Omphalos

In Practice

Pausanias, writing his tour of the sanctuary, describes it directly: a stone of white marble, no great size, which the Delphians themselves call the Omphalos and say is the middle of all the earth, a claim he notes that Pindar's poetry backs up. The object was a real, physical landmark inside the temple's inner chamber, not just a figure of speech for Delphi's importance. The reason the Greeks located the world's center at that specific stone is a myth Strabo records in his Geography: Zeus released two eagles, one from each end of the earth, flying toward each other at equal speed, and the point where their paths crossed was Delphi. Strabo adds that the omphalos itself carried the proof, a kind of navel visible in the temple, draped with fillets, with the likenesses of the two birds from the myth worked onto it. Pindar's own poetry gestures at the same picture without spelling out the myth behind it: his fourth Pythian ode places the Delphic priestess seated beside "the golden eagles of Zeus" when she gives her oracle, and elsewhere in the same poem calls Delphi "the central navel of well-wooded mother earth," language Pausanias treats as the ode confirming the Delphians' own claim. A second, unrelated tradition sometimes gets folded into the omphalos by modern retellings, but the ancient sources keep the two apart. Apollodorus's Library tells how Rhea, to save infant Zeus from his father, wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes and gave it to Cronus to swallow in the child's place; Apollodorus's own narrative never places that stone at Delphi. Pausanias does describe a stone answering to that story while touring Delphi, but it stands in a different part of the sanctuary from the marble omphalos: past the enclosure holding Neoptolemus's grave, a small stone that the Delphians anoint with oil daily and dress in unworked wool at festivals, which Pausanias reports "there is also an opinion about... that it was given to Cronus instead of his child." Ancient testimony, in other words, names two separate stones at Delphi answering to two separate myths, not one object doing double duty.

Where Accounts Differ

• two separate stones, not one

• Modern popular retellings often treat the omphalos and the stone Rhea gave Cronus as the same object. Read together, Pausanias's own tour of Delphi keeps them apart: the marble omphalos sits in the temple's inner chamber (10.16.3), while the stone popularly linked to the Cronus story stands near Neoptolemus's tomb (10.24.6), a different location entirely -- and Apollodorus's narrative of the Cronus story never places that stone at Delphi to begin with.

Where This Appears

• Character Apollo
• Character Zeus
• Character Kronos
• Character Rhea
• Character Gaia
• Term Delphi
• Term Oracle
• Mythology Greek Mythology

Sources