"Ma's Ditty to Apollo"

Where in the world is Luther? It was the most renowned temple to Apollo in the ancient world next to Delphi. How many workers per mason and how much did they get paid to build a column? Was the temple ever finished? The city’s name sounds like, “your ma’s favorite ditty.”

If you guessed Didyma, you guessed right. Above the modern town stands the Temple to Apollo. (Luther said it didn’t look at all like the Apollo program he’d seen.)

Do you see the people on the bottom left? The steps were big!

 

We drove but the ancients traveled a 17 km road loaded with way stations and statues of members of the Branchidae family. They ran the temple. (Luther asked why that family got to run it and get all the offerings? I told him they claimed to be descendants of Branchidae, a favorite youth that Apollo loved. Luther said, “So?” I said, “Well it worked for them.”) [As is most of the cool stuff in Turkey and Greece, you have to go to the British Museum in London to see them. Many of the statues are there.] In 600 BC a smaller temple to Apollo existed built upon a spring. A small temple of wood probably existed first before a small stone temple built to house a stature of Apollo. A priestess would be seated above the spring and gave people utterances. But the spring dried up in the 600s BCE and the oracle tradition stopped. (Luther asked if she had a bad case of dry mouth without that spring water.) The temple was still used until the Persians, destroyed it in 494 BCE. After the Persians were driven out by Alexander the Great, he found the spring flowing again and so set up a new priesthood to restore the temple. Seleucus I Nictator, (Luther asked, "Are you sure it's not Seleucus the dictator?" I said, "Google doesn't lie." Luther said, "Oh, brother.") he brought the bronze-age cult practice back to the temple. The people from Miletus began the construction of the new building, [The ruins we now see] It would have been the largest Greek and Roman temple ever built if it would have been completed. We know because a German archeologist found a 200 square foot blue print scratched on rocks left on the far wall of the adyton, the inner court wall.

It took 380 pounds of silver per column because each of the 20,000 workers received 8.6 grams of silver. Although it is not comparable, it’s fun to try. So you take 8.6 grams times 20,000 workers to get 172,000 grams of silver. Divide it by 28 ounces per gram would equal about 6,143 ounces. The price per ounce today is around 22 dollars. That would mean about 135,000 dollars per column. 120 columns were planned. That’s 16,217142 million dollars without counting walls, floors and other major masonry, quarrying costs and transport. If we knew how much 8.6 grams of silver bought a person, we could come close to knowing how much in today’s dollars.. (Luther said, “Sufficient to say it cost a lot. Impressive for a bunch of hairless apes.” I think he was jealous.)