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Didyma  FROM the temple of Apollo Delphinios at Miletos a paved Sacred Way led south for 15 km to the oracular temple of Apollo at Didyma. Although extensive areas of ancient habitation have been uncovered near the temple, the site belonged to Miletos and was never an autonomous city. The oracle is very ancient. According to Pausanias, it was in operation before the Greeks arrived around 1000 BC; some eighth century BC structures have been detected, and inscriptions begin around 600 BC. Croesus king of Lydia was a client, and made gifts to the shrine at around the time that the archaic temple was being built in about 560 BC. This was destroyed in 494 BC when the Persians crushed a revolt of the Ionian cities, and the cult-statue of Apollo was carried off to Persia. After the conquests of Alexander nearly two centuries later, the statue was returned and work finally began on a new temple in about 300 BC. This was the structure which we see today; work continued for 500 years and the temple was never fully completed, as the absence of fluting from some columns shows (compare the temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, begun in the sixth century BC and not completed until the second AD). The oracle flourished in the first and second centuries AD under imperial patronage, but declined in the third century, doubtless because of the spread of Christianity; it finally closed after the edict of Theodosius in AD 385 banning pagan oracles.


The temple cannot fail to impress for its sheer size (109 × 51m; only the Artemision at Ephesos and the Heraion at Samos were bigger), and harmony of proportion. The heart of the complex was a sacred spring, from which the prophetess drew her inspiration; this and the cult-statue of Apollo were enclosed in a small Ionic temple. Only traces of these features survive, but a bay-tree, sacred to Apollo, has recently been planted there. Above tower the unroofed high walls of the cella. From the east end of the cella an imposing flight of steps led to the chresmographeion, the oracle-office, where the utterances of the prophetess were turned into verse (sometimes prose) for delivery to the client; two vaulted passages, probably used in cult ceremonies, also lead from the courtyard below the chresmographeion and out to the porch in front of the temple. In front of the porch between the antae (the projecting side walls of the courtyard) were twelve massive columns, and all round the outside there was a double row of columns on a stepped base; some of these lie where they were toppled in an earthquake. A circular altar and a lustral well stood in front of the temple. The place must have been awe-inspiring in antiquity.


Every four years the festival of the Great Didymeia was held here, with musical, dramatic and athletic contests; the south steps of the temple served as the seats of a stadium which lies immediately alongside, and names scratched into them attest the reservation of places.


On our way north from Didyma, we see on our right a stretch of the Sacred Way currently under excavation by German archaeologists. Charles Newton had excavated part of the Way in the 1850s, and some of the seated 6th century BC statues which lined it are now in the British Museum.

WESTMINSTER CLASSIC TOURS