A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery The Elusive E at Delphi

Abstract

There has been no dearth, since Plutarch’s day at least, of erudite theories about what message the E at Apollo’s temple was meant to convey to visitors. Yet no account so far has added up to a truly compelling answer, not for lack of ingenuity, but because the various approaches have tended so strongly towards the sophisticated and artful, rather than the probable. This article will review why the familiar answers are more impressive than convincing, and will propose in their place a much simpler explanation: namely that the E was meant to represent the mysterious itself, reminding pilgrims that they were entering a realm where logos continued to hold sway, to be sure, as the other inscriptions testified, but where the human intellect must leave room for mantic wisdom, and where logical reasoning must be supplemented with contemplation and meditation upon the enigmatic, the hidden, and the ineffable.

I

The enigmatic E that has been intriguing and confounding commentators for 2,000 years or more,¹ was not placed just anywhere: it hung high and in a most conspicuous spot at the gateway to the most revered oracle in the ancient world, at the very navel of the Greek universe.²

This pride of place should, then, be the starting point for any convincing effort to understand the intended meaning: whatever it may turn out to be, it must be profound and important enough to merit such a distinguished position. As Plutarch himself wrote, ‘It is likely that those who, in the beginning, sought after knowledge of the god … used [the letter] as a token with reference to some other matters of the highest concern, and thus adopted it.’³

Second,the inscription of the original E was widely attributed to the Seven Sages⁴ as part of a core arrangement of exhortations including the famous Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, Μηδὲν ἄγαν, and Ἐγγύα πάρα δ’Ἄτα. Whatever message the E was meant to convey must therefore bear some appropriate relationship, both in form and significance, to these vital truths, the very essence of wisdom as the ancient Greeks conceived it at the time.

Third, if the E is taken to be an abbreviation or symbolic representation, some plausible reason needs to be given why it should be the only inscription not written out like the others, especially if the proposed text is so short that the need to save space cannot explain it. And fourth, if it is assumed that the meaning of the E could be so readily expressed, then some explanation needs to be given for how something so important and easy to convey could possibly be forgotten so completely.

Dissatisfaction with the various explanations on offer is nothing new and has sometimes been expressed rather severely,⁵ even unfairly, considering that quite a few of the professed ideas are clever and imaginative, occasionally even brilliant, and often defended rather ingeniously. What none of them accomplish very successfully, however, is to clear the above hurdles and answer the obvious common-sense challenges in a way that would add up to a fully compelling explanation. No wonder, perhaps, that in light of this notable failure, recent scholarship seems to have turned away from the mystery of the E altogether, becoming engrossed instead in elaborate disquisitions upon the form and meaning of Plutarch’s writing.⁶ ‘The conundrum remains unsolved’, Parke sighed more than eighty years ago: ‘Plutarch’s treatise enumerated many unconvincing explanations and modern scholarship has added some equally unlikely reasons.’⁷ It would take a brave soul to conclude otherwise even today.

II

The Sages’ message has not, it seems, been getting through for a long time, and we might pause and ask ourselves why that should be. Were the senders really such inept thinkers and teachers that they had no conception at all of what the recipients might be able to grasp, since the meaning of the E appears not to have been much clearer to their more immediate posterity either?⁸

Before impugning the sagacity of our philosophical forebears quite so readily, perhaps we ought to consider that the blockage may also be found on our end. Is it possible that we are not making enough of an effort to understand the intention behind the symbol, or are we perchance trying too hard? We might at least consider the possibility that our straining after the answer is not availing us much because we keep approaching the problem from the wrong angle, so that our very labours carry us further away from the solution – somewhat in the manner of those cerebral students of Zen who keep presenting their masters with the most carefully crafted dissertations on the meaning of the koan they have been assigned, only to be dismissed from their interviews and sent back to their meditation cells, time and again, because they are missing the point of the exercise, which is not to intellectualise a puzzle that cannot be resolved in so logical a manner, but rather to break through to a different perspective and a new mode of answering altogether.

