Sailing to Delphi

Sailing to Delphi
Created by: * Mauricius Fabius, 2008-04-18 18:45:55

It was time for a holiday.
A festival had been announced in Delphi. I immediately made arrangements to attend. A few business matters needed attention, but rather than let them detain me, I resorted to an old ploy : combining my business with pleasure. I hired a scribe named Thyssos to whom I could dictate letters while travelling, and sold one of my slaves to have some extra cash in case I needed to pay for messengers to carry correspondence to various destinations.
We left on the tenth day of March, the day the seas officially “open” again to traffic, with a decent westerly wind and chilly but sunny skies.
First stop : Paphos

Three days with my friends the Pauli from Rome. We caught up on news and gossip and made the obligatory visits to the Temple of Aphrodite and the Egyptian market. Some local workmen were putting together the cartoons of a series of mosaics for the house of a wealthy Italian entrepreneur. I had my hired scribe make a copy of one of the cartoons and sent it to my intendant in Seleucia with instructions to commission the mosaic. Little did I know at the time that the Delphic Oracle would inspire me to build a Shrine that I would decorate with this and other souvenirs.

Second port of call : Halicarnassus
From Paphos we sailed north-west past the island of Rhodes to Halicarnassus on the south-west coast of the province of Asia. The city boasts one of the most extravagant monuments in the world : the tomb of Mausolus, the man who made Halicarnassus capital of the Satrapy of Caria. Though such enormous memorials to the dead only emphasize to my mind the fact that we, like stones, must all crumble into dust, I was still curious to see what it looked like and why it was so famous.
There was another reason for stopping in the city. It had been the home of Herodotus who wrote so much on foreign places and customs. I was hoping to conduct some research on his life and family for my bookshop on the Aventine. Alas, the ravages of several wars had long ago obliterated all trace of the historian’s ties to his home city.

My hired scribe took advantage of our fruitless visit to the Archives to copy a mosaic that decorated the floor in the front lobby. When he offered to finance its execution for a public building I agreed at once and promised to name him as benefactor.
By then I had taken care of all the business correspondence that I had brought with me. As there was nothing to be learned about Herodotus, I dismissed the scribe and put him on a boat leaving for Rhodes. From there he would easily find other vessels to take him back to Syria.

Mosaic commissioned by Thyssos of Seleucia Pieria

Third stop : Naxos
ariadne
The journey from Halicarnassus to Corinth took longer than expected because of rain and poor visibility. My ship called at the island of Naxos and I stayed in an inn to wait for the weather to clear.
Naxos is an island of fishing villages, but an adolescent appeared where I was lodging and produced a collection of small stone sculptures no larger than the palm of his hand. I was determined to resist all attempts to wrangle any cash off me, but when I saw his Ariadne Astride A Panther my resolve evaporated. The words of a popular song about Ariadne’s meeting with Bacchus came back to me as I parted with a few drachmae.

Ah, youthful Bacchus ! A boy no longer : a youth, a man
Trimming his sails to a favorable breeze,
Fearless helmsman, to his first adventure speeding !

At last, to Corinth
The weather cleared the following day and the captain decided to lift anchor. The less time spent waiting, the more journeys he could charter out and the more profits he would collect.
The ship was going no further than Cenchreae, the village and harbor on the Saronic Gulf distant about seventy stadia from Corinth. I disembarked with my baggage and soon found a vehicle to drive me to the city. I could not continue on to Delphi alone, I would need a bodyguard and assistant for the last leg of this trip. Corinth having become a busy market city since it was rebuilt by Divus Julius and turned into a Roman colony, I hoped to find a man for the job without too much difficulty.
In Corinth the port authorities directed me to the Agora where I looked for a pandokeion and soon found the Argos with its ensign obviously meant to attract sea voyagers. After leaving my baggage under lock and key, I wandered around the market area. An altar dedicated to Herakles caught my attention, and I purchased some grains of incense which I burned, praying Herakles that he would send me the aide I needed for the rest of my journey.

I have to believe that the hero heard my prayer because soon after I had left the altar and was making my way back towards the inn I thought I heard a group of people speaking Greek with a Syrian accent. I greeted the group and asked if they were Syrians ; it turned out they were from the region of Tyre. I told them I was looking to hire a bodyguard to accompany me on my trip to the Apollona festival in Delphi. A strong-looking bearded man at once volunteered for the job ; the group seemed to encourage him. His name was Samson. He looked to be about 20 years old, was unmarried, his family had moved away from Tyre to the inland city of Halab which in Greek is called Beroea. We agreed on a salary, and went to the inn for a meal. Pleased with how everything was working out, I decided to look for some thermae and to visit more of the city’s attractions.

After a night at the Argos, Samson and I devoted the morning to shopping for some fruit and a travelling-amphora which we filled with a thick sweet-smelling wine before boarding a boat and sailing on to Cirrha, the small port in the Gulf of Corinth that serves Delphi. We arrived after two days of sailing, around sunset. The Cirrhans have a reputation for ambushing and robbing pilgrims to Delphi, which is precisely why I had wanted a bodyguard. Not wanting to tempt fate, we went ashore just long enough to buy some freshly cooked meat which we ate in the boat. We anchored a couple of stadia from the shore and slept on board. Early the next morning, Samson and I headed for Delphi.

