The Sacred Lake on Delos

The island that accepts Leto’s labour

Leto braces herself against Mount Cynthus beside a palm and the streams of the Inopos while Apollo is born. The Homeric Hymn names the island twice and makes the labour last nine days and nights. Hera has kept Eileithyia, the goddess who can release childbirth, on Olympus until the other goddesses send Iris to bring her.

The Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades identifies the sacred lake as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. The hymn names the Cynthian hill, palm and watercourse rather than a lake. Those descriptions need not be forced into one precise point on the excavated plan; the institutional record preserves the lake’s local identification while the poem supplies its own landmarks.

What the island asked for first

The bargain is the part of the story the retellings drop. In the hymn Leto goes from land to land and every one of them refuses her, afraid of the son she is carrying. Delos answers her at last, and answers frankly: it would be glad to take the far-shooting lord, since it is ill-spoken of among men and would become greatly honoured, but it has heard that Apollo will be haughty, and it expects never to be rich in oxen and sheep. Leto swears the great oath of the gods before it agrees. Then Leto is racked nine days and nine nights, with every goddess about her except Hera, who has kept Eilithyia, the goddess of labour, on Olympus under golden clouds and out of hearing.

The island purified

Thucydides reports what Athens did with the birthplace. The Athenians purified Delos in the winter, taking up all the sepulchres of those who had died on the island, and it was commanded for the future that no one should be allowed either to die or to give birth there; the dying and the labouring were to be carried across to Rhenea, the neighbouring island. Pisistratus had done a partial purification long before, Thucydides adds, of as much of the island as could be seen from the temple. Athens then held the quinquennial Delian games for the first time. Long before any of it, Thucydides says, the Ionians and the islanders round them came to Delos for a festival of athletic and poetical contests, the cities bringing choirs of dancers, and he quotes the hymn to prove the point: the robed Ionians take their way there with wife and child.

The lions on the road

The Naxian workshops set a row of marble lions on the road that runs from the sanctuary of Apollo to the sacred lake, in the late seventh or early sixth century BC. They stood on it for thousands of years. In 2000 the Ephorate moved them inside the Archaeological Museum of Delos, out of the weather of the island, and they are in room IV.

The movement changes what stands on the ancient road without changing where the dedication belonged. The lions now kept indoors are the original sculptures; replicas occupy the outdoor line. Their route still joins Apollo’s sanctuary to the lake that Delos identified with the twins’ birth.

The relocation also makes the modern encounter legible. A visitor sees copies guarding the ancient approach and must enter the museum to meet the weathered Naxian marble. Protection divided object from place, but the road still points toward the lake.