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Euphranor shall colour the hair like his Hera's; Polygnotus the comely brow and faintly blushing cheek, after his Cassandra in the Assembly-room at Delphi. Polygnotus shall also paint her robe, of the finest texture, part duly gathered in, but most of it floating in the breeze. For the flesh-tints, which must be neither too pale nor too high-coloured, Apelles shall copy his own Campaspe.
The edge of the plate was marked with the letters of the alphabet separated by certain spaces. A priest, linen clad, bowed himself over the table, balancing a ring tied to a thin thread. The ring, bounding from letter to letter, picks out letters forming hexameters, like those of Delphi. This is confusing.
The oracle was delivered in a temple, or some sacred place; and in this particular we plainly discover that mixture of nature and art, of genuine enthusiasm and contriving craft, which is so frequently exemplified in the character of man. The oracle of Apollo at Delphi is the most remarkable; and respecting it we are furnished with the greatest body of particulars.
They were defended, it is true, in part by the inaccessibleness of the position of Delphi, and by the artificial fortifications which had been added from time to time to increase the security, but still more by the feeling which every where prevailed, that any violence offered to such a shrine would be punished by the gods as sacrilege.
On a long, sloping mountain-terrace, facing the east, stood once the town and temples of Delphi, and now the modern village of Kastri. As you may imagine, our first walk was to the shrine of the Delphic oracle, at the bottom of the cleft between the two peaks.
It is said that having suffered a defeat in the course of the Social War, in Italy, he drew from his bosom a little image of Apollo, which he had stolen from the temple of Delphi, and had ever since carried about him when engaged in war.
Nor were the hopes of divine interposition which this wonder awakened disappointed in the end; for, as soon as the detachment of Persians came near the hill on which Delphi was situated, loud thunder burst from the sky, and a bolt, descending upon the precipices near the town, detached two enormous masses of rock, which rolled down upon the ranks of the invaders.
"Farewell!" again from high in air. "Farewell!" once more came moaning through the distant darkness of the night. The deception was perfect. "A ventriloquist," said I, "or or, perhaps the devil." The seance had an ill end: the chief's sister shot herself. This was decidedly a well-got-up affair for a colonial place. The Maori oracles are precisely like those of Delphi.
The house where he was born, in which a cultivated clergyman ruled as father; the ancient, linden-embowered monastery of Bergen on the Elbe, where a pious teacher kept up his patriarchal activity; Tübingen, still monastic in its essential form; those simple Swiss dwellings about which the brooks murmured, which the lakes laved, and which the cliffs surrounded everywhere he found another Delphi, everywhere the groves in which as a mature and cultivated youth he continued to revel even yet.
In Delphi yet lingered the trace of the Dorian institutions and the Dorian blood, but the primitive valour and hardy virtues of the ancestral tribe had long since mouldered away.
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