Thus with the lengthening of day into night rises the flood tide of fragmentary realizations of ancient thought. But the tide ebbs with the sinking moon. The cold night air draws the dreamer back to the waiting fires and hospitable copper lamps of Kastri. As he makes his homeward way through the low dark ruins, which are all that the intrepid archæologists could summon from the grave of centuries, he is moved to wonder whether Delphi, save for its natural beauty by day and by night, has any place in modern thought. The ancient interpretation of its importance was by no means only a religious one. The Greeks cannot be understood only through an Æschylus of profound spiritual insight, or an Herodotus of intelligent piety. Thucydides, amid the bustle of its life, was as rationalizing in his ideas about Delphi as we can be amid its dead ruins. To him as to us, its oracular power was a matter of superstition. He would have attributed Socrates’s faith in it to his goodness rather than his knowledge, and doubtless anticipated the modern explanation of the wisdom of the priests. And yet Thucydides accepted without question the political and civic value of such a centre for the Greek world. Now that that value has disappeared with the world it served, we are left to find a new value in the imperishable human thoughts which were inspired by Delphi and have outlived its marbles, its silver and gold, its laurel crowns and echoing lyres. For any subsequent religion has but created, _mutatis mutandis_, the differing types of men through whom we know the pagan god. If the oracle is dumb, and Apollo but an antique fable, yet men of the twentieth century may still find in the poets and thinkers of Greece expressions of their own faith or their own doubt. They may find also that blending in one mind of belief born of idealism with unbelief born of experience which is familiar to the modern world. Pindar’s piety was such that “at Delphi they kept with reverence his iron chair, and the priest of Apollo cried nightly as he closed the temple, ‘Let Pindar the poet go in unto the supper of the god.’” And yet he uttered the universal lament:— “Much tossed, now rise, now sink the hopes of men, the while they cleave the waves of baffling falsity, and never yet hath any one on earth obtained from God a token sure of anything to come. Blind is the verdict of the future.” CHAPTER XII FROM DELPHI TO THEBES “Ye triple pathways, shrouded crypt of woodland vale, Coppice, and narrowing pass where three roads meet! O ye Who drank my father’s blood—my own—from these my hands, Do ye, perchance, remember what ye saw me do?” SOPHOCLES, _Œdipus Tyrannus_.