DELOS de’ lŏs (Δῆλος). A small Aegean island, regarded as the center of the Cyclades, which derive their name from their encirclement of Delos. That they do so is apparent to anyone viewing the panorama of surrounding islands and sea from the 480 ft. summit of Mount Cynthus, the central rock knoll of the island. The island itself, barren of trees and uninhabited, is covered with the remarkable ruins of a Greco-Roman town.

Delos was reputed to be the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and from earliest recorded history the island was honored by song and dance, and was the scene of a sacred festival which, as early as the 8th cent. b.c., attracted visitors from all parts of the Aegean world. The island was taken over by colonists of Gr. stock as early as 1000 b.c., and was already famous as a place of Hellenic life by the time the Odyssey was written, in the 8th cent. History, in the stricter sense of the word, begins, however, in the 6th cent., when Pisistratus of Athens (560-527 b.c.), and Polycrates, who came to power in Samos in 540 b.c., sought in turn to bring Delos within their spheres of control.

When the Pers. fleet was on its way to Greece in 490 b.c., it respected the sanctity of Delos, and when, after the clash with Persia, the Greeks set up a maritime confederacy to protect their independence (478 b.c.), Delos was chosen as the seat of the common treasury. When Athens boldly removed the treasury to Athens, Delos remained a member without tribute. Athenian control continued until the end of the disastrous war with Sparta that closed the 5th cent. b.c., when Athens lost her great naval power. A generation later (378, 377 b.c.) Athens lead a revived maritime league and again controlled Delos. With Athens’ final eclipse (314 b.c.), her influence in Delos ended.

For the next cent. and a half, the island was administered by officials known as hieropoioi, with Ptolemaic Egypt and metropolitan Macedon, successor states of Alexander’s empire, contending for power in the Aegean. Delos enjoyed the status and institutions of a city-state over this period. Monuments and inscrs. reveal the rivalries of the surrounding states—Egypt, Macedon, Pergamum and Syria—under their Hel. kings all of whom, however, seem to have respected Delian independence and the island’s sanctity.

Early in the 3rd cent., Delos became the center of the Aegean grain trade. Foreign banking firms flourished and Italian names began to appear in Delian inscrs. Delos lost her neutral status when she made the mistake of supporting Perseus of Macedon in his clash with Rome. Rome, after breaking Macedon, handed Delos to Athens, which had been shrewd enough to support the victor, and Athens replaced the whole Delian population by her own colonists (166 b.c.). Delos was made a free port to damage Rhodian trade and the island rapidly became a cosmopolitan center of business commerce and the chief center of the slave trade in the central Mediterranean. It was one of the states to whom the Rom. Lucius Calpurnius Piso appealed for protection of Jewish interests in the war with Antiochus VII (1 Macc 15:15-24). When Mithridates of Pontus launched his great assault on Rome in 88 b.c., Archelaus his general massacred 20,000 Italians on Delos and the island failed to recover its commercial prosperity. The trade routes changed and the place fell into the dereliction in which it is seen today.

The French began the archeological investigation of Delos in 1873. Its mass of remains, buildings, public and private, sacred and secular and its multitude of inscrs. have notably added to the knowledge of the Gr. world and its culture.

Bibliography CAH, VIII, ch. 20 (1930) has a full bibliography; W. A. Laidlaw, A History of Delos (1933).