floating on the breeze as the ships bear the sacred envoys to Delos; but, of all ancient memories, there is one which rises more vividly than the rest. In that north-west opening between Syra and Tenos we can see the sacred ship from Athens moving into the waters of the Cyclades: yesterday the Athenian priest of Apollo crowned it in the Peiraeus; to-day an Athenian court has passed sentence of death on Socrates: the ship will come into the harbour at our feet, the envoys will approach the temple beneath us with chants of praise to the giver of light and health, they will stay here in the summer sunshine of the holy month, while Socrates is waiting in the prison at Athens for their return, and is speaking words of good hope for the soul in that voyage on which it must soon put forth over the untried sea.
The position of Delos is central in a threefold sense. First, it is indeed what Callimachus called it, the Hearth of the Cyclades[1] Secondly, it is nearly at the centre of the southern Aegean, equally accessible from Greece Proper and from Asiatic Hellas, from Rhodes and Crete on the south, from Chios and Lesbos on the north. Thirdly, if our survey embraces the most distant regions to which early Greece sent out its colonies, or to which Greek civilisation was carried by the conquests of Alexander, Delos is still approximately at the midpoint of this Greater Hellas. It is a holy spot on which offerings might well converge—as it is known that they did—from Syria and from Sicily, from
- ↑ ἱστίη ὦ νήσων: Hymn. Del. 325.
