honour, Phoebus, the long-robed Ionians assemble, with their children and their gracious dames: so often as they hold thy festival, they celebrate thee, for thy joy, with boxing, and dancing, and song. A man would say that they were strangers to death and old age evermore, who should come on the Ionians thus gathered: for he would see the goodliness of all the people, and would rejoice in his soul, beholding the men and the fairly-cinctured women, and their swift ships and their great wealth; and besides, that wonder of which the fame shall not perish, the maidens of Delos, handmaidens of Apollo the Far-darter. First they hymn Apollo, then Leto and Artemis delighting in arrows; and then they sing the praise of heroes of yore and of women, and throw their spell over the tribes of men[1].' The Delian panegyris combined the characters of a festival and a fair: like the temple at Miletus, like the Artemision of Ephesus and the Heraeon of Samos, the Delian shrine was a focus of maritime trade. The Pan-Ionic festival at Delos had much of the celebrity to which the Olympian festival succeeded, and in two points it indicates a higher phase of society. Women participate in it; and it includes a competition in poetry (μουσικὸς ἀγών), whereas the
- ↑ vv. 143–161. The Δελιάδες "know how to imitate the voices of all men, and the sounds of their castanets" (κρεμβαλιαστύν—i.e. the measure of their dances): "each man would say that he was speaking himself, so wondrous is the weaving of their lay": ib. 162–165. This has been referred to ventriloquism (?). At any rate, it suggests the variety of the elements which composed the Pan-Ionic gathering.
