Didymaion, Didim

Didyma was an ancient Ionian city, the modern Didim, Turkey.^[1] The town formed just outside of the sanctuary containing a temple and oracle of Apollo, the Didymaion. In Greek didyma means "twin", but the Greeks who sought a "twin" at Didyma ignored the Carian origin of the name,^[2]. Next to Delphi, Didyma was the most renowned oracle of the Hellenic world, first mentioned among the Greeks in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo,^[3] but preceding literacy and even the colonization of Ionia. Mythic genealogies of the origins of the Branchidae line of priests, designed to capture the origins of Didyma as a Hellenic tradition, date to the Hellenistic period.^[4] Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1280 × 960 pixel, file size: 578 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Ruins of the temple of Apollo in Didyma, Turkey. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1280 × 960 pixel, file size: 578 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Ruins of the temple of Apollo in Didyma, Turkey. ... Temple of Apollo in Didim Didim is a small town on the west coast of Turkey. ... Location of Ionia Ionia (Greek Ιωνία; see also list of traditional Greek place names) was an ancient region of southwestern coastal Anatolia (in present-day Turkey, the region nearest İzmir,) on the Aegean Sea. ... Temple of Apollo in Didim Didim is a small town on the west coast of Turkey. ... The Greeks began to build monumental temples in the first half of the eighth century BC. The temples of Hera at Samos and of Poseidon at Isthmia were among the first erected. ... Consulting the Oracle by John William Waterhouse, showing eight priestesses in a temple of prophecy An oracle is a person or persons considered to be the source of wise counsel or prophetic opinion; an infallible authority, usually spiritual in nature. ... Lycian Apollo, early Imperial Roman copy of a fourth century Greek original (Louvre Museum) In Greek and Roman mythology, Apollo (Ancient Greek , Apóllōn; or , Apellōn), the ideal of the kouros (a beardless youth), was the archer-god of medicine and healing, light, truth, archery and also a... Location of Caria Caria (Greek Καρία; see also List of traditional Greek place names) was a region of Asia Minor, situated south of Ionia, and west of Phrygia and Lycia. ... Delphi (Greek Δελφοί, [ðe̞lˈfi]) is an archaeological site and a modern town in Greece on the south-western spur of Mount Parnassus in a valley of Phocis. ... The anonymous Homeric Hymns are a collection of ancient Greek hymns. ... Location of Ionia Ionia (Greek Ιωνία; see also list of traditional Greek place names) was an ancient region of southwestern coastal Anatolia (in present-day Turkey, the region nearest İzmir,) on the Aegean Sea. ... The term Hellenistic (established by the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen) in the history of the ancient world is used to refer to the shift from a culture dominated by ethnic Greeks, however scattered geographically, to a culture dominated by Greek-speakers of whatever ethnicity, and from the political dominance...

Didyma was a neighbor of Miletus. To approach it, visitors would follow the Sacred Way to Didyma. For the last two kilometers of its length the Sacred Way was lined with the seated statues of members of the Branchidae family, male and female. The lower half of the benches and the remnants of the scene building of the theater of Miletus (August 2005) Miletus (Hittite: Milawata or Millawanda, Greek: Μίλητος transliterated Miletos, Turkish: Milet) was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia (in what is now the Aydin Province of Turkey...

Greek and Roman authors laboured to refer the name Didyma to "twin" temples— not a feature of the site— or to temples of the twins, Apollo and Artemis, whose own cult center at Didyma was only recently established, or whether, as Wilamowitz suggested^[5] there is a connection to Cybele Dindymene, "Cybele of Mount Dindymus", is mooted. Lycian Apollo, early Imperial Roman copy of a fourth century Greek original (Louvre Museum) In Greek and Roman mythology, Apollo (Ancient Greek , Apóllōn; or , Apellōn), the ideal of the kouros (a beardless youth), was the archer-god of medicine and healing, light, truth, archery and also a... The Diana of Versailles, a Roman copy of a sculpture by Leochares (Louvre Museum) Artemis (Greek: nominative , genitive ) in Greek mythology the daughter of Zeus and of Leto and the twin sister of Apollo was one of the most widely venerated of the gods and manifestly one of the oldest... Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (22 December 1848 - 25 September 1931) was a German classical philologist. ... Cybele with her attributes. ...

