LXXXVII. Delphi.—

The site of Delphi, till lately occupied by the modern village of Kastri, is in the highest degree striking and impressive. The city lay at the southern foot of the tremendous cliffs of Parnassus, which form a sheer wall of rock, about eight hundred feet high. Over these frightful precipices Philomelus drove some of the defeated Locrians. Just at the angle where this vast wall of rock bends round towards the south it is rent from top to bottom by a deep and gloomy gorge, some twenty feet wide, where there is a fine echo. Facing each other across this narrow chasm rise two stupendous cliffs, whose peaked summits tower considerably above the rest of the line of cliffs. They are nearly perpendicular in front, and perfectly so where they fall sheer down into the gorge. The eastern of the two cliffs was called Hyampia in antiquity; from its top Aesop is said to have been hurled by the Delphians. It has been suggested, though perhaps without sufficient reason, that when the later writers of antiquity, especially the Roman poets, speak of the two summits of Parnassus, they are really referring to these two cliffs. In point of fact the cliffs are far indeed from being near the summit of Parnassus; but seen from Delphi they completely hide the higher slopes of the mountain. In winter or wet weather a torrent comes foaming down the gorge in a cascade about two hundred feet high, bringing down the water from the higher slopes of the mountain. At the mouth of the gorge, under the eastern cliff, is the rock-cut basin of the perennial Castalian spring, a few paces above the highway. The water from the spring joins the stream from the gorge, which, after passing over the road, plunges into a deep rocky lyn or glen, which it has scooped out for itself in the steep side of the mountain. Down this glen the stream descends to join the Plistus, which flows along the bottom of the Delphic valley from east to west, at a great depth below the town.

From the cliffs at the back of Delphi the ground slopes away so steeply to the bed of the Plistus that it is only by means of a succession of artificial terraces, rising in tiers above each other, that the soil can be cultivated and made fit for habitation. There are about thirty of these terraces, supported by stone walls, mostly of polygonal masonry. The sanctuary of Apollo occupies only the five or six highest terraces at the foot of the cliffs, on the western side of the Castalian gorge. So high does it stand above the bottom of the valley that twenty minutes are needed to descend the steep terraced slope to the bed of the Plistus. Corn is grown on the terraces below the sanctuary; and the slopes on the eastern side of the Castalian gorge are wooded with fine olive and mulberry trees. Across the valley, on the southern side of the Plistus, rise the bare precipitous cliffs of Mount Cirphis, capped with fir-woods. From the western end of the precipices which rise at the back of Delphi a high rocky ridge projects southward toward the bed of the Plistus. This ridge closes the valley of Delphi on the west, shutting out all view of the Crisaean plain and the gulf of Corinth, though a glimpse of the waters of the gulf is obtained from the stadium, the highest part of Delphi.

Thus, enclosed by a rocky ridge on the west, by tremendous precipices on the north and east, and faced on the south, across the valley of the Plistus, by the lower but still precipitous sides of Mount Cirphis, Delphi lay in a secluded mountain valley; and rising on terraces in a semicircular shape, it resembled an immense theatre, to which it has justly been compared by ancient and modern writers. The whole scene is one of stern and awful majesty, well fitted to be the seat of a great religious capital. In respect of natural scenery no contrast could well be more striking than that between the two great religious capitals of ancient Greece, Delphi and Olympia—Delphi clinging to the rugged side of barren mountains, with frowning precipices above and a profound glen below; Olympia stretched out on the level margin of a river that winds in stately curves among the corn-fields and vineyards of a smiling valley set between soft wooded hills.