Delos
Overview
Delos is the emptiest important place in Greece, and the emptiness is the point. No one lives here. 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 — the island Leto reached to bear 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 thereafter 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 not a temple but 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: a hundred and twelve metres, twenty minutes, and the whole circle of islands laid out below. Then come down into the ruins with the site 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, and three or four hours ashore is the honest measure of it.
House Notes
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 up to the First World War; the houses and insulae of the Northern Quarter came up between the end of the 1950s and the end of the 1970s. Almost everything a visitor walks past was lifted by one institution across 150 years.
The Colossus
The base of the colossal kouros the Naxians gave Apollo still lies where they set it, 515 by 347 centimetres, cut with two inscriptions — the archaic boast “I am of the same stone, both figure and base”, and a later “The Naxians, to Apollo”. The figure above it stood around 9 metres in Naxian marble and is now in pieces. Its left foot, 0.57 metres long, is in the British Museum.
The Hypostyle Hall
Off the north-west corner of the sanctuary, a roofed hall of 56 by 34 metres, raised 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; the façade ran a further 15 Doric columns between pilasters. The stumps still read as a plan — take them from the north end, where the double colonnade lines up.
The Bulls
The Edifice of the Bulls: a six-column prodomos, a long gallery flanked by benches, a cella at the end, and the bull protomes carved on its supports that gave the building its name. Raised in the late fourth or early third century BC, it appears to have been built around a ship. The neorion is recorded as holding the flagship Antigonus II Gonatas dedicated after his sea victory at Kos in 255 BC.
The Minoan Fountain
Behind the Stoa of Antigonos, outside the temenos wall, a square well-house of granite and gneiss was raised over a natural spring in the sixth century BC. A staircase runs down to the water, a thin Doric column standing near the foot of it to carry 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.
The great cistern
The cistern behind the theatre took the rain off the whole cavea, gathered by a duct running round the orchestra. Its roof rests on eight granite arches, with well-mouths cut between them to draw the water back up. The theatre above it was begun shortly after 314 BC and finished around 250. The arches are the piece of engineering on this island worth as long a look as any floor in the houses.
The Egyptian chronicle
In the courtyard of Sarapieion A stood a column inscribed around 200 BC with the sanctuary’s own founding story, told by the priest Apollonios: his grandfather brought the god with him from Egypt, and Sarapis then instructed Apollonios in a dream to stop housing him in rented rooms and to buy a rubbish-filled plot. The temple went up in six months, and the neighbours who sued to stop it lost. The larger Sarapeion C above, entered along a dromos of sphinxes, passed to the sanctuary’s administration around 180 BC.
The Syrian sanctuary
At the foot of the Kynthos massif runs the long terrace they call the Terrace of the Foreign Gods, and its northern half belongs to Atargatis and Hadad. The Syrian sanctuary keeps a square court ringed with small rooms and shrines and, opening onto a long terrace, a small theatre. Its plan departs from the Greek sanctuaries below it because the liturgy did: the theatre and the terrace carried processions, and the faithful gathered in the seats rather than watched from them.
The House of Cleopatra
Two portrait statues stand on a threshold in the peristyle of a merchant’s house, set 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 — and dates itself by the archon Timarchos to 138/137 BC. The originals are in the island’s museum; the pair in the courtyard are copies.
The Trident
One of the larger houses on the theatre road, laid out around a Rhodian peristyle over an impluvium that drained to a cistern beneath the floor, its marble window still framed to the street. The peristyle panels set 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 tessellated floors at all.