Delos

Delos is the emptiest important place in Greece. No one lives here, and no one may stay the night. The last boat leaves in the afternoon, and the island is given back to its guards and its lizards.

The rule is older than it sounds. Delos was the sacred centre of the Aegean. It was the island Leto reached to give birth to Apollo and Artemis, and the fixed point around which the other islands make the circle that gives the Cyclades their name. In 426 BC Athens purified it. Every grave was opened and the dead carried across the strait to Rineia, and it was decreed that from then on no one might be born and no one might die on Delos. The ban on sleeping here is the last surviving clause of that law.

What survives is a city. The Sacred Way climbs from the harbour past the Agora of the Competaliasts towards the sanctuary of Apollo. The Terrace of the Lions faces the dry bed of the Sacred Lake, where a single palm stands for the tree Leto is said to have held. The lions on the terrace are casts. The originals, worn down to the ribs, are in the museum a few minutes away. Behind them the theatre quarter climbs the slope in streets of merchants’ houses, and the mosaic floors of the House of Dionysus and the House of the Masks lie where their owners laid them.

Climb Mount Kynthos first, before the paths fill. It is 112 metres high, the climb takes 20 minutes, and the whole circle of islands lies below. Then come down into the ruins while the site is still quiet. Licensed boats run from the old port at Mykonos, and there is no other way to land. The site closes and empties every evening. Three or four hours ashore is the honest measure of it.

House Notes

  1. The French School

    The École française d’Athènes has been digging here since 1873, when it sent A. Lebègue out to open the first trenches. Under T. Homolle and then M. Holleaux, the large clearances ran until the First World War. The houses and insulae, or city blocks, of the Northern Quarter came to light between the end of the 1950s and the end of the 1970s. Almost everything a visitor walks past was uncovered by one institution across 150 years.

  2. The Colossus

    The base of the colossal kouros, a statue of a standing youth, that the Naxians gave Apollo still lies where they set it. It measures 515 by 347 centimetres and carries two inscriptions: the archaic boast “I am of the same stone, both figure and base”, and a later “The Naxians, to Apollo”. The figure stood around 9 metres high in Naxian marble and is now in pieces. Its left foot, 0.57 metres long, is in the British Museum.

  3. The Hypostyle Hall

    Off the north-west corner of the sanctuary stands a roofed hall of 56 by 34 metres, built in the last years of the third century BC and opening onto the agora. Inside, 24 Doric and 20 Ionic columns carried a roof pierced by a skylight, and the front had a further 15 Doric columns between pilasters. The column stumps still show the plan. Read them from the north end, where the double colonnade lines up.

  4. The Bulls

    The Edifice of the Bulls has a porch of six columns, a long gallery lined with benches and an inner room at the end. The bull protomes, the carved fronts of bulls on its supports, gave the building its name. Built in the late fourth or early third century BC, it appears to have been made around a ship. The neorion, or ship shed, is recorded as holding the flagship Antigonus II Gonatas dedicated after his sea victory at Kos in 255 BC.

  5. The Minoan Fountain

    Behind the Stoa of Antigonos, outside the temenos, the wall of the sacred precinct, a square well-house of granite and gneiss was built over a natural spring in the sixth century BC. A staircase runs down to the water, and a thin Doric column near its foot carried the roof. An inscribed stone forbade washing, swimming and the throwing of dung into the sacred spring. Repairs in the mid-second century BC added a fresco of a river god with three nymphs. It still fills.

  6. The great cistern

    The cistern behind the theatre took the rain from the whole cavea, the tiered seating, gathered by a channel around the orchestra. Its roof rests on eight granite arches, with well-mouths cut between them to draw the water back up. The theatre above was begun shortly after 314 BC and finished around 250. The arches are the piece of engineering on this island that deserves as much time as any floor in the houses.

  7. The Egyptian chronicle

    In the courtyard of Sarapieion A stood a column inscribed around 200 BC with the sanctuary’s founding story, told by the priest Apollonios. His grandfather brought the god from Egypt. Sarapis then told Apollonios in a dream to stop housing him in rented rooms and to buy a plot full of rubbish. The temple went up in six months, and the neighbours who sued to stop it lost. The larger Sarapeion C above, reached along an avenue of sphinxes, passed to the sanctuary’s administration around 180 BC.

  8. The Syrian sanctuary

    At the foot of the Kynthos massif runs the long Terrace of the Foreign Gods, and its northern half belongs to Atargatis and Hadad. The Syrian sanctuary has a square court ringed with small rooms and shrines and, opening onto a long terrace, a small theatre. Its plan differs from the Greek sanctuaries below because its rites did: the theatre and the terrace carried processions, and the faithful gathered in the seats rather than watching from them.

