The current
visitor entering in holy, follows the sacred way and he
goes up between the ruins that
respected the time and the destruction, mainly the
foundations of the buildings and the bases of the
valuable offerings. The sacred way reaches up to the
temple of Apollo and then the path leads up to the
theatre and the stadium.
From the main entrance
the Sacred Way leads obliquely up; in Greek times it had
level stretches and steps (of which traces can be seen
on the lower courses of the Altar of the Chians) but
under the Romans these were replaced by the present
graded slope, though some of the paving was laid by the
recent villagers. Much of the first stretch is bordered
by bases for statues, now vanished. Just inside the gate
on the left was the Spartan monument for their victory
over the Athenians in 405-4, erected next to an earlier
Athenian memorial of their defeat of the Persians at
Marathon; and across the way the Arcadians afterwards
found a place for their monument to advertise the
humiliation of Sparta in 369.
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