could those gifts have been preserved? The Greek priests had always the instinct of bankers. When the fountain of piety, quickened by vanity, was flowing so freely, they would not have seen it run to waste. It would have been strange if, in the course of two or three centuries, the whole wealth of the Ionian world had not housed their god and his treasures in some better abode than the granite hovel half-way up Cynthus.
2. Supposing—though to me the supposition is scarcely possible—that no new temple of Apollo had been built in the Ionian days, at least the sixth century B.C. would hardly have passed by without seeing it arise. Peisistratus showed devotion to Delos. If the Delian Apollo still lacked a treasure-house, to build one for him would have been to balance the influence which the Alcmaeonidae had gained by a similar attention to the Apollo of Delphi. Polycrates, again, by becoming the founder of a Delian temple, could have secured just the hold which he desired to have on the Sacred Island.
3. Thucydides says, speaking of the formation of the Delian Confederacy (i. 96), ἦν δ' ὁ πρῶτος φόρος ταχθεὶς τετρακόσια τάλαντα καὶ ἑξήκοντα, ταμιεῖόν τε Δῆλος ἦν αὐτοῖς καὶ αἱ ξύνοδοι ἐς τὸ ἱερὸν ἐγίγνοντο. The word ταμιεῖον means that the great sums raised by the levy of tribute on the allies were kept for security in the temple at Delos, as they were afterwards kept in the temple on the Acropolis: we remember that the sacred treasurers at Athens