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Credits :
Itinerary map from Cedarville University’s Ancient Greece ; Paphos mosaic detail from Nereids webpage ; Halicarnassus dog mosaic at the British Museum, photograph by Mauricius Fabius ; Ariadne sculpture from Frankfurt Nordend article ; map showing the Gulf of Corinth from B. Suzanne’s Plato and his dialogues site ; ship at sunset from an advertisement in Alitalia in-flight magazine ; crown of laurel from the sports journal Sportvox.
Song about Bacchus adapted from the libretto of R. Strauss’ opera Ariadne auf Naxos.

Rome - Rome, Season 1 - The Stolen Eagle

It was time for a holiday. A festival had been announced in Delphi. I immediately made arrangements to attend. A few business matters needed attention, but rather than let them detain me, I resorted to an old ploy : combining my business with pleasure. I hired a scribe named Thyssos to whom I could dictate letters while travelling, and sold one of my slaves to have some extra cash in case I needed to pay for messengers to carry correspondence to various destinations. We left on the tenth day of March, the day the seas officially “open” again to traffic, with a decent westerly wind and chilly but sunny skies. First stop : Paphos
	Three days with my friends the Pauli from Rome. We caught up on news and gossip and made the obligatory visits to the Temple of Aphrodite and the Egyptian market. Some local workmen were putting together the cartoons of a series of mosaics for the house of a wealthy Italian entrepreneur. I had my hired scribe make a copy of one of the cartoons and sent it to my intendant in Seleucia with instructions to commission the mosaic. Little did I know at the time that the Delphic Oracle would inspire me to build a Shrine that I would decorate with this and other souvenirs.
Second port of call : Halicarnassus From Paphos we sailed north-west past the island of Rhodes to Halicarnassus on the south-west coast of the province of Asia. The city boasts one of the most extravagant monuments in the world : the tomb of Mausolus, the man who made Halicarnassus capital of the Satrapy of Caria. Though such enormous memorials to the dead only emphasize to my mind the fact that we, like stones, must all crumble into dust, I was still curious to see what it looked like and why it was so famous. There was another reason for stopping in the city. It had been the home of Herodotus who wrote so much on foreign places and customs. I was hoping to conduct some research on his life and family for my bookshop on the Aventine. Alas, the ravages of several wars had long ago obliterated all trace of the historian’s ties to his home city.
My hired scribe took advantage of our fruitless visit to the Archives to copy a mosaic that decorated the floor in the front lobby. When he offered to finance its execution for a public building I agreed at once and promised to name him as benefactor. By then I had taken care of all the business correspondence that I had brought with me. As there was nothing to be learned about Herodotus, I dismissed the scribe and put him on a boat leaving for Rhodes. From there he would easily find other vessels to take him back to Syria.		Mosaic commissioned by Thyssos of Seleucia Pieria
Third stop : Naxos	The journey from Halicarnassus to Corinth took longer than expected because of rain and poor visibility. My ship called at the island of Naxos and I stayed in an inn to wait for the weather to clear. Naxos is an island of fishing villages, but an adolescent appeared where I was lodging and produced a collection of small stone sculptures no larger than the palm of his hand. I was determined to resist all attempts to wrangle any cash off me, but when I saw his Ariadne Astride A Panther my resolve evaporated. The words of a popular song about Ariadne’s meeting with Bacchus came back to me as I parted with a few drachmae.
Ah, youthful Bacchus ! A boy no longer : a youth, a man Trimming his sails to a favorable breeze, Fearless helmsman, to his first adventure speeding !

At last, to Corinth The weather cleared the following day and the captain decided to lift anchor. The less time spent waiting, the more journeys he could charter out and the more profits he would collect. The ship was going no further than Cenchreae, the village and harbor on the Saronic Gulf distant about seventy stadia from Corinth. I disembarked with my baggage and soon found a vehicle to drive me to the city. I could not continue on to Delphi alone, I would need a bodyguard and assistant for the last leg of this trip. Corinth having become a busy market city since it was rebuilt by Divus Julius and turned into a Roman colony, I hoped to find a man for the job without too much difficulty. In Corinth the port authorities directed me to the Agora where I looked for a pandokeion and soon found the Argos with its ensign obviously meant to attract sea voyagers. After leaving my baggage under lock and key, I wandered around the market area. An altar dedicated to Herakles caught my attention, and I purchased some grains of incense which I burned, praying Herakles that he would send me the aide I needed for the rest of my journey.
	I have to believe that the hero heard my prayer because soon after I had left the altar and was making my way back towards the inn I thought I heard a group of people speaking Greek with a Syrian accent. I greeted the group and asked if they were Syrians ; it turned out they were from the region of Tyre. I told them I was looking to hire a bodyguard to accompany me on my trip to the Apollona festival in Delphi. A strong-looking bearded man at once volunteered for the job ; the group seemed to encourage him. His name was Samson. He looked to be about 20 years old, was unmarried, his family had moved away from Tyre to the inland city of Halab which in Greek is called Beroea. We agreed on a salary, and went to the inn for a meal. Pleased with how everything was working out, I decided to look for some thermae and to visit more of the city’s attractions.
After a night at the Argos, Samson and I devoted the morning to shopping for some fruit and a travelling-amphora which we filled with a thick sweet-smelling wine before boarding a boat and sailing on to Cirrha, the small port in the Gulf of Corinth that serves Delphi. We arrived after two days of sailing, around sunset. The Cirrhans have a reputation for ambushing and robbing pilgrims to Delphi, which is precisely why I had wanted a bodyguard. Not wanting to tempt fate, we went ashore just long enough to buy some freshly cooked meat which we ate in the boat. We anchored a couple of stadia from the shore and slept on board. Early the next morning, Samson and I headed for Delphi.

Next Section