“Say to the King now that levelled to earth is the temple of splendour, Phœbus no more has a roof for his head nor the laurel prophetic; Gone is the voice of the fountain and dried is the chattering water.” Theodosius put a formal end to the Delphic cult as well as to the Olympic games. From Apollo’s slaying of the earth-born dragon to the Byzantine emperor’s destruction of the oracle is a long stretch of centuries. Within them fell the brilliant epochs which filled Delphi with the opulence of all the arts. As Greek and barbarian brought hither their well-wrought schemes and passionate desires, so they brought also, in offerings to the god, their best skill in architecture and sculpture and painting, their rarest workmanship in marble and bronze and gold and silver. Ghostly proofs of the existence of some of these offerings the French excavators have within twenty years evoked from the reluctant soil. Gallic precision and insight have even made of ruined walls and broken stones an orderly array easily perceived by the traveller who is patient enough to follow his guidebook. The Museum supplements the ground foundations by several important sculptural details. There were many localities and objects made holy by legendary associations, like the tomb of Neoptolemus, Achilles’s red-haired son, whose murder is described by Euripides and whose quadrennial worship brought crowds of Thessalians to Delphi; or like the marble Omphalos, or navel stone, flanked, in Pindar’s day, by golden eagles which marked the meeting place of the winged explorers sent east and west by Zeus in search of the exact centre of the earth. But of paramount importance in the religious life of Delphi was the Temple of Apollo, built above the deep cleft in the ground that held the sacred spring of prophecy. The Priestess sat upon a tripod in the adyton or holy of holies, directly over the fissure from which a natural vapour issued, and her ravings were transmitted by the priests in ambiguous hexameters. The site of the first primitive temple was preserved, but upon it rose successive structures. The temple that was seen by Herodotus and Thucydides, by Pindar, by Æschylus and Euripides was built in the latter half of the sixth century to replace an older one destroyed by fire. In the fourth century an earthquake necessitated still another, and it is to this one that the existing foundations are attributed, although fragments of the other are not wanting. Owing to the shifting history of the fourth century, this temple was long in building and was not yet completed when Demosthenes thundered out his scorn that the barbarian of Macedon had assumed the “honours of the temple,” to which even all the Greeks could not pretend. The work had been undertaken by an international commission, and inscriptional records of the contributions are richly suggestive of the private life of the times. Many individuals and some states promised first fruits.