The Pythian Games

The first contest was a hymn

The Pythian Games, also called the Pythia, were the festival of the god Apollo at Delphi. The earliest contest that the travel writer Pausanias knew of was not a race. It was the singing of a hymn, a song of praise, 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 a song that someone else had written. Music was not an extra added to an athletic meeting. It was where the competition began.

Why music came first

The order followed the festival’s god and its story. The Pythia was one of the celebrations held at Delphi for Apollo’s victory over the serpent Python. The earliest festival was said to come round every ninth year. It centred on paeans, songs of praise, sung with the kithara, a kind of lyre. After the First Sacred War, in the early sixth century BC, the Amphictyons reorganised it on a four-year cycle. They were the council of peoples that oversaw the sanctuary.

How the musical programme changed

Pausanias dates the new programme by Olympiads, the four-year spans between Olympic games. The Amphictyons kept the contest for singing to the kithara. They added solo playing on the aulos, a reed pipe, and singing to the aulos. Pausanias names the first winners: Melampus of Cephallenia, Sacadas of Argos and Echembrotus of Arcadia. At the next festival, singing to the aulos was dropped. Its tunes and words were laments, thought unsuitable for the gathering. Solo playing stayed, and a contest for the kithara without song was added later.

Athletics and the laurel crown

Athletic contests came in with the same reorganisation in the sixth century. Pausanias says the first events followed the programme at Olympia except for the four-horse chariot. Delphi added long and double foot races for boys. Chariot racing came in at the following festival. Later festivals added running in armour, two-horse chariots, contests for foals and boys’ pankration, a fighting contest.

The order matters because it sets the Pythia apart from Olympia. Delphi took athletic forms used elsewhere but did not let them push aside its first art. In the festival’s own remembered history, a hymn to Apollo came before running, wrestling or chariots. The festival opened with religious rites, then held the music contests, then the athletics, with horse events after them.

Pausanias says the winner’s crown was laurel. He links it to Apollo’s love for Daphne, daughter of Ladon. The branches came from an old laurel at Tempe, cut by a boy whose parents were both living. Myth, plant and prize all kept the result within the worship of Apollo.

The stadium above the temple

The surviving stadium sits at the highest point of Delphi, 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 horse contests must have used other ground, perhaps the plain below Delphi.

The track was originally about 178 metres long. Its eastern starting line survives. It has 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. So the stadium preserves the athletics of the mature festival, not its beginning.

Song left in stone

Music also left traces at Delphi. An inscription of the second century BC records Satyrus of Samos performing a hymn for the god and the Greeks, with the kithara. Two Athenian hymns to Apollo are carved on the Treasury of the Athenians. They belong to later Pythaids, the official delegations that Athens sent to Delphi, rather than to the Pythian Games themselves. But they show how city delegations kept making song visible in the sanctuary.

The Pythian Games cannot be reduced to a Delphic copy of Olympia. Their remembered first contest called for a hymn. Their programme went on testing voice, kithara and aulos while athletics spread across other parts of Apollo’s sacred ground. The stadium above the temple is the clearest surviving venue, but the festival began in song.