To make this possibility a little more plausible, let us remember what scant warrant we have for approaching the questions surrounding the oracle at Delphi, including the E itself, from too analytical a perspective – or rather, what persistent warnings we have been given against doing so. Thus Plutarch himself made a point of cautioning his readers that Apollo was ‘no less a philosopher than a prophet … [and that] it seems only natural that the greater part of what concerns the god should be concealed in riddles’.⁹ In so doing, Plutarch was giving expression, moreover, to a well-established ancient tradition according to which the Delphic deities spoke, through the oracle, ‘neither to hide nor to make fully explicit, but to hint, in order thereby to rouse the questioner to thought’.¹⁰ After all, the god of logic, order, and harmony, though the undisputed patron of the temple, still shared his inner sanctum with Dionysus and communicated by the tongue of a vapour-inhaling Pythia for whom the very earth had broken open to facilitate her inspirations.¹¹ Though by no means all pronouncements were opaque, let alone impenetrable, there were enough cases of egregious misinterpretation (the especially famous one by Croesus, for example,¹² or those swirling around Socrates’ supposedly superior wisdom¹³ ) to justify amply the warning that ancient sagacity had seen fit to interpose in the small space that still remained between the questioner and his answer.

The Sphynx of Delphi may greet us, one might say, with her Apollonian head, and that side of her nature is well-represented by an easily recognised letter; but her ease with the logos should not lead us to overlook the rest, the body so to speak, which is much more Dionysian and mysterious.¹⁴ Hidden within the E, in other words, there is a lesson about all that cannot be grasped by reasoning alone, as if the gods of the temple were calling out to their visitors, ‘Remember where you are: this is no ordinary place, but a realm of mystery and wonder, a place between the worlds! Heed and honour that mystery if you want to benefit from it!’¹⁵ Not that human wisdom loses its value here – hence the other inscriptions beside which the E is set – but be mindful as you cross this threshold that you are now entering the domain of a mantic wisdom that cannot be understood by human categories alone.¹⁶ If, in full view of all that points here towards the inexpressible, the ineffable, you are still unable to catch any glimpse of realities not readily reducible to the diminutive dimensions of our human logic; if, that is, you cannot even for a moment look at the E laterally rather than literally, not just straight at it but as it were through the apparent and down to layers of meaning that come into view out of the corner of your eye but cannot be easily put into words; then you will have missed the point, the distinctive magic, of the place. So we might imagine the gods of Delphi exhorting their votaries then, and calling out to us still.

III

What is probably the most popular scholarly explanation of the past hundred years – presented in variations by Bates, Berman and Losada, and Hodge – views the E as being connected in some manner to the goddess Earth, who by Pausanias’s and other traditional accounts was widely credited with hosting the original oracle.¹⁷ The inscription on the omphalos of which Bates made so much was always a rather precarious basis for Gaia’s claims and no longer finds much favour among scholars,¹⁸ but the case for her ownership of the E has been reformulated by treating E as equivalent to ΓE – thus a ligature or monogram in which the gamma has been invisibly superimposed upon the E (Berman and Losada), or else what remained after the Γ fell off (Hodge).¹⁹

The superimposition theory is certainly ingenious but, beyond the wish to uphold Earth’s claims, there is nary a shred of evidence to make it plausible,²⁰ and the same goes, with aggravation, for Hodge’s remarkable account of how ΓΕ supposedly got mutilated. Letters that make up displays at the most sacred human sites are at all times in the public gaze; they are not simply allowed to fall off and remain unrepaired!²¹ Of course we can imagine rarefied scenarios in which a letter might perhaps have been struck by lightning or removed by an animal in a way suggestive of divine intent, hence left unrestored; but such a prodigious event would have been widely noted and, in the absence of a definite tradition to that effect, it is clasping at straws to simply posit it for its convenience.

Even if one were willing to disregard such qualms for the sake of argument, it would not help the proposed theory much. For this house of the gods had most definitely and irrevocably changed owners, and however magnanimous the current proprietor (great scion that he was of the latest and most powerful family of gods), there is no reason why tributes to previous divine residents, no matter how respectable and ancient, should have been paid in so prominent a location, rather than more quietly on the side. Besides, what need was there in the first place for grand pronouncements about an ancestral tradition that everyone knew about? If such a crude identification of divine ownership by signpost were at least combined with a call to some kind of appropriately reverential act or attitude, it would be one thing. But wasting so signal and central an opportunity for directing the devotions of the faithful on nothing more than the invocation of a god’s name, and not even that of the current proprietor but an archaic one, would bespeak no very lofty conception of the divine.

