Delphi in Winter

Socrates and his students are on a break from the Agora. They’re dressed warmly in boots and woollen robes; they’re spending their time snowboarding on the slopes of the Parnassus. Despite Socrates best encouragement and advice, his pupils keep falling over. He despairs; at this rate, how will he ever manage to teach them proper balance in all things?

Halfway down the hill in the Nefeli Pension, Sappho sits wrapped in a sheep skin by the fire. She pauses her reading of a good scroll to inspect her newly cuniformed nails, then reaches carefully for her bowl of heated wine. The copper lamps suspended from the ceiling have been lit, and the atrium is growing dark. She wonders when her dear girls will be home.

Old Homer is not a great one for sports now. He has spent the day rugged up in the corner of the taverna with a particularly fine jug of Ionian brandy. He has been revising The Iliad, yet again. Hesiod is propped at the bar: all afternoon he has been grumbling and musing about the Gods, his spendthrift brother, and his winter fields.

At the Temple Hospital, Asclepius’ surgery has been overrun throughout the morning: a new strain of Persian flu has become epidemic in the outlying demes.  At the end of his day now, thankfully he only has his tablets to complete. He pauses to consider the options: should it be the sharp lemons and then honey, or perhaps just prayers and dreams?

The Polis Council workers are still out: they are digging the snow away from the Athenian Treasury and scattering the Sacred Way with salt. They are glad tomorrow’s planned performance of The Frogs has been cancelled: the Oracle has predicted further inclement weather.

The Pitho Rooms Pensione, Delphi, October 2010.

Notes

Socrates, Sappho and Homer need no introduction. Hesiod is a near contemporary of Homer. His two greatest works are Theogony, and Works and Days.  The former tells the story of the Gods from woe to go:  the latter is a pastoral primer on the running of country estates. It’s filled with endless complaints levelled at his spendthrift younger brother who Hesiod felt was deficient  in his management of their family’s lands.

Asclepius was the first Greek doctor we have knowledge of and was transfigured at a later date as the God of Medicine. His temple in the Argolid at Epidaurus was renowned as the first “hospital” in history. It specialised in palliative care. As old age was not curable, its patients were more often than not, simply dosed with poppy and left to their dreams. We still do pretty much the same thing today. 

The Frogs is a play by the comic author Aristophanes. The Pythian Oracle sits on her tripod in the Temple of Apollo where she prophesies about the likelihood of  further snow in Delphi this Winter …