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 famous place could be named which is at once so conspicuously and so exclusively identified with the Hellenic past.

The topography of ancient Delos is not known in detail from any extant work. When Strabo wrote (circ. 18 A.D.), Delos had already entered on the period of decadence: he merely mentions a few of the leading facts in its history. Pausanias (160 A.D.) seems never to have visited it: in his day it was deserted by all but the priests. His passing notices do little more than attest its decay. Probably the guides in Greece Proper (and we know how much he was in their hands) told him that there was little to see in the island. As it is, we have to form our idea of ancient Delos from scattered hints in Greek and Roman literature, from the Homeric hymn to the writings of the Christian Fathers. Our modern authorities date from the opening of the fifteenth century. Cyriac of Ancona, who travelled in the East between 1412 and 1447, collected several inscriptions in Delos, as in other islands of the Aegean, He appears to have seen there a large quantity of ancient marbles: at Myconos he saw Delian monuments which had been brought thither for sale. His contemporary, Bondelmonte, whose journeys belonged to the years 1414–1422, notices "an ancient temple in the plain," "a prostrate statue of vast size" (idolum quod in tanta magnitudine iacet—the Naxian colossus of Apollo), and "more than a thousand statues here and there." After the Turkish conquest of Constantinople (1453), even these slight