IV

The interpretation advanced most forcefully by Plutarch himself,²² around the suggestive force of the letter’s sound taken to mean ‘Thou art’²³ – or as Poulsen put it, ‘Apollo’s mystical letter that contained the believer’s assurance of the god’s existence’²⁴ – may seem to improve matters at least insofar as the god is not only named, but his exalted and timeless being affirmed in a gesture of pious reverence. This too, however, is open to grave objections: for to make pronouncements upon a god’s being is hardly man’s place²⁵ and, what is more, consistency with the other inscriptions would require that this one too be understood as directed from god to man, not the other way around.²⁶

Thus Goettling first, and later Schultz, took Plutarch’s idea and reversed its direction,²⁷ now interpreting it not as directed from man to god, but from Apollo to man, as if to call out,

‘Thou art’, that is, you are a creature endowed with reason and self-consciousness, a human being. [The E] is therefore a true precursor to the famous cogito ergo sum…, capturing also the essence of the Sphynx’s riddle…, hinting at the immortality of the best part of the being it addresses … and as it were awakening the spirit and the conscience of man with a word about his subjectivity.²⁸

Edifying though one may find this turn of thought, it suffers from two debilitating weaknesses. First, it would ‘destroy completely’ the harmony with the other maxims that Goettling himself stressed,²⁹ by assuming a simple present tense instead of an imperative; and second, even more seriously, the Greek, taken in this way, by affirming no more than that man is, leaves it entirely to the interpreter’s discretion to fill in the substance of what exactly man is taken to be.³⁰ Everything will depend, in other words, on what one expects the results of man’s self-inquiries to be, and so it is hard to see what has been accomplished by the E beyond pointing back to the Γνῶθι.

V

Wilhelm Roscher emphasised particularly that any solid interpretation of the E must yield an oracular imperative, a precept, or a divine commandment to match the other inscriptions³¹ – even if it may turn out to be as gentle as Roscher’s own welcoming exhortation for the hesitant devotees to step forth without fear. One cannot help being charmed by such kindly solicitude for the pious shy and their reverent ‘trembling and wavering’ over the threshold of their holiest of holies.³² The clever but rather strained philological foundations upon which Roscher builds his argument have not attracted many other partisans, however.³³ The interpretation of εἶ that he proposes has been criticised by some for not having a very natural ring in Greek,³⁴ while to others the need for abbreviation does not appear sufficiently evident.³⁵

Meanwhile Roscher’s argument for how such a clear and straightforward message could have ever been forgotten in plain view of so many pilgrims – namely that after the great fire of 548 BCE it remained unseen for so long that its meaning became obscure – is perhaps the weakest part of his case.³⁶ Such breaks in tradition can occur, of course, but only if a sacred object is kept from view for several generations; otherwise the living memory of priests and visitors alike will preserve the original meaning. That so hallowed an object should be allowed to disappear without a trace, for decades on end, or more likely a full century before it might be forgotten, cannot just be supposed in the absence of any direct evidence.

The trepidations that Roscher imagined so vividly, and for which he invokes the doubtful testimony of Epictetus,³⁷ may have been very real in many cases; but if so, would the power of a single syllable bidding them enter really have sufficed for soothing them? The call to come on in, by itself, need not even be reassuring, and there are many settings where it would further unsettle quaking knees not steady them.³⁸ Nor is it obvious that we must imagine the typical answer-seeker as quite so timid a soul, and not rather a robust traveller amidst plenty of hardy hustling and bustling around the temple³⁹ – as one may surmise from Pausanias’s description of shepherds grazing their flocks nearby, or locals such as Plutarch and his companions in the famous dialogue taking their seats and holding their discussions in the immediate vicinity.⁴⁰ The general hawking and gawking around the sacred precinct was probably quite unlike the decorum that we tend to expect of such hallowed settings, and perhaps closer to the incessant hubbub that the contemporary visitor might discover around the Mahabodi Temple in Bodhgaya, to give just one salient modern example.

