The Sanctuary of Apollo on Delos

The gathering Apollo was promised

The Sanctuary of Apollo was the holy ground of the god Apollo on the island of Delos. A sanctuary is a place set apart for the gods. Delos claimed to be Apollo’s birthplace, and the sanctuary grew from that claim.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, an early Greek poem in praise of the god, describes a festival there. The long-robed Ionians arrive on Delos with their families and their ships. They box, dance and sing before Apollo. The poet imagines that a visitor might take the crowd for people untouched by age. Apollo has temples, groves and mountains elsewhere, the hymn says, but Delos pleases him most.

The island became a shared religious centre for the Ionians of the Aegean islands and of the coasts on either side. Their delegations sailed into the Sacred Port with offerings for Apollo, his sister Artemis, his mother Leto and the other gods worshipped there.

Three temples, not one

The sanctuary was a precinct, a walled sacred area, and not one building. Three temples of Apollo stood near one another: the Porinos Naos, the Temple of the Athenians and the Great Temple. Nearby were the Horned Altar, treasuries and stoas. Treasuries were small buildings where a city kept its offerings, and stoas were long covered walks with columns. There were also bases for offerings. The people of Naxos, the Athenians and several other island communities all added monuments.

These additions followed no master plan. Around 100 BC the sanctuary was a large space, roughly trapezoidal, with several entrances. The main approach was through the Athenian Propylaea, a gateway, from the south. Inside, buildings of different dates, materials, sizes and directions stood side by side, without a clear Sacred Way.

The crowded plan records how the sanctuary was made. A city could honour Apollo and put its own name before other visitors at the same time. Each new temple, treasury or offering joined a sacred centre that already belonged to many communities.

Worship and power on Delos

The historian Thucydides looks back to an early Ionian festival on Delos, with contests in athletics and poetry and choirs sent by the cities. Athens reorganised the Delia in 426 BC as a festival held every four years. The festival made the sanctuary a place where worship, performance and civic display happened together.

Control of the precinct also carried political weight. After the Persian Wars, an alliance was formed that is now called the Delian League. Its common treasury was kept in a temple of Apollo on Delos. Athens moved the treasury to Athens, probably in 454 BC, and Athenian officials managed Apollo’s property on the island.

The sanctuary was more than a place that received decisions made elsewhere. Its religious standing was one reason why control of Delos mattered. Monuments from Naxos, Samos and Athens show different powers using the precinct to state their place in the Aegean.

Where the Sacred Lake fits

The Sacred Lake was one of the holy places of Delos. A road lined with lions from Naxos ran from Apollo’s sanctuary towards the lake, which is named as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. That route joined the broad public precinct to one particular spot in the birth story.

The two places are separate subjects. The lake raises the question of where Leto gave birth, and how that spot was later identified. The sanctuary holds the buildings, offerings, festivals and administration built up around Apollo’s claim to the island.

What the excavated precinct keeps

The ruins keep the sanctuary’s built-up character. The plan shows three temples, not one complete monument. Treasuries and stoas keep the work of communities that came to Delos by sea. Hundreds of bases mark offerings, though their statues have often disappeared.

Some sculpture has been separated from the buildings it once decorated. One example is the central group from the pediment of the Athenian temple, the triangle under its roof at the front. Made around 425 to 420 BC, it showed the god Boreas carrying off the Athenian princess Oreithyia. It is now in the Archaeological Museum of Delos. The subject placed an Athenian myth above an Athenian building inside the Ionian sanctuary.

So Delos keeps no single finished image of Apollo’s house. It keeps a precinct that was entered and changed again and again. It was the island of the god’s birth and the gathering place praised in the hymn. It was also a field where cities showed their devotion beside the work of their rivals.