Persian Fire (19 page)

and then, on the far side of that mountain, the most sacred spot of all, a shrine holier to the Spartans than any in their own city, or indeed in all of Greece. At Delphi, the air was pure with prophecy. There, for nine months every year, the Lord Apollo was believed to have his dwelling. More than anywhere else in the world, it was where glimpses and revelations of the future might be uncovered. Deep within the oracle, the veil of time itself was rent.

That the Spartans should have had a particular admiration for Apollo was hardly surprising. Just as their ancestors had migrated to Lacedaemon, so the archer-god had come to Delphi as an invader from the north. Leaving the halls of Olympus behind him, Apollo had travelled the world 'with his far-shooting bow, searching for an oracle that might speak to mortal men'.'
¹⁵
He had found it where a monstrous python, bloated upon human prey, slumbered by a sweet-flowing, icy spring, its coils heaped against the sheer rock of Parnassus, while below it eagles soared over a lonely and dappled gorge. A single shot from his deadly bow had been sufficient to end the monster's reign, and from that moment on it was Apollo who had ruled as lord of Delphi. Sprigs of laurel planted by the god served to purify the sanctuary. In time, men raised a temple there, out of boughs cut from the laurel bushes, it was said, and Apollo had uttered prophecies through the rustling of the leaves. Since the youth of the god, foundation had succeeded foundation. The second had been built of fern-stalks, the third of wax and feathers, the fourth of bronze - for the history of Apollo's oracle was a fabulous one, and marked by ceaseless change. In time, the laurel leaves themselves had fallen silent, and the god chose to speak instead through the ecstasies of a young priestess, the Pythia, in whose title could be heard an echo of Apollo's long-rotted foe. Around 750
bc,
when Delphi's history first begins to emerge from myth, a temple of stone was raised. Shortly afterwards, it appears, it was decided that only an old woman should be appointed to serve as the Pythia, although she was still, as a symbol of purity, obliged to wear a young girl's dress.
⁴⁶
In 548
bc,
the temple burned to the ground. Still, amid all this turmoil, the voice of Apollo spoke on.

There was no other oracle to compare with it. Indeed, such was the prestige of Delphi that it became, of all the many temples founded by the Greeks, the only one to be served by a body of full-time priests. While the notion of such a cadre would hardly have raised eyebrows amid the great temple bureaucracies of the East, it was, for the Greeks, a decided innovation. Travellers' tales of the bizarre doings of Egyptian or Babylonian priests never ceased to amaze them. The news that in Persia only a Magus could preside over a sacrifice was greeted with particular astonishment. In Greece, anyone, even women, even slaves, could sacrifice. Only the Delphians, far removed in their mountain valley from all other possible forms of income, made a living from the proceeds of their shrine. 'Guard my temple,' Apollo had instructed them, 'receive the crowds of men."" The Delphians, obeying him, had lavishly cashed in. Other cities, far from begrudging the priests their professionalism, were happy to collude in it. The arrangement suited everyone. What better assurance could there be of the priests' even-handedness than that they charged everyone the same flat fee? When rival factions turned to the oracle for adjudication, they needed to be able to trust the words of the god absolutely. No one could afford to see Delphi's neutrality compromised. When, in 595
bc,
the neighbouring city of Crisa attempted to annex the oracle, the whole of Greece had been shocked into ruthless action.'
¹⁸
A great league of cities had marched to the god's defence. The norms of civilised behaviour, which banned chemical warfare as a crime against the gods, had been temporarily suspended: poison had been added to Crisa's water supply, so that 'the defenders were afflicted by violent bouts of diarrhoea, and had to keep rushing from their positions'.
⁴⁸
The walls were stormed, the impious city wiped out. Centuries later, the plain on which Crisa had once stood remained barren and bare of trees, 'as though labouring under a curse'.
⁵⁰

The terrifying lesson had been learned. Delphi was either an oracle for all the Greeks or it was nothing. Sacred flames rose eternally upon the public altar of the temple in illustration of precisely this truth: tended busily by priestesses, fed with pine and laurel wood, never permitted to go out, they blazed as the hearth-fire of the whole of Greece.

