The E at Delphi

In the pronaos (vestibule) of the ancient Oracle of Delphi, so it is said, were three inscriptions on the walls. The first of these, and the most famous, read Gnothi seauton—'Know thyself'—while the second read Meden agan—'Nothing in excess'. The third was merely the letter E: a capital epsilon. Plutarch's essay on the meaning of the E, in which various thinkers propose different explanations, is our only literary source for the object. Not much is clear about the E; in fact, it is even suggested that there are three of them:

That this account is not beside the mark may be recognized by any one who has heard the officials of the temple naming the golden "E" as that of Livia the wife of Cæsar, the brazen one as that of the Athenians, whereas the original and oldest letter, which is of wood, is to this day called that "Of the Wise Men", as having been offered of all in common, not of any one of them.

In addition to Plutarch's essay, modern archaeologists have found a similar image on bronze coins of the period, such as this one:

The quest for the meaning of the E acquires an epic significance in Plutarch's essay: 'Our kind Apollo, in the oracles which he gives his consultants, seems to solve the problems of life and to find a remedy, while problems of the intellect he actually suggests and propounds to the born love of wisdom in the soul, thus implanting an appetite which leads to truth.' The wonder occasioned by enigmas like the Delphic E is thus for Plutarch the impetus to philosophical wisdom.

There are six solutions proposed in the dialogue. The first is offered by Lamprias, Plutarch's brother, who thinks that because E is the fifth letter in the Greek alphabet, it stands for the five original sages of Greece—Solon, Bion, Thales, Pittacus and Chilon. The second solution is proposed by an unnamed figure, who cites the opinion of a Chaldaean (Babylonian) astrologer, that the E, being the second vowel out of seven in the Greek alphabet, stands for the second planet out of seven, that is to say, the Sun, which pertains to Apollo. Nicander offers the third solution, which he claims is the local one, namely that the letter epsilon—EI in Greek—is also the word for 'if' (ei), and represents the word with which questioners address the oracle: 'If they shall conquer; If they shall marry', etc. The fourth solution, voiced by Theon, is a version of the third: the EI or 'if' represents syllogistic reasoning, which is the basis of man's intellect. The fifth solution satirises Pythagorean number-mysticism: Eustrophus claims that E, being the fifth letter, represents simply the number five, to which he attributes mystical properties—the five senses, the five divisions of the soul, Plato's five solids, Homer's five worlds, and so on. The sixth, 'correct' solution is provided by Ammonius, Plutarch's own teacher—he returns to EI, but with the meaning 'Thou art' instead of 'if'. The statement 'Thou art' is addressed to Apollo, and signifies that of all things, Apollo (taken as the Neoplatonic One, with an etymology of a-pollos, 'not many') is the only being that fully is, whereas all other beings are merely in flux.

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Just as with Atlantis, modern interest in the E, despite the scanty evidence for it, has not abated. Several scholarly articles have been devoted to interpretations of its meaning, none accepting any of Plutarch's solutions. William Nickerson Bates ('The E of the Temple at Delphi', American Journal of Archaeology, 1925) notes that Plutarch clearly has no idea of the E's true meaning, and that furthermore, given that Plutarch was a priest at Delphi around 100 AD, the E must have been very old, and its meaning long lost, even to the initiated. Bates mentions the discovery of an omphalos-stone at Delphi, dated to the 7th century BC, with the following inscription:


This, he claims, following F. Courby, reads E ΓA (E GA), or E ΓAΣ (E GAS)—the latter syllables being an archaic form of Greek ge, 'earth'. It is implied that before the cult of Apollo, the Earth herself was worshipped at Delphi. This suggestion is supported by Parke and Wormell's classic 1956 history of the oracle, which adduces the various myths about Apollo's invasion of Delphi. Bates traces the cult at Delphi back further, to the cult of the mother goddess at Crete, and goes on to compare the E to a similar figure from a Minoan coin of great antiquity. In Bates' view, the Minoan character was misinterpreted as an Attic E, the enigma ensuring its survival:

The historic Greeks had lost all knowledge of its origin or significance. To them it was Apollo's holy letter. The E of the temple of Delphi is thus an inheritance from prehistoric times, and another example of the conservatism in religious matters common in all ages.

A. Trevor Hodge ('The Mystery of Apollo's E at Delphi', American Journal of Archaeology, 1981) has a different view. By Hodge's time, Bates' theory has been 'exploded' by Bousquet's proof that the omphalos-stone is modern, and that the Delphic E thus has no relation to the inscription, E GA[S]. Hodge, however, still associates the E with the word GE, only he argues that the G was originally there, and later fell off accidentally:

Of an original ΓE at some very early period the Γ fell off the wall, soon to be forgotten and never to be replaced, reducing the inscription to unintelligibility and succeeding ages to bewilderment. . . it would not be surprising if the surviving but incomprehensible E was still cherished and indeed replaced in a spirit of faithful, if blind, piety.

The constant in these explanations, and others, is that the E was once a communicating sign, but then ceased to be. It became rather a fetish, something left over from before and venerated out of context. It acquired new meaning as a sign purely because the old meaning was no longer there—semotics, like Nature, abhors a vacuum. This notion of the remnant object keeps cropping up in my thought and reading—it is the essence, for example, of the 'unknown' winnowing oar—and I intend to return to it again soon. For now, though, I leave you with Nicolas Poussin's 1647 Ordination, which shows Christ handing Peter the keys to heaven, and in which, according to Anthony Blunt, can be discerned the very figure of Plutarch's E (indicated by a red arrow on this image). The significance of this association I leave to your judgement.