Delos

/dee"los, del"ohs/, n.

a Greek island in the Cyclades, in the SW Aegean: site of an oracle of Apollo.

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Greek Dhílos

Island, Greece.

One of the smallest of the Cyclades, it was an ancient centre of religious, political, and commercial life in the Aegean. It was the legendary birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. The Delian League was established there in 478 BC, following the Persian Wars. Made a free port by Rome in 166 BC, Delos was a flourishing commercial post and slave market. Sacked in 88 BC during the Mithradatic Wars, it gradually declined and was abandoned. Its impressive ruins have been extensively excavated.

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▪ island, Greece

Modern Greek  Dhílos,  

      island, one of the smallest of the Cyclades, 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 Míkonos 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 and Olympia. Among Delos' 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 Cynthos 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 BC) has plain frieze motifs, scant sculptural decoration, and no interior colonnade. Adjoining it is a Doric Athenian temple (425–417 BC); the third is the Porinos Naos. 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 animal sacrifices.

      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 BC, each featuring a court surrounded by columns and many paved with mosaic. The theatre (early 3rd century BC) lay beyond the commercial harbour, on the lower slope of Mount Cynthus; its summit has remains of ancient Cycladic dwellings (3rd millennium BC) 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 BC). 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' origin. It was inhabited in the late 3rd millennium BC. In the 9th–10th century BC, 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, famous for references to it in the Odyssey. After the Persian Wars, in 478 BC the Delian Confederacy (Delian League) 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 BC, Delos became a free port. In 88 BC 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 BC), and, though Athenian control was restored by Rome in 42 BC, the Greek geographer Pausanias records that the island remained almost uninhabited. By the end of the 1st century AD, 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. Pop. (1981) 16.

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