Delos, and may probably be placed shortly before 200 B.C.[1]
During the Macedonian age we have seen Delos independent, widely venerated, and increasingly prosperous. In the period which now opens, independence is once more taken from it; worship gradually forsakes it; and the marts of Delos, still busy for a space, presently share the ruin of her freedom and the silence of her shrines.
IV. The Roman Period: from 166 B.C.
Livy says that Athens recovered Delos in 196 B.C.; Polybius, in 166 B.C.[2] The latter is doubtless right. Athenian hopes may have been raised when Rome proclaimed the freedom of Greece in 196 B.C., but they were realised, after urgent demands, only thirty years later[3]. From 166 B.C. onwards the archons of Athens are, as M. Dumont has shown, the archons of Delos also[4]. The last shadow of autonomy has vanished; Delos is more completely dependent than an ordinary cleruchia. The supreme administration was vested in an Athenian governor (ἐπιμελητής). But a special cause sustained, or stimulated, Delian commerce.
