Apollo

For more than a thousand years Apollo’s oracle at Delphi was the closest thing the fractured Greek world had to a single authority. The sanctuary held religious weight from around 800 BCE, and by the 8th century the Pythia was already drawing visitors from across the Aegean. Cities did not found a colony or march to war without sending to ask; her answers, delivered in trance and turned into hexameter verse, shaped laws, alliances and the placement of new settlements from Sicily to the Black Sea. The site carried the inscription “know thyself,” ran the Pythian Games in his honour every four years, and anchored a Panhellenic cult that reached from his birth-island of Delos to temples at Didyma and Corinth. Sparta, Athens, Croesus of Lydia, and the founders of colonies all paid for the god’s word and acted on it.

The cult did not fade; it was shut down. The anti-pagan edicts of Theodosius I in 391–392 banned sacrifice and closed the temples, and in 393 he ended the pagan games in Greece and ordered the sanctuaries closed. Delphi’s oracle went quiet; the reputed last response, sent to an envoy of the emperor Julian around 362, was a report of the god’s own silence — the spring stilled, the laurel gone. The temple was stripped and a Christian community moved onto the site, which was abandoned by the 7th century. Apollo’s statues outlasted his worship: the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican, a 2nd-century CE Roman marble after a bronze attributed to Leochares, remains one of the most copied figures in Western art, studied and reproduced for five centuries. The god those images depict is prayed to by no one.