For all the ingenuity with which Roscher weaves together the thin threads of reported tradition into a seamless composition between the columns,⁴¹ one cannot help wondering whether so perfect an arrangement (into two tidy hexameter series, no less⁴² ) is really probable for a temple tableau in ancient times, and whether a more incremental and haphazard accretion of elements would not have been a lot likelier. Indeed the very centrality of the E to the entrance hall (as Roscher envisages it) ends up undermining the structural soundness of the account: for in the setup that Roscher has in mind, the letter is not just an especially salient feature in a series of inscriptions, no mere primus inter pares among the grammata, but rather the indisputable focal point of the whole display.⁴³ Whatever merits Roscher’s ‘Come on in’ may have as part of a scholarly tour de force, the meaning he proposes for the letter simply does not match the unique prominence that he himself insists on.⁴⁴

Even if the abbreviation could be invested with all the significance of Jesus’s ‘Come to me’⁴⁵ (which would be granting a great deal), still it would not stand out enough among the other pronouncements to justify its architectural distinction, any more than that one Gospel phrase can be said to rise markedly above and beyond the others. Besides, even conceding the utmost to this tenuous line of reasoning, no one has ever claimed that Apollo’s soothing words were meant to convey anything so momentous as an offer of salvation if only the glad tidings be accepted. Thus what finally stands out most about Roscher’s impressive Delphic vision is not so much the E itself but the refinement of the reasoning and how cleverly the construction is fortified and defended against what look like nearly unanswerable challenges from the start.⁴⁶ As an argument about the Delphic pronouncements as an ensemble, it is a remarkable work of art, but the role of the E, advertised as the lead, ends up looking a bit part, and the production as a whole cannot help coming off as a little contrived.

VI

Among the modern scholarly accounts, it is Griffiths’ that does the most convincing job of clearing at least our first two tests. The appealing idea that the E was an abbreviation for Εὐφήμει, enjoining a suitably reverent silence and ‘general religious attitude’ upon visiting pilgrims (the rough equivalent, perhaps, of signs reminding meditators at a contemporary meditation centre to ‘keep noble silence and cultivate mindfulness’), does indeed look ‘most apposite’⁴⁷ – not only in its general spirit and orientation, but also in how well it fits the location and occasion, and how it parallels in form and complements in meaning the other exhortations right beside it.

Unfortunately, for all its attractiveness in other respects, Griffiths’ account does not fare nearly so well with the third and fourth tests. Why the temple at Delphi alone should use a sign in this style is not even the biggest problem,⁴⁸ nor why something so elementary would have required saying. What weighs much more heavily upon Griffiths’ theory is the question why so very short and straightforward an exhortation would not have been written out like the others. What need was there for abbreviating the briefest inscription of all, and why should its meaning have subsequently sunk into oblivion when it was so very clear, so very simple, and so very fitting?⁴⁹

The likeliest solution to the puzzle may have eluded so many learned labourers because it is so deceptively simple. The E is not shorthand for a sound or anything else that could have easily been made more explicit – or if it were, the burden would be on anyone who argues in this vein to make a compelling case for why the message required such abbreviation at the risk of being misconstrued and eventually forgotten. In default of such an argument, and in light of the above difficulties with the other interpretations, accomplished as they may be, it seems safest to assume that the E was meant to be nothing more and nothing less than a representation of the enigmatic itself, thus a symbol for that which cannot be readily or reliably reduced to the parameters of human reasoning.

The inherent complexities of the setting, an outwardly Apollonian temple with heavy Dionysian undercurrents running beneath (crack in the earth and all), cannot be insisted upon too much. For while the other prominent inscriptions covered in outline what reason can teach man – self-knowledge, prudence, ethical conduct⁵⁰ – that worldly aspect of things was only one side of the temple equation and urgently required a supplement. The E, or something like it, was plainly needed in order to encompass the other, dimmer and darker,⁵¹ more mysterious and mystical side⁵² – this not by way of honouring the older gods as against the newer, but in order to reflect symbolically the inherent tension between that which one can reason one’s way into and that which requires at least an element of inspiration or revelation such as the Pythia personified.

VII

We are left, then, with the question why the Seven Sages should have settled on the E, of all available symbols, as a fitting representation of the everyday meeting the enigmatic, and the ephemeral touching the eternal. It is a question that probably cannot be settled, only speculated about; but a starting point for such reflections is visible even in the terms, suggesting that in the English too (a remote relative of ancient Greek, granted, but still part of the Indo-Germanic tree of languages) there seems to be something about the E that suggests both the unexceptional and the extraordinary.

