Temple of Apollo in Delphi

Greek tradition counted five temples in succession on the site. The first three belong to myth rather than to record, and the fourth, of stone, was credited to the legendary builders Trophonius and Agamedes; Pausanias, who set the sequence down, doubted Hephaestus's part in the third. The fourth temple burned down in 548 BC, and the fifth was built in its place towards the end of the sixth century BC. The Amphictyonic League, the council that controlled Delphi, met before the work began and set the cost at 300 talents, a quarter to be paid by the Delphians and the rest collected by subscription across the known world. The contract went to the Alcmaeonids, an Athenian aristocratic family then in exile, who around 510 BC took on the completion and decoration of the temple and faced its front in marble rather than the poros stone the contract specified.

By 490 BC the temple was in full use, mentioned in one of Pindar's Pythian odes. Persian shields taken by the Athenians at Marathon in 490 BC were fixed to the building, along with Gallic shields from the repulse of the Gauls in 279 BC. Between 595 and 290 BC control of Delphi was contested in a series of Sacred Wars, several of which saw the temple and the treasuries looted. In the Third Sacred War the Phocians seized and plundered the temple in 357 BC, after refusing to pay a fine levied by the Amphictyonic League for cultivating sacred land, and paid a mercenary army with the proceeds, put at 10,000 talents.

An earthquake brought the temple down, an event dated to 373 BC in some accounts and to 330 BC in others. A subscription raised across the Greek world paid for the rebuilding, which was held up by the Third Sacred War, and the new Doric peripteral temple was inaugurated in 330 BC, the work of the architects Spintharos, Xenodoros and Agathon. Its pediments were begun by the sculptor Praxias and finished after his death by Androsthenes.

The temple stood until AD 390, when the emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of pagan temples and their images, and most of the statues and artwork at Delphi were removed or destroyed. The French government granted the French School of Athens the right to excavate in 1891, and the first modern excavation ran from 1892 to 1894 under Jean Théphille Homelle, turning up the bronze Charioteer of Delphi, taken on the Delphi Archaeological Museum's account to be a gift from Polyzalos of Gela after a victory at the Pythian Games; the head of the Sphinx of Naxos was found in 1893. The school dug again in 1938 under Robert Demangel, finding beneath the temple two small cavities that held ivory, bronze and gold taken for the remains of chryselephantine statues. Recent geological study has identified fractures and fault zones in the ground below the site. The ruins standing now are those of the fourth-century BC building, the site is protected as an archaeological site, and the Charioteer stands in that museum.