The Delia

The Ionians arrive with their families

The Delia was a festival of the god Apollo on the island of Delos, held by the Ionian Greeks. The oldest surviving picture of it comes from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, an early poem in praise of the god. The poet imagines Delos full. Long-robed Ionians arrive with their children and wives. Ships surround the island. Boxing, dancing and song honour Apollo. The gathering looks so complete that a visitor might take its people for immortals whom age never touches.

The poem is about a crowd on display, not one champion. The cities brought people, choruses and ships. In the hymn, families are present, not only competitors or priests. Apollo’s pleasure in Delos shows itself through a gathering that came round at set times and let the Ionians see one another.

The hymn pauses on the Delian Maidens, attendants of Apollo. They first praise the god and the goddesses Leto and Artemis. Then they sing of people from former times. The poet says they can imitate the tongues and speech of everyone. They do it so precisely that each listener might believe the voice was his own. Their song holds many ways of speaking within one chorus. The islands and coasts keep their differences when they meet.

What Thucydides made of the hymn

The historian Thucydides read the same lines as evidence for the early gathering. He wrote during the Peloponnesian War. He says that Ionians and neighbouring islanders once came to Delos with their wives and children. There were contests in sport and music, and single cities sent choruses. He quotes the hymn’s lines on boxing, dancing and song, including its appeal to the Delian Maidens.

He also records a break. The games and some other customs had lapsed under the pressure of misfortune. Still, islanders and Athenians kept sending choruses with their delegations to the sacrifices. The ancient festival known from poetry did not pass unchanged from one age to the next.

Purification and renewal

In the winter of 426/5 BC, Athens purified Delos, cleansing it of religious pollution. Thucydides says every grave on the island was removed. From then on, nobody was to die or give birth there. Anyone close to either event was taken across to the island of Rheneia. After the purification, the Athenians set up a recurring festival on Delos and restored the games. They added a horse race, which Thucydides says had not been part of the older gathering.

This order of events links control of ritual to the renewal of the festival. Athens did more than bring back an entertainment. It first remade the conditions of the sacred island. It moved the dead and regulated birth and death, the two edges of life, and only then called the gathering. The new Delia asserted Athenian authority in the same act that honoured Apollo.

The festival is not the sanctuary

The sanctuary, the sacred precinct of Apollo, gave the gathering its ground. A sanctuary of Apollo stood there by at least the ninth century BC and was organised more fully in the seventh. The Homeric Hymn already treats Delos as a famous religious centre of the Ionians. Delegations from cities across the islands came to a small place. Its reach came from its sanctuary, not from the people who lived there.

So the Delia and the Sanctuary of Apollo are related, but they are not the same thing. The sanctuary entry covers temples, altars, treasuries, offerings and control of sacred property. The Delia covers what happened when communities arrived together: sacrifice, choruses, music, boxing and, after the Athenian changes, horse racing.

Counting the years

Thucydides calls the renewed festival quinquennial, a word that sounds like every fifth year. Ancient counting included both the first and the last year. So the term means the familiar gap of four years, not five full years between festivals. The label belongs to the Athenian arrangement that Thucydides saw in his own century. It should not be pushed back onto the gathering in the hymn as if its schedule were known.

The Delia survives most clearly in two acts of looking. The hymn asks an imagined visitor to gaze at the gathered Ionians and marvel at their ships, women and men. Thucydides turns back to that poem, uses it as historical evidence, then records what Athens changed. Between them, the festival is neither pure legend nor a fixed timetable. It is an old Ionian gathering revived under new power on Apollo’s island.