Vowels are not spelled out in all systems of writing, of course, but sometimes left for the reader to supply, as in Arabic or Hebrew; but in the Indo-Germanic family they are, by their very nature, highly visible and vital connectors – and the E in particular forms a kind of ubiquitous cement spread so thickly throughout the brickwork of these languages that it might almost be called their common denominator, or even the essential letter.⁵³ One does not need to consider the Sages ‘proto-linguists’⁵⁴ to think that they might have noticed, or grasped intuitively, the predominance of the letter – no more than one needs to be a professional scholar today to notice that the E on one’s keyboard seems to be getting worn out disproportionately. Thus the choice would have been, if not an altogether obvious then at least a very plausible one for early philosophers wishing to express their fascination with the power of language, and to represent the intersection of what is knowable and expressible, the logos, with what lies beyond.⁵⁵

Given how much, more than 2,500 years of usage later, we take writing for granted, it is easy to overlook how recent and remarkable an invention it would have still seemed from the perspective of the Seven Sages – and not only writing in general, but the alphabet in particular. The astounding discovery that everything intelligible could be reduced to only two dozen characters was made, if not by the Sages themselves, then in their immediate intellectual vicinity, and it had not yet lost, we may assume, any of its freshness and wonder. To their minds its peculiar dual nature would have still been much more present than it perhaps is to ours, though we too might marvel if we paused to ponder the matter: a contrivance that was almost certainly invented for mundane purposes, written contracts most probably (hence the Phoenician connection), could also be employed to signify the greatest mysteries! There was magic still in the alphabet, one might say, and surely it is not such a stretch (though it would be impossible to prove) that the Sages might have thought it very apt to single out the most widely used letter to represent both the expressible and the inexpressible at the same time.

VIII

The Sages would have done better, it might be said at last, to settle on a less ambiguous symbol instead, maybe their version of something like Wallis’s infinity loop, or a kind of ‘cosmic hieroglyph’ such as some interpreters have proposed as their solution to the riddle.⁵⁶ Yet a more specific symbol of this sort would have done little to capture the dual nature of an Apollonian temple also sacred to Dionysus – the home of a mantic no less than a philosophical god – with a warning implied that while prophecies must perforce be rendered in terms comprehensible to human ears, nothing would be more unwise than to take away too literal a reading of whatever a pilgrim had received from the hand of Apollo and the mouth of the Pythia.

A line of argument introduced by Diels in 1910 would likewise have us take the E symbolically, but in a much more deflected manner: we are to believe that it originated not as an abbreviated aphorism or a mere letter at all, but as a votive offering, a key, which then came to be represented by a symbol and was subsequently misconstrued.⁵⁷ Dornseiff echoed Diels’s view in 1923, only adding, with equal brevity, that the symbol from which the E was supposedly derived might have once represented a miniature temple, not a key.⁵⁸ Guarducci, finding herself still ‘charmed’, half a century later, not only by the question in general but by Diels’s solution more particularly,⁵⁹ makes every effort to sustain it by offering a much more elaborate rationale for the key-hypothesis than the originator himself.⁶⁰ What stands in her way, however, is a key design so crude that it amounts to little more than an indeterminate object with three equal prongs, of which human ingenuity has devised many, for mundane and ritual uses alike, especially if the handle or base is not decisive.⁶¹ The human imagination alone sets limits to the possibilities in this direction, and what is more, the association between keys and a particularly important religious site is so close for us not because of any strong Greek antecedents, but because of the keys of St Peter, as Guarducci herself recognises.⁶² She makes a valiant defence, in other words, but in the end there is just not enough to go on.⁶³ What this whole school of interpretation fails to establish, moreover, is why the E, if it had such a simple meaning, should alone have been included among inscriptions with much more philosophical and urgent messages to the viewer.⁶⁴

For the interpretation proposed here, by contrast, the E itself was never what mattered most, nor the reasons why the Sages would have chosen it over other possible marks of the inscrutable. What they were after, these grandfathers of philosophy and seasoned contemplators of riddles, was not so much the answers we might give, as getting us to think as widely and deeply as possible about the nature of questioning itself. That a conclusive solution still eludes us more than a hundred generations later may be frustrating for us, but one could also take it as evidence for just how well the Sages chose their symbol.⁶⁵