Yet even those who were not Greek might approach Apollo and hope for an answer. Delphi's claims to holiness were on a truly global scale. In the beginning, it was said, when Zeus had first come into the kingdom of the universe, he had sought to measure the scale of his inheritance by releasing one eagle from the east and one from the west, and watching them fly, to locate the centre of the world. The two birds had met at Delphi, and a great egg of rock, the 'Navel Stone', or Omphalos, still marked the spot. It was only natural, then, that the priests should have welcomed foreign supplicants as merely their temple's due. When Croesus, for instance, faced with the growing threat of Persia, had sought divine guidance, he had sent messengers to all the world's leading oracles, with instructions, on a given day, to ask what their master was doing back in Lydia. Only Delphi had provided the right answer: that Croesus was boiling up a lamb and tortoise casserole. From that moment on, the King of Lydia had become the oracle's most generous patron. Unparalleled gifts of gold, mixing bowls, ingots and statues of lions had been sent to join the treasures that already cluttered the shadows of the temple. Apollo, in return, had offered Croesus foreign-policy advice. It had been upon the suggestion of the god, for example, that the King of Lydia had formed his alliance with the Spartans.

Not that this had saved him in the long run, of course. If Apollo's advice often appeared clear, then it was not always so. 'The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor keeps silent, but offers hints.'
⁵¹
Those who misinterpreted the god, who failed to recognise the ambiguities which might haunt his pronouncements, who blundered into actions on the basis of what they wanted to believe, would invariably come to ruin. Croesus, having grown reliant upon Apollo's counsel, had ultimately been deceived by his own vainglory and obtuseness into disaster. Pondering whether to attack Cyrus, he had consulted Delphi and received the answer that a mighty empire would fall if he did. Croesus had duly gone to war and seen his own empire fall.

When Apollo was accused of ingratitude towards his benefactor, his priests at Delphi retorted that the god, while he was unable to avert the course of destiny, had granted to Croesus three more years of prosperity than had been allotted him by Fate. This explanation was readily believed: kings had always been the favourites of the gods. Such was clear from the stories of ancient times, when the heroes had invariably possessed royal blood. But what was acceptable in legend had become, first to the aristocracies of the various Greek states and then to every class of citizen, increasingly offensive. The claim that one mortal might be privileged over his fellows did not, as in the East, serve to legitimise the concept of monarchy, but rather to tarnish it - for no Greek cared to imagine that he might naturally be a slave. 'Only know the yoke of servitude,' it was said, 'and Zeus, the thunderer, will rob you of half your virtue.'
⁵²
It was all very well, perhaps, for the servile peoples of the East to live like women with a despot's foot upon their necks — but not for a free-born Greek. Kings, unless safely confined to remote and effeminate lands, properly belonged in ancient poems. Only as a title awarded to certain priests did the rank, in some Greek cities, maintain a ghostly after-life — for the intimacy which it had once been the privilege of royalty to share with the gods could not be lightly set aside, and venerable ceremonies might still depend upon it. Even as a priest, however, a 'king' remained a figure of danger. The charisma natural to his title had to be scrupulously trammelled. No powers could be permitted him beyond the religious. Even his term of office, in a city such as Athens, was sternly limited to one year.

How extraordinary, then, it might be thought, that in Sparta, of all states, where the communal was everything, kingship should not merely have endured but been illuminated by a sacral, haunting glow. Other Spartans were
hommoi
— peers — but royalty was something more. As a boy a crown prince was exempted from the
agoge.
As commander-in-chief, a king led his countrymen into war. As head of state, he stood for no man in the city; nor was anyone permitted to touch him or even brush against him in public. Most eerie of all, and what truly set him apart from his countrymen, was his intimacy with the gods. Certainly, no mortal in the world could look for a closer relationship with the Delphic oracle than that enjoyed by a Spartan king. Each one, in an arrangement unparalleled in any other state, had two ambassadors, the 'Pythians', on permanent stand-by, ready upon a royal gesture to gallop north and put questions to Apollo. Such were the privileges of breeding. The kings were, after all, the distant relatives of Zeus.

