’t what I was expecting—I was thinking that this place ,which the ancients believed was the centre of the earth and which early maps depict as the epicentre of civilisation and the known world, would be a city on a hill, an Acropiolis, but no, it was hidden and deliberately so. Delphi was the centre of wisdom and in keeping with that role it was not going to present itself on a plate to the seeker. Only the determined would find it and perhaps still do.
Delphi is central to the history of the Olympic Truce because it was here that king Iphotos, in old age and exasperated by the perpetual fighting between the city states of Greece, came to the Temple of Apollo to consult the Oracle who was believed to possess powers of insight and wisdom. Due to being a certain age and a certain lack of formal education, I believed that Apollo was a space rocket, but in fact he was the most important Greek and Roman deity after his father Zeus. Apollo had a particular gift of prophecy and would speak through The Pythia (a women over 50) who lived in a special dwelling in the sanctuary.
Originally The Pythia would only answer questions on one day a year—the birthday of Apollo, but then some enterprising priests came up with a way in which statesmen and wealthy merchants who built a monument at the site or who sent a representative to be there in one of the first diplomatic courts could consult the Oracle on any day of the year. It was a very formal process: the seeker would write his question down and hand it to the priest. The seeker would then present a sacrificial offering. The Oracle, who went into a hypnotic trance under the influence of special vapours and laurel leaves, would then give her answer. This was invariably in incoherent words and incomprehensible shouts which the priests would then transcribe into a Hexameter (a poetic verse with six ‘feet’—Don’t worry I didn’t know either so had to look it up) and then it was written down and the seeker would take it away with him.
The answer was never ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but cleverly written, a bit like modern day horoscopes, to be taken as having at least two meanings. So when Iphitos presented his question as to how to stop fighting the response was not explicit. It said:
‘The problem is that fighting men can’t lay down their arms for fear of looking weak to their opponents and weak to their supporters. They must therefore fight on to be victorious or vanquished, because they are gripped by fear. Find a way of allowing fighting men to lay down their weapons without losing face and you remove the weapon of fear from which all war springs.’ (my interpretation).
So the king came up with the idea of a sporting event to be held in the place of Apollo’s father’s temple at Olympia, during which competitors would pursue ‘manly’ activities—competing with each other, but not as representatives of a city state, rather together as Olympians. It was war without killing people; competition between individuals respecting common rules and customs and most crucially respecting each other. The result was the first Olympic Games.
As I stood by the entrance to the Temple of Apollo, as no doubt King Iphotos had done nearly three thousand years earlier, I tagged on to a tour party of Americans and found that inscribed over the entrance to the temple were inscribed the following words ‘First, know thyself’.
I thought initially how strange—these people had spent a fortune building shrines, funding priests and representatives, and were now able to consult The Oracle who could give them all the answers they seek direct from the gods, and they were told to first, know thyself. The inescapable conclusion is that the answer we seek lies not in the hallucinogenic ravings of the Pythia or the skilled riddles composed by the priests, but in ourselves. Through knowing ourselves we can discern the answers we seek. If we don’t know ourselves, then all the greatest minds and priests will not be able to answer it for us.
About eight centuries after Iphitos consulted the Oracle, Jesus was confronted by the learned men of his time, the Pharisees, who wanted to know where he thought the Kingdom of God was. He replied that some say it is here and some say it is there, when all the time it was within you. We all want to believe that there is a special place we can go, some special person who will always know what we should do. So it is appropriate that the lesson Delphi should teach, is that the purpose of the journey can often be to enable us to discover the answer that lay within, even before we left.
