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 center 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 recognize 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 toward 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 favorites 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 legitimize 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 freeborn 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 afterlife—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 trammeled. 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 homoioi—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 standby, 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,”53 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 judgment of the heavens.