Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/226

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

Sacred Island were taken up:—more than half of them, we are told, contained bodies which could be recognised, by the fashion of the armour and by the mode of burial, as Carian. These remains were removed. It was ordered that henceforth all dying persons, and all parturient women, should be transported from Delos to Rheneia. At the same time a new festival was instituted. Year by year the sacred embassies, bringing choruses and offerings, had continued to visit Delos. But since the cessation of the Pan-Ionic gatherings, the brilliant contests had in great measure ceased. The Athenians now founded a celebration to be held in the third year of every Olympiad. The list of the ancient contests was enlarged by the addition of chariot-races[1]. Religion and policy alike counselled such a measure. Athens had lately been delivered from the plague. The Athenians and their allies were still excluded from Olympia. But the regulation of births and deaths had an ulterior aim which it is not difficult to perceive. When the Delians, in Plutarch's story, complain to the Spartan king, he drily rejoins that, under this double restriction, Delos has well-nigh ceased to be their own country[2]. The best comment on this apocryphal sarcasm is the next step actually taken by Athens. In 422 B.C. the Delians were

  1. Thuc. iii. 104.
  2. Plutarch, Apophth. Lacon., Παυσανίου τοῦ Κλεομβρότου, i. (p. 230 D); πῶς οὖν, ἔφη, αὕτη πατρὶς [ἂν] ὑμῶν εἴη, ἐν ᾗ οὔτε γέγονέ τις ὑμῶν, οὔτ' ἔσται; The last word seems corrupt. I would read, οὔτε κείσεται;