The sixth-century Didymaion, dedicated to Apollo, enclosed its smaller predecessor, which archaeologists have identified. Its treasury was enriched by gifts from Croesus. Croesus Croesus (IPA pronunciation: , CREE-sus) was the king of Lydia from 560/561 BC until his defeat by the Persians in about 547 BC. The English name Croesus come from the Latin transliteration of the Greek , in Arabic and Persian قارون, Qârun. ...

Until its destruction by the Persians in 494 BC, Didyma's sanctuary was administered by the family of the Branchidae, who claimed descent from Branchos, a youth beloved of Apollo.^[6] The priestess, seated above the sacred spring, gave utterances that were interpreted by the Branchidae. Both Herodotus^[7] and Pausanias dated the origins of the oracle at Didyma before the Ionian colonization of this coast. The Branchidae were expelled by Darius' Persians, who burned the temple in 493 and carried away to Ecbatana the archaic bronze statue of Apollo, traditionally made by Canachus of Sicyon^[8] in the sixth century; the spring dried up, it was reported, and the archaic oracle was silenced.^[9] Though the sanctuaries of Delphi and Ephesus were swiftly rebuilt, Didyma remained a ruin until the first steps of restoration were undertaken, in 334: Callisthenes, a court historian of Alexander reported that the spring began once more to flow after Alexander passed through, but there had been a complete break in the oracles' personnel and tradition.^[10] Inscriptions, including inquiries and responses, and literary testimony record Didyma's role as an oracle, with the "grim epilogue"^[11] of Apollo's supposed sanction of Diocletian's persecution of Christians, until the closing of the temples under Theodosius I. This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Location of Ionia Ionia (Greek Ιωνία; see also list of traditional Greek place names) was an ancient region of southwestern coastal Anatolia (in present-day Turkey, the region nearest İzmir,) on the Aegean Sea. ... Seal of Darius I, showing the king hunting on his chariot, and the symbol of Ahuramazda Darius the Great (Pers. ... Golden Rhyton from Irans Achaemenid period. ... The site of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in Turkey. ... Callisthenes, or Kallisthenes, ( in Greek) of Olynthus (c. ... Alexander the Great (Greek: ,[1] Megas Alexandros; July 356 BC–June 11, 323 BC), also known as Alexander III, king of Macedon (336–323 BC), was one of the most successful military commanders in history. ... First Christians // In the two thousand years of the Christian faith, about 70 million believers have been killed for their faith, of whom 45. ... An engraving depicting what Theodosius may have looked like, ca. ...

Enriched mouldings from the third-century rebuilding

After his capture of Miletus in 334 BC Alexander the Great reconsecrated the oracle but placed its administration of the oracle in the hands of the city, where the priest in charge was annually elected. About 300 BC^[12] Seleucus I Nicator brought the bronze cult image back, and the Milesians began to build a new temple, which, if it had ever been completed, would have been the largest in the Hellenic world. Vitruvius recorded a tradition that the architects were Paeonius of Ephesus, whom Vitruvius credited with the rebuilding of the Temple of Artemis there, and Daphnis of Miletus. The peripteral temple^[13] was surrounded by a double file of Ionic columns. With a pronaos of three rows of four columns, the approaching visitor passed through a regularized grove formed of columns. The usual door leading to a cella was replaced by a blank wall with a large upper opening through which one could glimpse the upper part of the naiskos in the inner court (adyton). The entry route lay down either of two long constricted sloping passageways built within the thickness of the walls which gave access to the inner court, still open to the sky but isolated from the world by the high walls of the cella: there was the ancient spring, the naiskos— which was a small temple itself, containing in its own small cella the bronze cult image of the god— and a grove of laurels, sacred to Apollo. The inner walls of the cella were articulated by pilasters standing on a base the height of a man (1.94 m). Turning back again, the visitor saw a monumental staircase that led up to three openings to a room^[14] whose roof was supported by two columns on the central cross-axis. The oracular procedure, so well documented at Delphi, is unknown at Didyma and must be reconstructed on the basis of the temple's construction, but it appears that several features of Delphi were now adopted: a priestess^[15] and answers delivered in classical hexameters. At Delphi, noting was written; at Didyma, inquiries and answers were written; a small structure, the Chresmographion featured in this process: it was meticulously disassembled in the Christian period. Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1280 × 960 pixel, file size: 660 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Frieze from the temple of Apollo in Didyma, Turkey. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1280 × 960 pixel, file size: 660 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Frieze from the temple of Apollo in Didyma, Turkey. ... Alexander the Great (Greek: ,[1] Megas Alexandros; July 356 BC–June 11, 323 BC), also known as Alexander III, king of Macedon (336–323 BC), was one of the most successful military commanders in history. ... Silver coin of Seleucus. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (born ca. ... The site of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in Turkey. ... Bahut a dwarf-wall of plain masonry, carrying the roof of a cathedral or church and masked or hidden behind the balustrade. ... Architects first real look at the Greek Ionic order: Julien David LeRoy, Les ruines plus beaux des monuments de la Grèce Paris, 1758 (Plate XX) The Ionic order forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and... A cella, in Ancient Greek and Roman temples was the central room that housed cult statues. ... The naiskos is a small temple in Classical order with columns or pillars and pediment. ... The Adyton (Greek Αδυτον) was a restricted ares within the cella of a Greek or Roman temple. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... Hexameter is a literary and poetic form, consisting of six metrical feet per line as in the Iliad. ...