  9. The House of Cleopatra

    Two portrait statues stand on a threshold in the courtyard of a merchant’s house, placed so that whoever came through the door met the owners at once. The inscription names Kleopatra, daughter of Adrastos of Myrrhinous, who raised the image of her husband Dioskourides. He had given two silver tripods to the temple of Apollo. The inscription dates itself by the archon Timarchos to 138/137 BC. The originals are in the island’s museum, and the pair in the courtyard are copies.

  10. The Trident

    The House of the Trident is one of the larger houses on the theatre road. It is laid out around a Rhodian peristyle, a colonnaded courtyard, over a rain basin that drained to a cistern beneath the floor, and its marble window is still framed to the street. The courtyard panels show a black dolphin coiled around a red anchor, and black tridents on white. The theme has long been read as the owner’s trade. Only 25 houses on Delos have mosaic floors at all.

Mythology

  1. Apollo

    On Delos, Leto gives birth to Apollo beside a palm tree near Mount Kynthos, after she promises the island his first temple. His sanctuary made the rocky island a major gathering place for Ionian worshippers.

  2. Artemis

    Apollodorus says Artemis was born on Delos before Apollo, and that the newborn goddess acted as her mother’s midwife. The Homeric Hymn gives Artemis to Ortygia instead, so the ancient sources disagree about where the twins were born.

  3. Coeus

    Both of Coeus’s daughters are fixed to Delos. In Apollodorus, Asteria flings herself into the sea in the likeness of a quail, and the place once called Asteria after her is afterwards named Delos; Leto then comes to the island and bears Artemis and Apollo there. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo the island itself answers Leto and names her the daughter of great Coeus.

  4. Crius

    Crius’s line reaches Delos through his son Perses, who in Hesiod takes Asteria as his wife. Apollodorus says that Asteria flung herself into the sea in the likeness of a quail, and that the place first called Asteria after her was afterwards named Delos; Callimachus still addresses the island by that older name.

  5. Eileithyia

    On Delos, Leto’s labour lasts nine days and ends only when Eileithyia arrives from Olympus. Pausanias says the people of Delos went on sacrificing to the childbirth goddess and singing a hymn, a song of praise, linked with Olen.

  6. Eos

    Apollodorus says Eos fell in love with Orion and carried him to Delos. Artemis later killed him there, after he either challenged her to a contest at quoits or attacked Opis, a maiden from the land of the Hyperboreans.

  7. Iris

    On Delos, Leto’s labour lasts nine days because Eileithyia, on Olympus, has not been told. Iris crosses the distance in secret and returns with the childbirth goddess, whose arrival lets Apollo be born.

  8. Leto

    Delos took in Leto for the births of Artemis and Apollo, and it also had a separate sacred enclosure for her. Her marble temple stood between Apollo’s sanctuary and the Sacred Lake, although private offerings to her had become rare by the Hellenistic period.

  9. Orion

    Eos falls in love with Orion and brings him to Delos. Apollodorus places his death there at the hands of Artemis, and gives two reasons: a contest at quoits, or an attack on Opis, a Hyperborean maiden.

  10. The Charites

    Pausanias says the image of Apollo that Angelion and Tectaeus made for the people of Delos held three Charites in its hand. This work for Apollo’s sanctuary gave the familiar number three a fixed form.

  11. The Delia

    The Delia brought Ionians and neighbouring islanders to Apollo’s sanctuary on Delos. The Homeric Hymn pictures their ships, families, boxing, dancing and song, and Thucydides records how Athens restored the festival on the purified island.

  12. The Homeric Hymns

    The Hymn to Apollo turns to its audience on Delos, asks the island’s girls to remember the singer, and answers for itself as a blind man who lives in rocky Chios. Thucydides, writing two centuries later, took the lines as Homer’s own and quoted them as proof that Ionian cities had long sailed to Delos with their wives and children for the god’s festival.

  13. The Sacred Lake on Delos

    The Homeric Hymn to Apollo puts the birth of the god on Delos, with Leto resting against the Cynthian hill by a palm tree and the streams of the Inopos, and local tradition names the sacred lake as the birthplace of the twins. The Naxian lions were set up on the road from the sanctuary to the lake, and were moved inside the island museum in 2000.

  14. The Sanctuary of Apollo on Delos

    Apollo’s sanctuary stood on the island claimed as his birthplace and received Ionian delegations through the Sacred Port. Its crowded grounds held three temples of Apollo, the Horned Altar, treasuries, stoas and offerings made by cities across the Aegean.