Plutarch

A writer who served the god he wrote about

Pythian Apollo was the god whose oracle stood at Delphi, and Plutarch’s priesthood there comes from his own pen. Arguing that age is no reason for a man to give up public service, he turns the argument on his own case: “you indeed know that I have these many Pythiads served the Pythian Apollo”. He then refuses the reply he could expect, that he has sacrificed, gone in procession and led dances enough, and might “lay aside the garland and leave the oracle”.

Three dialogues, sent out together

Three of his dialogues are set at Delphi, and he sent them out as one gift, to a friend named Serapion. He presents them as “a first-fruit offering, some discourses concerning the Pythian affairs”, and says what he expects in return: more and better discourses from Serapion and the friends around him, who live in a great city and have leisure, books and conversation of every kind. He had little of that at home.

The three are The E at Delphi, The Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse and The Obsolescence of Oracles. Each is staged on real ground inside the sanctuary: the temple itself, a walk among the dedications, a meeting of travellers before the games.

A single letter in the temple

The E at Delphi starts from an object. A dedication of the letter E stood in Apollo’s temple, and Plutarch takes its position seriously. The word alone, he writes, was “placed in the principal seat in the God’s temple”, and received the standing of a sacred offering and of a thing to be looked at. He does not believe a letter reached that place by chance or by any lottery of letters. The men who first thought philosophically about the god gave it that station, either because they saw some particular power in it or because they used it as a symbol for something else worth attention.

The scene around the argument is domestic. He had often avoided the question when it was raised in the school, and was caught out by his own children while he was debating it with strangers who were leaving Delphi. Too courteous to hold them in suspense, he sat down by the temple and worked through it with them.

A day among the dedications

The second dialogue opens after the event. Philinus, who reports the whole conversation afterwards to Basilocles, a friend tired of waiting for his company, had spent the day showing visitors the consecrated objects of the sanctuary. Most of the party had gone on upward, climbing to the Corycian cave and to Lycorea. Those who stayed walked slowly, arguing as they went.

One of the visitors brings the talk to its subject. He asks why the Pythian prophetess no longer delivers her oracles in verse, and proposes they give up the rest of the sightseeing and sit down to it instead. The question carries a sting: either the prophetess no longer approaches the place where the god abides, or the vapour that inspired her has gone out. The company walks round to the south side of the temple and takes seats in the portico, opposite the temple of Earth, with the Castalian spring in view.

The Muses by the water

Boethus, one of the party, remarks that the place itself favours the question. A temple of the Muses once stood close by the source of the stream from which water was drawn for the sacrifices. Plutarch quotes the poet Simonides on that spring, whose clear water supplies “the fair-haired Muses water for their hands, before they touch the hallowed sacrifice”, and quotes him again on Clio, one of the Muses, as the keeper of those sacred wells.

The men who placed the temple there, he says, set the Muses as guardians of the springs and assistants to prophecy, and set the temple of Earth beside them, where the answers used to be delivered in verses and songs.

Two travellers and a failing oracle

The third dialogue begins with an old story. Eagles or swans flew from the opposite bounds of the earth and met where the temple of Pythian Apollo stands, at the place called the Navel. Epimenides the Phaestian put the story to the oracle and came away no wiser: “No navel is there of the earth or sea: ’Tis known to Gods alone, if one there be.” Plutarch reads the answer as the god’s rebuke to a man too bold with old traditions.

Then comes the frame. Not long before a celebration of the Pythian games, in the magistracy of Callistratus, two travellers met at Delphi from opposite ends of the world. Demetrius was a grammarian on his way home to Tarsus in Cilicia, and had come from Britain. Cleombrotus was a Spartan who had spent years in Egypt and on the Red Sea, travelling to improve his knowledge, with enough to live on and no wish for more. The dialogue dates itself by the magistrate’s name and by nothing else.

The small city he would not leave

Plutarch’s home was Chaeronea, a small city in Boeotia. He names its smallness himself, at the opening of a biography where he explains the limits of his research. A writer who needs books and local memory ought to live in a famous, populous city, he says, and then: “as for me, I live in a small city, and I prefer to dwell there that it may not become smaller still.” His public duties and the number of his pupils in philosophy left him no leisure to practise the Roman language while he was in Rome and Italy, and he came to Roman literature late, well on in years.

Chaeronea appears in his work as his own place. Telling the story of Damon, an orphan boy who killed a Roman officer quartered in the town, he calls it “our native city”, in sorry plight at the time and neglected for its smallness and poverty, and records that the walled-up vapour-bath where Damon was later killed still alarmed the neighbours in his own day.

The priesthood in the record

Modern scholars count two passages in which Plutarch states the priesthood outright, and read them alongside inscriptions found at Delphi.