The annual festival held there under the auspices of Miletus was the Didymeia; it was made a Panhellenic festival in the beginning of the second century BC. German excavations made between 1905 and 1930 revealed all of the incomplete new temple and some carved fragments that belonged to the earlier temple and to associated statues.

Pausanias visited Didyma in the later second century AD (Description of Greece, 7.2.6). Pausanias (Greek: ) was a Greek traveller and geographer of the 2nd century A.D., who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. ...

Pliny reported^[16] the worship of Apollo Didymiae, Apollo of Didymus, in Central Asia, transported to Sogdiana by a general of 'Seleucus and Antiochus" whose inscribed altars there were still to be seen by Pliny's correspondents. Corroborating inscriptions on amphoras were found at Dilbergin (Hammond 1998). Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th Century portrait. ... Sogdiana, ca. ...

Notes

Söke is a district of Aydın Province of Turkey. ... shows the Location of the Province Aydın Aydın is a province of Turkey, and its located in the southwestern Anatolian district, or more specifically in the Aegan region, in Turkish called Ege bölgesi. ... Aydın (Greek: Αϊδίνιο) is a city in western Turkey and the seat of the Turkish province of the same name (Aydın Province). ... Joseph Edward Fontenrose (1903-1986) was an American classical scholar. ... Nicander (2nd century BC), Greek poet, physician and grammarian, was born at Claros, near Colophon, where his family held the hereditary priesthood of Apollo. ... Magnesia on the Maeander is an ancient Greek city in Anatolia, located on the Maeander river upstream from Ephesus. ... The Greek geographer Strabo in a 16th century engraving. ... The Greek geographer Strabo in a 16th century engraving. ... Pausanias (Greek: ) was a Greek traveller and geographer of the 2nd century A.D., who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. ... ... Naturalis Historia Pliny the Elders Natural History is an encyclopedia written by Pliny the Elder. ...

External links

• Didyma
• Apollon Temple Photos
• Encyclopedia Iranica, "Didyma"
• Livius Picture Archive: Didyma (Yenihisar)
• Site of Didyma
• Richard Stillwell, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, 1976: "Didyma,or Branchidai (Didim, previously Yoran) Turkey"
• Rather exhaustive picture series of Didyma
• Didim
• Didyma
• Altinkum Homes
• Didyma Apart Otel
• Didim Property
• Didim Emlak

References

• Hammond, N. G. L. 1998. "The Branchidae at Didyma and in Sogdiana" The Classical Quarterly, New Series, 48.2 pp. 339-344.

Further reading

• Joseph Fontenrose, 1988. Didyma. Apollo's Oracle, Cult and Companions, (Berkeley). Catalogue of Didyman inquiries and responses, translated.
• Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians 1986: Chapter 5.
• H. W. Parke, 1985. The Oracles of Apollo in Asia Minor
• T. Wiegand, 1941-58. Didyma, 2 vols. in 4, (Berlin) The prime archaeological report.