Sacred landscape of Delphi
The sacred landscape of Delphi is the way the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi was set into the mountains, gorges and springs of Mount Parnassus, and how pilgrims experienced that setting on the way up. The architectural historian Vincent Scully treated Delphi as the place where "the conflict between the old way" of the earth goddess and the new way of the young god Apollo "was most violently manifest".[1]
Apollo and the horned mountain
Scully argues that Apollo's sanctuaries are usually placed where the earth's landscape is most awesome, among cleft and horned mountains, and that the god's temple is set both to complement and to oppose those older powers.[1] At Delphi the myth says so outright. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo the god kills the she-dragon Pytho and takes over the site; Aeschylus gives a gentler version in which the sanctuary is handed to Apollo by Phoebe, the last of three goddesses who held it.[1] Scully notes that a Mycenaean sacred place came before the later Greek sanctuary.[1]
Earth, water and earthquakes
The sanctuary lies below the twin cliffs of the Phaedriades, "the Brilliant Ones", with the Castalian spring between them and the Corycian cave above.[1] Delphi is earthquake country, and Scully points out that this made Poseidon, the earthshaker, a co-resident with Apollo. The geology is part of the meaning of the place.[1]
The approach
Pilgrims came by land through cleft passes from Lebadeia or Gravia, or by sea, landing at Itea and climbing past the gorge of the Pleistos with the shadowed cliffs above.[1] The Hymn remembers the place as Crisa "beneath snowy Parnassus", and tells how Apollo, in the form of a dolphin, led Cretan sailors there to become his priests.[1]
Before the main sanctuary the road passed the shrine of Athena Pronaia, Athena "before the shrine", at Marmaria. Its round tholos (late 5th century BC) had an outer ring of Doric columns and an inner ring of early Corinthian ones, which Scully reads as the earth's sacred grove brought indoors.[1]
Up the Sacred Way
Inside the sanctuary the Sacred Way zigzags uphill past treasuries and monuments set up by rival cities. Athens' Marathon monument faced Sparta's monument for its victory at Aegospotami; there were also monuments by the Arcadians and Argives, and the Cnidian and Siphnian treasuries.[1] Critics have called the layout unplanned, but Scully argues that each building stands as a separate sculptural "participant", and that the temple of Apollo, on its terrace, appears and disappears behind walls and the altar of Chios before a final reveal.[1]
Inside the temple stood the omphalos, the conical stone marking the navel of the world, which Scully derives from the goddess's older tree and pillar cults. Apollo's mottoes were "Know thyself" and "Nothing to excess".[1] Above the temple the theatre echoes the hollow between the horns of the mountain, and from its orchestra the site feels "calm and contained". For three months a year Dionysos took over the shrine.[1]