TEMPLE OF MYSTERIES

Smaller by far than the temple at Didyma, the Temple of Apollo at Claros nevertheless developed a strong reputation during Anatolia’s Roman period. Indeed, it became such an attraction that no less a figure than Germanicus Caesar, the adoptive son of the emperor Tiberius, paid it a visit. The process of divination is described by the historian Tacitus, who relates how the oracle, “after departing into a grotto and taking a draught of water from a hidden spring, produces replies in set forms of verses on the subject which each enquirer has conceived in his mind.”

Some years later the historian Pliny the Elder noted that, although consuming the water enabled the oracle to produce “marvelous prophecies,” it was an act not witliout risk, since the water was certain to shorten “the life of the drinker.”

Externally, the temple resembled other such classical structures, but unlike them it had an unusual basement, in which the sacred spring was located. Two stairways of four steps each descended into this low-ceilinged netherworld. A passage, so narrow it forced the consultants to proceed single file, led directly under the middle of the temple to a kind of waiting room that contained a marble bench. Beyond lay another passage, to be used only by the oracle, who followed it to reach a chamber where a well contained the miracle-working water.

Found under the oldest altar of Apollo at Claros in 1992, this bronze pendant represents the Egyptian crocodile god Sobek. It may have been brouglst back from Egypt by an Anatolian mercenary as an ojfering. Below, part of a cult statue of Artemis, Apollo’s twin sister, lies on the temple floor.

A rising water table has left the basement of the Umple partially submerged. Although an earthquake during the Middle ftges is supposed to have laid flat the part of the building above ground, the basement survived undamaged, gradually filling with flood-borne silt. The vaults helped support the weight of large cult statues in the temple proper.

Though no oracular messages survive at Claros, the names of visitors do, as on the column at rigljt. Such inscriptions appear on steps and elsewhere around the Umple grounds, a uniqiu feature. Some are lists of chorisUrs who came here to celebraU rius as-sociaud with Apollo. This Umple, atid the one at Didytna, closed in the third century BC as Christianity triumphed over paganism.