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Then he danced to his own music till the whole room came down in thunders of applause. The dancing lessons brought him two thousand dollars; this sum, together with his wife's savings, enabled him to foresee a successful issue to his great ornithological work. On May, 1826, he embarked at New Orleans on board the ship Delos for Liverpool.
Delos was then a floating island; but when Latona arrived there, Jupiter fastened it with adamantine chains to the bottom of the sea, that it might be a secure resting-place for his beloved. Byron alludes to Delos in his "Don Juan": "The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!"
The Peloponnesian Argos thenceforth became the rendezvous for the Roman merchants, who were very numerous even in Greece. For the Roman wholesale traffic, however, Delos was of greater importance; a Roman free port as early as 586, it had attracted a great part of the business of Rhodes, and now in a similar way entered on the heritage of Corinth.
The nearest approach which Athens ever made was the confederacy of Delos, which did not work well, from the jealousy of the cities. But Sparta soon made herself more unpopular than Athens ever was, and her dream of empire was short. The Asiatic Greek cities had been surrendered to Persia according to treaty, as the price for the assistance which Persia rendered to Sparta in the war with Athens.
And as Apollo goes forth from some fragrant shrine to divine Delos or Claros or Pytho or to broad Lycia near the stream of Xanthus, in such beauty moved Jason through the throng of people; and a cry arose as they shouted together.
“For your part, excellent Tigranes, you must avoid the Hellenic ships at Delos and come back to Mardonius with your fleet ready to second him at once after his victory, which will be speedy; then with your aid he can readily turn the wall at the Isthmus. I send also letters written, as it were, in the hand of Themistocles. See that they fall into the hands of the other Greek admirals.
A hymn of Callimachus has been preserved, which is said to have been chanted by the priests of Apollo at Delos, while performing this ceremony of circumambulation, the substance of which is, "We imitate the example of the sun, and follow his benevolent course." It will be observed that this circumambulation around the altar was accompanied by the singing or chanting of a sacred ode.
Homer tells us that none but pirates ventured at the risk of their lives to steer directly from Crete to Lybia; and when the Ionian deputies arrived at Egina, where the naval forces of Greece were assembled, with an earnest request that the fleet might sail to Ionia, to deliver their country from the dominion of Xerxes, who was at that time attempting to subdue Greece, the request was refused, because the Greeks were ignorant of the course from Delos to Ionia, and because they believed it to be as far from Egina to Samos, as from Egina to the Pillars of
It will be remembered that Leotychides, the Spartan king, and the Athenian Xanthippus, had conducted the Grecian navy to Delos. There anchored, they received a deputation from Samos, among whom was Hegesistratus, the son of Aristagoras.
Laodicea was famous for tapestries, Hierapolis for its iron wares, Cybara for its dyes, Sardis for its wines, Smyrna for its beautiful monuments, Delos for its slave-trade, Cyrene for its horses, Paphos for its temple of Venus, in which were a hundred altars. Seleucia, on the Tigris, had a population of four hundred thousand.
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