relations of Delos that these details are seldom of merely local import, and that in numerous instances they are significant for the general history of the Hellenic or Roman world.
I believe that the best way of presenting these epigraphic results will be to exhibit them in chronological sequence. I shall first, therefore, sketch the story of Delos from the dawn to the close of its ancient life, inserting in the proper place each new fact derived from the inscriptions.
The Homeric hymn to the Delian Apollo is the oldest document for the history of the island. The earliest historical fact is that Delos was the seat of a Pan-Ionic festival. But mythology has something to tell. Three leading facts may be gathered from the myths. First, that the Hellenic sanctity of Delos was derived from a pre-Hellenic antiquity; secondly, that various races and cults had left their traces in the island; thirdly, that these older elements were partly displaced, partly absorbed, by a cult which came to Delos from Asia Minor, and which, fostered by Ionians on both shores of the Aegean, grew to be the worship of the Delian Apollo.
The Iliad never mentions Delos: but in the Odyssey Odysseus compares Nausicaa, flower of maidens, to the young sapling of a palm-tree which he had seen in Delos, springing up beside the altar of Apollo[1] He had seen it, he says, when he visited Delos, and much people with him, on that journey
