Delphi

I've just been thinking that what one feels at seeing all these centuries on top of each other (that's what this trip seems to be largely about) cannot really be expressed by describing ruins and statues -- or at least, i can't. Besides, that's done in much detail elsewhere. Just a few flashes, though:

--the rock where the oracle-women sat for centuries, probably from before 2000 a.C. How much of the behavior of kings and tyrants did they determine from this squat, unremarkable thing? I imagine them like a succession of toads on a toadstool, old and blind, blindly guiding the throng of humanity that came to consult them. Did they possess any true wisdom? If not truly prescient, maybe they were able to look into people's needs, or into their society's... Did they ever get tired and simply spit forward prefabricated formulas of the future? "When the sun no longer shines on your path, remember that drachma coins are stamped on both sides". It's fun to think that maybe one of them saw me here, too, a man dressed strangely, sitting in the shade, sliding a stick accross a piece of paper; it's sad to know probably none of them did.

--a swimming pool among the ruins of the town's gymnasium. Round, 15 metres across, could still hold water. Served as a goat pen for over a thousand years, when even the name of Delphi had turned into a legend and the people who now lived here didn't even know such a place had ever existed. Walking among the monuments of their ancestors perhaps they thanked them for building such sturdy sties.

--cats basking in the winter sun, among all these fallen human glories.

--a marble statue of Antinoo, so perfect, beautiful and life-like after lieing buried in a mountainside for 100 times the duration of its model's life... Neck and parts of the body still shining, as if the sculptors's hands had just finished polishing the white stone; tiny holes among his locks, where a golden laurel crown was once anchored. Story has it Antinoo drowned in a river to save his lover, some roman emperor or other. The bereaved was so devastated that he elevated Antinoo to godhood, and had him adored throught the empire. His cult survived for four centuries: he symbolized loyalty. I can't read it on his face, his expression is too forlorn. I think that, though the face be that of the dead, the sculptor put in it the expression of the one lover left alive.

--a corner of the sea in the distance. The ancient port through which pilgrims use to arrive in waves is now a fishers's village, pilgrims turned into 5 or 6 tourists with digital cameras. The whirring lenses, extending or retracting, try to capture the present. They'll have as much success as the oracle ever did with the future, i suppose.