Year: 1997
Type: article
Abstract: ~AN INTERNATIONAL SANCTUARY, Delphi helped bring about the transition within the emerging poleis of the Archaic period to what Fran~ois de Polignac has called a "more finished, <adult' stage of society and institutions."1 Delphi's business was international in scope: the sanctuary was involved in colonization, arbitration, and panhellenism.2 Yet one important aspect of Delphi's emergence as a panhellenic sanctuary rarely studied is the impact of this extraordinary status on the community of Delphi and its surrounding region.In this paper I propose that, as the sanctuary of Delphi came to represent order, conciliation, and mediation to the Greeks, the local topography of the region was made to reflect these same themes.Delphi and Mt Parnassus became, through myth and ritual, a landscape in which tensions between wildness and civilization-a polarity at the heart of the culture of the poliscould be narrated, enacted, and organized.Delphi and Parnassus stood for the polarities from which the polis was constructed.On the one side was Delphi, representing the triumph of order over chaos, as expressed in the myth of the sanctuary's foundation, when Apollo destroys Pytho and brings culture to the original inhabitants of Parnassus (Strab.9.3.12).On the other side was Mt Parnassus, the wilderness tamed by Apollo.These 1 F.
Author: Jeremy McInerney
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1599954526