Their countrymen, naturally, looked to benefit from such a bloodline. Respectful of royalty though they were, the Spartans did not indulge it out of a craven servility. Just the opposite. While other Greeks flinched from the mystique of kingship, the Spartans, with that blend of common sense and superstition so typical of all their policy, looked to exploit it for their own ends. If the kings had the ears of Apollo, then the state had the ruling of the kings. Like magnificent but captive predators, they were kept, in the strictest Spartan manner, under close and ceaseless watch. By each other; by the Gerousia; by the mass of the people. Even when, as was increasingly the case by the late sixth century
bc
, the kings were absent from the city on campaigns, the surveillance never slackened.

In fact, if anything, the screws began to tighten. As Spartan greatness flourished, and the opportunities for foreign adventures with it, a once insignificant magistracy, the Ephorate, began to operate as both inquisitor and guardian of the kings. Five in number, the ephors were elected annually from the whole assembly of citizens, and so could legitimately claim to represent the people. A king, although he might ignore their first and second summons, was obliged to rise and answer their third. This calling of royalty to account by the Ephorate, a ritual which would occur at least once a month, represented a piquant reversal of roles. In the beginning, it was said, the ephors had served the kings as their servants, but over the years, by a secretive and cunning process, they had advanced to become their masters' shadows. Faceless in comparison to the kingship they may have been, and yet they too had unearthly powers. They would meet in darkness and trace the future in the sky. Should it be discovered there that a king was 'an offender against the gods,'
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the ephors had the right to dismiss him from his throne. They could then take it upon themselves to do as the king himself traditionally did, and dispatch messengers to Delphi. The oracle, it was assumed, would confirm the judgement of the heavens.

But would it? In a death-struggle between a king and the Ephorate, which side would Apollo and his priesthood back? This was not a question that the Spartans, with their deep-seated fear of constitutional upheaval, much cared to ponder. Nor did they expect to have to: Sparta was a city governed, in the final reckoning, not by kings or ephors, but by custom, and by the inimitable character of her people. To the quality they most universally prized the Spartans gave the name
'sophrosyne':
soundness of mind, moderation, prudence, self-restraint. Great though the powers of a king or an ephor might be, both were steeled, as Spartan citizens, not to push them to the limits. 'For it is always your nature', as a Corinthian would one day complain, 'to do less than you could have done, and to hold back from heading where your judgement might otherwise lead you.' But such criticism could be taken by the Spartans as commendation.
Sophrosyne
in everything: the spirit of revolution in Lacedaemon had been well tamed. Just as a warrior was subsumed within the discipline of the phalanx, so were the ephor and the king within the state: no selfishness, no running amok, no sudden lurching from the ranks.

Then, in 520
bc
a new king came to the throne. He laid claim to power as he would wield it, ruthlessly, and touched by scandal. Even before his birth, Cleomenes had been entangled in a snarl of shocking rumours. His father, the king, unable to impregnate his much-beloved first wife, had been ordered by the ephors to divorce her and take a second; but the King, although reluctant to defy the Ephorate openly, opted instead to practise bigamy. No sooner had his new bed-partner borne him Cleomenes than his original wife, to everyone's astonishment, outdid her rival and delivered three sons in quick succession. Since she was the King's niece as well as his beloved, this, unsurprisingly, had left Cleomenes much resented by his father. The king, flaunting his favouritism, had pointedly named the eldest of Cleomenes' half-brothers Dorieus — 'the Dorian' — and then entered him for the
agoge,
which the prince had duly passed with flying colours. Posing simultaneously as legitimate heir and man of the people, Dorieus had put the hapless Cleomenes, his unwanted elder brother, thoroughly in the shade. 'Everyone ranked him first of all the youths of his generation. And Dorieus himself had little doubt that his many qualities would serve to win his father's throne.'
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