The Pythian Games

The first contest was a hymn

The earliest Pythian contest Pausanias knew was not a race. It was the singing of a hymn to Apollo. Tradition named Chrysothemis of Crete as the first winner, followed by Philammon and Thamyris. Eleuther was remembered for a strong, pleasing voice even though he sang another person’s composition. Music was not decoration added to an athletic meeting. It was the beginning of the competition.

That priority followed the festival’s god and story. Delphi’s official account places the Pythia among the celebrations of Apollo’s defeat of Python. The earliest observance was said to recur every ninth year and to centre on paeans sung with the kithara. After the First Sacred War, in the early sixth century BC, the Amphictyons reorganised it on a four-year cycle.

How the musical programme changed

Pausanias dates the reorganised programme by Olympiads. The Amphictyons kept the contest for singing to the kithara and added solo aulos playing and singing accompanied by the aulos. He names the first winners: Melampus of Cephallenia, Sacadas of Argos and Echembrotus of Arcadia. At the next festival, accompanied aulos song was dropped because its tunes and words were laments thought unsuitable for the gathering. Solo playing remained, and a contest for kithara without song was added later.

Athletic contests entered at the same sixth-century reorganisation. Pausanias says the initial events followed Olympia’s programme except for the four-horse chariot, while Delphi added boys’ long and double foot races. Chariot racing was introduced at the following celebration. Later festivals added armed running, two-horse chariots, contests involving foals and boys’ pankration.

The sequence matters because it separates Pythia from Olympia. Delphi took athletic forms used elsewhere without allowing them to displace its first medium. A hymn to Apollo came before running, wrestling or chariots in the festival’s own remembered history. The official site describes religious rites on the opening days, musical competition before athletics and equestrian events after them.

Laurel for Apollo

Pausanias says the victor’s crown was laurel and connects it to Apollo’s love for Daphne, daughter of Ladon. The official account adds a ritual provenance: branches were cut from an old laurel at Tempe by a boy whose parents were both living. Myth, plant and award all kept the result within Apollo’s cult.

The surviving stadium sits at Delphi’s highest point, above the theatre and northwest of Apollo’s temple. Inscriptions call it the Pythian stadium. Its first building phase belongs to the late fourth or early third century BC, so the track is younger than the festival described for the sixth century. Earlier running and equestrian contests must have occupied other ground, perhaps the plain below Delphi.

The track was originally about 178 metres long. Its eastern starting line survives with two rows of slabs cut for runners’ feet and sockets for the starting mechanism. At an early phase as many as twenty tracks may have stood side by side; a later arrangement reduced the number to seventeen. The stadium therefore preserves the mature festival’s athletics, not its beginning.

Song left in stone

Music also left marks at Delphi. A second-century BC inscription records Satyrus of Samos performing a hymn for the god and the Greeks with kithara accompaniment. The two Athenian hymns to Apollo, carved on the Treasury of the Athenians, belong to later Pythaids rather than the Pythian Games proper, but they show how civic delegations continued to make song visible in the sanctuary.

The Pythian Games cannot be reduced to a Delphic version of Olympia. Their remembered first contest asked for a hymn; their programme continued to test voice, kithara and aulos while athletics spread through other parts of Apollo’s sacred ground. The stadium above the temple is the clearest surviving venue, but the festival began in song.