Great Names in History

The next morning a temple acolyte came to the Roman camp with the news that the oracle was ready to receive the quaestor. The acolyte wore the same white alb as the temple priests, and his head was shaved, which made his eyes seem enormous. He had never seen a Roman camp or any camp of soldiers, and he seemed so fascinated that the guard let him peek in through the gate. A bugle sounded. “What’s that?” he asked the guard, his eyes all full of wonder.
“That’s the call for breakfast.”
“Is the food good?”
“Chah! Coom see, coom sah.”
“Which tent is the quaestor’s?”
“See that big one in the center, with the red flag flying?”

The boy looked at the guard’s armor, his shield and his sword.
“Can I touch your sword?”
“Touch all you want,” said the guard. “I can’t unsheathe it for you, though, kid: we’re not allowed to do that only for the hell of it.”
“Are you going to go fight soon?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Did you ever kill anybody?”
The guard nodded. “Hey, kid, you’d better get back to the temple. They’re going to think you got lost. Or some floozy got her hands on you.” He started laughing as he pictured the floozy getting her hands on the big-eyed boy.

Caesar rode to the temple on horseback, with four military lictors. He was better on a horse than any of them.
It was raining when they reached the Herakleion. A young deacon walked towards Caesar as he jumped down from his dripping horse. Roman riders had no stirrups—there was no stepping down, only jumping. And Caesar was as agile as a boy, though he was thirty-one now.

The deacon showed them where to shelter their horses and he led Caesar alone to a cellar beside the temple. A sickening smell of rotten flesh and incense hung in the air; and as Caesar descended the cellar steps, the smell of mold became strong. There were small oil lamps burning in niches along the stairs to light the way.
The cellar itself was lighted, not very effectively, with two torches on the wall. The place might have been a tomb. Caesar didn’t like to be enclosed that way. He had had to hand his sword over to one of the lictors before coming down and now he felt trapped. Where was the darned oracle anyway? Was she going to pop out of a niche in the wall? Caesar decided this was the last time he played their silly games. Couldn’t these prophets talk to a fellow face to face in a normal room? Such cheap histrionics! “Oracle!” he shouted out. Who gave orders to who?

A voice answered from the wall at the far end of the cellar. But it wasn’t a girl’s voice. It was the voice of the High Priest. “The priestess is in deep meditation, preparing herself to receive the spirit of the God. You must do the same. Without the proper disposition you will learn nothing from the God. Humility, Excellency. You are in the crypt where the body of our Lord lies.”

So the High Priest is going to whip me into obedience, is he? thought Caesar. Does he mean to coach the oracle?

Caesar tried to meditate. Did he feel awe? Did he really believe that the God Herakles would speak to him through the ignorant girl on the other side of the wall?

In politics Caesar was cynical. He would say one thing and do another. He bribed. He schemed, he threatened. He spent fortunes on games and shows to win the vote of the Roman rabble. He was religious in the legalistic Roman way though not at all superstitious. He performed the prescribed sacrifices and observed the religious laws but he never let a so-called divine warning—a faulty liver, a bad omen—keep him from undertaking a battle or a trip. He was known to invent an omen to bring fearful soldiers his way.

And yet an oracle was another matter. The oracle was a god speaking directly, using the girl for his voice. The greatest men of antiquity had consulted the Delphic Oracle in Greece, and her predictions and other utterances had formed part—had determined part—of history. Who could forget the Oracle’s declaration that Socrates was the wisest man in the world? Or her sound political advice to Lykurgus and Solon? Or her advice to Croessus, the vain Lydian king, to know himself?

Caesar had been brought up on Greek myths and the beautiful stories of Greek heroes. He could recite whole passages of the Illiad and the Odyssey. His head was filled with the deeds of Achilles and Ulysses and Agamemnon. Ever since he could remember, Caesar had considered himself one of the heroes.
Not twenty-four hours ago he had puzzled a comrade by complaining that he, Caesar, was getting nowhere. “By my age Alexander the Great had conquered the world.” Was that the career Caesar was dreaming up for himself?
Alexander had consulted the Delphic and other oracles. He had made a pilgrimage to the temple of Isis in the Egyptian desert. He believed the gods spoke through their messengers. Why shouldn’t they?
In any case, Caesar thought he could himself judge by the oracle’s dictum whether it came from an ignorant peasant girl or a god.

