Egypt and from Italy, from the Marseilles to which Phocaean settlers had brought the fire of Ionian gods, and from that far place by the Inhospitable Sea where, as tradition told, priests from Delos itself had established the rites of the Tauric Artemis on the bleak shores of the Crimea.
This Sacred Island of the old world has been attended by a singular destiny. Delos emerges into the light of history as the seat of a worship distinctively Hellenic, yet embodying relics of older faiths. The story of Delos ceases when that Hellenic worship perishes. The modern life of Arachova and Salona has crept up to the very doors of the silent adyton in the cliff at Delphi. The plain of Olympia can show the ruins of a Byzantine church in close neighbourhood to the temples of Zeus and Hera. But since the days when the Emperor Julian, going to fight and fall in the East, sought counsel from the failing accents of the god who still haunted Delos, this rock, the birthplace of Apollo, has been only his grave. The Sibylline verse said—
ἔσται καὶ Σάμος ἄμμος, ἐσεῖται Δῆλος ἄδηλος—
Samos also shall be sand; the Far-seen Isle shall be obscure[1]:
and, for Delos, it has come true enough. No
- ↑ Orac. Sibyll. iii. 363, ed. C. Alexandre. Samos lost its privileges as a free state in the reign of Vespasian; and the decay of its ancient prosperity seems to have commenced about the end of the first century A.D. Tertullian paraphrases this verse (de pallio 2, inter insulas nulla iam Delos, harena Samos) which must therefore be older than about 200 A.D.
