Delos had been an important station only so long as the Romans had no firm footing on the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. As that footing became more secure, the Aegean stepping-stone lost its value. Delos was not to the Roman world what it had been to the Hellenic: in the course of the first century A.D. it was already little more than a sacred rock on which temples were kept up by Athens. How Delos may have fared under the successors of Constantine can be guessed from the case of a shrine hardly less famous. When the Emperor Julian paid his devotions to the Apollo of Daphne near Antioch, he found that the once rich offerings had dwindled to "a single goose, provided at the expense of a priest, the pale and solitary inhabitant of this decayed temple[1]." The last recorded incident in the annals of ancient Delos fitly recalls the chief source of its early fame. At the moment of vanishing from history it appears once more among the great oracles. Julian, when meditating that invasion of Persia in which he perished, consulted before all others the priests of Delphi, Dodona, and Delo[2]. Thus, on the threshold of
- ↑ Gibbon, ch. xxiii. vol. iii. p. 168 (ed. Dr Smith).
- ↑ Theodoretus, Hist. iii. 16, πέμψας δὲ εἰς Δελφοὺς καὶ Δῆλον καὶ Δωδώνην καὶ τὰ ἄλλα χρηστήρια, εἰ χρὴ στρατεύειν ἐπηρώτα τοὺς μάντεις· οἱ δὲ καὶ στρατεύειν ἐκέλευον καὶ ὑπισχνοῦντο τὴν νίκην. Gibbon has not recorded this detail, which, trivial in itself, is highly characteristic of Julian's reverence for pagan precedents.
