Making Delphi Happen: Walking, Memories, and Intellectual Experience in Roman Central Greece

A walk through Roman Delphi shaped a visitor’s intellectual experience in various ways. This paper focuses on two: the intellectual experience of the past and philosophical experience. The first is well exemplified by Pausanias’ description of the sanctuary. He allows the reader, a real or imaginary visitor, to cultivate circumambulatory knowledge, by situating the monuments and dedications in relational space and evoking the associated sensations. Thanks to (previously) individuated paideia and the paideia-related agency of objects and space, the reader can co-construct and shape collective memories of the past placed and lived in close relationship to his/her present. Plutarch's De Pythiae oraculis shows that this circumambulatory intellectual experience could, in certain cases, promote conversations based on philosophical formats and content, thus referring to a tradition rooted in Greek culture and actively taken up by Roman culture. The protagonists in the dialogue not only explore and reconstruct memories of the past as they walk through the sanctuary, but also discuss problems of a philosophical nature. As these protagonists themselves point out, their discussions are facilitated by slow-walking, which allows them to ‘sow words’ and reap lucidly conducted debates from a battlefield construed in a relational space (a metaphor used in De Pyth. or. 1). Locomotion improves their knowledge: as they go, they know.