as Plutarch implies, between Rheneia and Delos, which would make it at least half a mile long, but obviously between the landing-place of Delos and the more northerly of the two small islands in the channel, just opposite the landing-place, where the distance to be spanned is about 150 yards. Next morning the expectant populace beheld an unwonted sight. Across the bridge, splendid in gold and colours, festooned with wreaths and spread with carpets, a magnificent procession, raising the chant of the festival, slowly passed into the Sacred Isle, and moved in stately order to the temple of Apollo. When the sacrifices and the games had been celebrated, and the feasting was over, Nicias dedicated to Apollo the offering of a palm-tree in bronze. He also purchased and presented to the Delians a site to be used for sacrificial banquets; placing on it a column with an inscription which prayed the feasters to ask many blessings for Nicias from the gods. Five years later he was to die miserably in Sicily—after that terrible retreat, at the outset of which he makes his confident appeal to the tenor of "a life religious before the gods, just and without offence among men[1]." Subsequently the bronze palm-tree was blown down by a storm, overturning in its fall a colossus of Apollo, which had been dedicated at an earlier time by the Naxians. Perhaps the superstition of those days may have whispered that the Erinyes of the unhappy Athenian were wroth with the god whom he had adored in vain[2].
