Delos

Delos: marble lion

Delos, Modern Greek Dílos, island, one of the smallest of the Cyclades (Modern Greek: Kykládes), Greece, an ancient centre of religious, political, and commercial life in the Aegean Sea. Now largely uninhabited, it is a rugged granite mass about 1.3 square miles (3.4 square km) in area. Also called Lesser Delos, it lies between Rinía (Rhenea), or Megáli Dhílos (Greater Delos), to the west and Mýkonos Island to the east.

Since 1873 the École Française d’Athènes (“French School of Athens”) has been excavating the island, the complex of buildings of which compares with those of Delphi (Delfoí) and Olympia. Among Delos’s most noted sculptural artifacts are fragments of a colossal Apollo and nine marble lions. Four main groups of ruins are distinguishable on the west coast: the commercial port and small sanctuaries; the religious city of Apollo, a hieron (sanctuary); the sanctuaries of Mount Kynthos and the theatre; and the region of the Sacred Lake.

Behind the Sacred Harbour begins the paved Sacred, or Processional, Way, 42 feet (13 m) wide. To the west stood a sacred precinct, or shrine, and on the east a terrace with three important temples. The Doric temple of Apollo (mid-5th to 3rd century bce) has plain frieze motifs, scant sculptural decoration, and no interior colonnade. Adjoining it is a Doric Athenian temple (425–417 bce); the third is the Porinos Naos (“temple”). Beyond this complex is a sanctuary, an unusual elongated structure in two sections. At the north end was an altar built of the horns of sacrificed animals.

Other features of the precinct included a broad road flanked with votive offerings and the precinct of Artemis, with three temples superimposed on one another, perhaps the oldest edifice of pre-Hellenic times. Outside the precinct of Apollo, on the south, was an open space; between this and the precinct was a house for priests; and within it, the tombs of the Hyperborean Maidens, worshipers of Artemis. To the east was the temple of Dionysus, on the other side a large commercial exchange that had a temple of Aphrodite and Hermes.

Behind the commercial harbour were docks and warehouses; behind them lay the private houses of the 3rd and 2nd centuries bce, each featuring a court surrounded by columns and many paved with mosaics. The theatre (early 3rd century bce) lay beyond the commercial harbour, on the lower slope of Mount Cynthus; its summit has remains of ancient Cycladic dwellings (3rd millennium bce) and a small precinct of Kýnthios Zeus (Cynthian Zeus) and Athena. Down the slope lay a sanctuary for foreign gods; the southern section reserved for Egyptian gods, the northern for Syrian.

To the north, on the south side of the Sacred Lake (now drained), was the Agora of Italians, with entrance arches of Doric columns, the most spacious structure in Delos. Nearby, between the lake and the Sacred Harbour, was the Agora of Theophrastos (late 2nd century bce). North of the lake was the Palaestra (gymnasium), a large court with Ionic peristyle, and a stadium about 540 feet (165 m) long.

There are many traditional accounts of Delos’s origin. It was inhabited in the late 3rd millennium bce. In the 9th–10th century bce, Ionians brought the cult of Leto, who in legend gave birth there to Artemis and Apollo. The island was already a flourishing port and cult centre, made famous through references to it in the Odyssey. After the Persian Wars, in 478 bce the Delian Confederacy was established there under the leadership of Athens, but at the close of the Peloponnesian War Sparta briefly gave Delos its independence.

For 150 years after the breakup of Alexander the Great’s empire, Delos was independent. Under Rome after 166 bce, Delos became a free port. In 88 bce Menophaneses, a general of Mithradates VI of Pontus, sacked the island for remaining faithful to Rome; thousands of people were slaughtered. A pirate attack followed (69 bce), and, though Athenian control was restored by Rome in 42 bce, the Greek geographer Pausanias records that the island remained almost uninhabited. By the end of the 1st century ce, changes in trade routes ensured the commercial demise of Delos, and its cults were then or soon thereafter abandoned. Its structures were quarried for building material by the Venetians and Turks in the European Middle Ages. Tourists today are allowed access to the island for the sole purpose of viewing its archaeological sites.