Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/185

 EARLY IONIC FESTIVAL AT DELOS. 16. Ionian despots, partly the conquests of the Persians in Asia Minor, which broke up the independence of the numerous petty Ionian cities, during the last half of the sixth century before the Christian era ; hence the great festival at Delos gradually de- clined in importance. Though never wholly intermitted, it was i?horn of much of its previous ornaments, and especially of that which constituted the first of all ornaments, the crowds of joyous visitors. And Thucydides, when he notices the attempt made by the Athenians during the Peloponnesian Avar, in the height of their naval supremacy, to revive the Delian festival, quotes the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, as a certificate of its foregone and long-forgotten splendor. We perceive that even he could find no better evidence than this hymn, for Grecian transactions of a century anterior to Peisistratus, and we may, therefore, judge how imperfectly the history of this period was known to the men who took part in the Peloponnesian war. The hymn is exceed- ingly precious as an historical document, because it attests to us a transitory glory and extensive association of the Ionic Greeks on both sides of the ^Egean sea, which the conquests of the Lydians first, and of the Persians afterwards, overthrew, a time when the hair of the wealthy Athenian was decorated with golden ornaments, and his tunic made of linen, 1 like that of the Milesians and Ephesians, instead of the more sober costume and woollen clothing which he subsequently copied from Sparta and Peloponnesus, a time too when the Ionic name had not yet contracted that stain of effeminacy and cowardice, which stood imprinted upon it in the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, and which grew partly out of the subjugation of the Asiatic lonians by Persia, partly out of the antipathy of the Peloponnesian Do- rians to Athens. The author of the Homeric Hymn, in describ- ing the proud lonians who thronged, in hjs day, to the Delian festival, could hardly have anticipated a time to come, when the name Ionian would become a reproach, such as the European Greeks, to whom it really belonged, were desirous of disclaiming. 2 ' Thucyd. i, 6. diii TO ufipodiatror, etc. 2 Hcrodot. i, 143. Oi p.ev vvv uTJ.oi "Iwvec KOI ol 'Adijvaloi Ityvyov TO ovvofta. oil Povho/tsvoi 'Iwvec KeK^Tjtr&ai, an assertion quite unquestionable "rith reference to the times immediately preceding Herodotus, but not equally "*L. III. 8