jected; and it would not be rash to conjecture that this god was the Tyrian Heracles. Apollo further succeeded at Delos to the oracular functions of older deities. Some of these prophetic gods were marine,—Poseidon, Glaucus, the Nereids; others were forms of Gaia and Themis. A goddess called Brizo, who sends portents in dreams, continued to be an object of popular reverence in Delos after the official cult of Apollo had been established[1].
The dawn of the historical age is now at hand. Delos has become the seat of a distinctively Hellenic worship: at the same time, in dependence on that worship, it preserves religious associations fitted to attract the veneration of visitors from the non-Hellenic East. Henceforth the history of Delos may be cast into four periods. We may call them the Early-Ionian; the Athenian; the Macedonian; and the Roman.
I. The Early-Ionian Period: to 478 B.C.
The golden age of the Ionian race falls between the conquest of the Peloponnesus by the Dorians and the subjugation of the Asiatic Greeks by the kings of Lydia. In the absence of data for a precise chronology, we may assign the best days of Ionian
- ↑ Eustath. ad Od. xii. 252, who says that the Delian women offered dainties to Brizo: Hesych. βριζόμαντις, ἐνυπνιόμαντις. At Delphi, as M. Lebégue notes (p. 117), divination by dreams is found in early rivalry with the oracle of Apollo (cp. Eur. I. T. 1250 f.): at Delos there is no trace of such a conflict.