See Caesar’s Troubling Dream (Part Three)

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Caryatides are marble statues of women that take the place of columns in some famous Greek temples, such as the Erechtheum.

Somebody’s good idea—to use a pretty woman to hold up a roof?
Somebody’s MEAN idea.
Vitruvius, the Roman architect, explains the origin:

“Caryae, a state in Peloponnesus, sided with the Persian armies against Greece; later the Greeks, having gloriously won their freedom by victory in the war, made common cause and declared war against the people of Caryae. They took the town, killed the men, abandoned the State to desolation, and carried off their wives into slavery, without permitting them, however, to lay aside the long robes and other marks of their rank as married women, so that they might be obliged not only to march in the triumph but to appear forever after as a type of slavery, burdened with the weight of their shame and so making atonement for their State. Hence the architects of the time designed for public buildings statues of these women, placed so as to carry a load, in order that the sin and punishment of Caryae might be known and handed down even to posterity.” Vitruvius, Book I, 5

Yet scholars say the device is older than those Persian wars. These may be statues of priestesses of the temple. Here is the one Lord Elgin brought to England two hundred years ago and so saved from further deterioration.

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The great sanctuary of Gades (Cadiz) lasted for nearly one thousand five hundred years. As late as 400 AD it was still open when the poet Aviennus went for a visit. What was it like?

It looked from the outside like a Greek temple. The facade was a triangular pediment or gable supported by four columns. You walked up the steep steps, passed through the two central columns and entered through enormous bronze doors. On the doors were reliefs showing the Twelve Labors of Hercules.

Somewhere near the entrance were two columns—the two “Pillars of Hercules”. The ancient authors don’t agree on what they looked like. According to Posidonius they were eight cubits tall (ten feet?) and made of bronze; but Philostatus says they were of gold and silver and only one cubit high. An ancient Phoenician inscription on them had already become illegible by Roman times.

The temple was only partially roofed, so inside it wasn’t dark like Roman temples. The altar at the far end was open to the sky. Every day celibate priests with shaven heads and wearing snow-white tunics sacrificed a lamb or a dove and sprinkled its blood on the altar.

A perpetual fire burned on a tripod but there was no statue of the god. The Carthaginians, who founded the temple towards the end of the second millenium BC, didn’t allow images of their divinities. They had dedicated the shrine to to their god Melkart, whose famous temple they had left behind in Tyre, at the other end of the Mediterranean. Carthage disappeared and the Greeks came and Melkart became Herakles, a Greek god who was so similar to the Phoenician one that everyone just let one do for the other. To the Romans Herakles was Hercules—they were all names for the same god-hero. He was buried in a crypt under the temple—the mortal half of him.

There were various chapels or side-altars. One was dedicated to Old Age; others to Poverty, to Art, to Death, to the Month, and to the Year. Perhaps they looked like old attics, filled with strange wax exvotos and dried cloth, wooden and metal undefinables (weapons?), covered with the dust of ages.
There were relics, too, such as Teucro’s belt and Pygmalion’s miraculous olive branch (the olives were emeralds).

There was a resident oracle there. You could ask questions and get a cryptic reply or an interpretation of a dream, as Caesar did. Probably the oracle followed the same protocol as her Greek counterparts in Dephi and elsewhere. She sat high on a tripod and communed directly with the god. You were separated from her by a wall or screen. You asked your question and she answered as the god instructed her. Her reply was more or less intelligible, more or less literary, more of less to the point, depending on the woman herself and her upbringing. She was a mature woman with a record of spotless virtue.

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The ancients thought that Spain was as big as a continent and no one even knew its shape. They said it was full of strange tribes of uncivilized peoples who loved bulls and war, and also that it was so rich in precious metals that in some places the gold flowed right out of the ground. But few Greeks and no Roman had ever set foot there. Not even the best-informed knew more about it than its legends.

It was thought to be at the end of the world. The god-hero Hercules had set up pillars at its southern tip to mark the end of the Mediterranean and the gateway to Nowhere. Beyond those pillars or promontories (Gibraltar and Dschebel Musa) was the vast ocean, bigger than a thousand Mediterraneans and full of sea-monsters. Any ship that sailed there ended up falling off the earth.

None had ever come back.