About the year 390, Theodosius took the god at his word, and closed the oracle finally. The temple—with its cella of 100 feet—with its Doric and Ionic pillars—with its splendid sculptures upon the pediments—sank into decay and ruin. The walls and porticos tumbled down the precipitous cliffs; the prophetic chasm was filled up by the Christians with fear and horror; and, as if to foil any attempt to recover from ruins the site and plan, the modern Greeks built their miserable hamlet of Castri upon the spot; so that it is only among the walls and foundations laid bare by earthquakes that we can now seek for marble capitals and votive inscriptions. One or two features are still unchanged. The three fine springs, to which Delphi doubtless owed its first selection for human habitation, are still there—Castalia, of which we have spoken; Cassotis, which was led artificially into the very shrine of the god; and Delphussa, which was, I suppose, the water used for secular purposes by the inhabitants. The stadium, too, a tiny racecourse high above the town, in the only place where they could find a level 150 yards, is still visible; and we see at once what the importance of games must have been at a sacred Greek town, when such a thing as a stadium should be attempted here.(114) The earliest competitions had been in music—that is, in playing the lyre, in recitation, and probably in the composition of original poems; but presently the physical contests of Olympia began to outdo the splendor of Delphi. Moreover, the Spartans would not compete in minstrelsy, which they liked and criticised, but left to professional artists. Accordingly, the priests of Delphi were too practical a corporation not to widen the programme of their games, and Pindar has celebrated the Pythian victors as hardly second to those at the grand festival of Elis. There is yet one more element in the varied greatness of Delphi. It was here that the religious federation of Greece—the Amphictyony of which we hear so often—held its meetings alternately with the meetings at the springs of Thermopylæ. When I stood high up on the stadium at Delphi, the great scene described by the orator Æschines came fresh upon me, when he looked upon the sacred plain of Krissa, and called all the worshippers of the god to clear it of the sacrilegious Amphissians, who had covered it with cattle and growing crops. The plain, he says, is easily surveyed from the place of meeting—a statement which shows that the latter cannot have been in the town of Delphi: for a great shoulder of the mountain effectually hides the whole plain from every part of the town.