Delos
Investigation of ancient stone huts found on the island indicates that it has been inhabited since the 3rd millennium BC. Thucydides identifies the original inhabitants as piratical Carians who were eventually expelled by King Minos of Crete. By the writing of the Odyssey, the island was already famous as the birthplace of the twin gods Apollo and Artemis (although there seems to be some confusion about Artemis' birthplace being either Delos or the island of Ortygia).
Between 900 BC and 100 AD, Delos was a major cult center where the gods Dionysus and Leto, mother of the twin deities Apollo and Artemis, were revered. Eventually acquiring Panhellenic religious significance, Delos was initially a religious pilgrimage for the Ionians. A number of "purifications" were performed by the city-state of Athens in an attempt to render the island fit for the proper worship of the gods. The first took place in the 6th century BC, directed by the tyrant Pisistratus who ordered that all graves within sight of the temple are dug up and the bodies moved to another nearby island. In the 5th century BC, during the 6th year of the Peloponnesian war and under instruction from the Delphic Oracle, the entire island was purged of all dead bodies.
Prohibition of dying was then ordered so that no one should be allowed to die (or give birth) on the island due to its sacred importance, and to preserve its neutrality in commerce since no one could then claim ownership through inheritance. Immediately after this purification, the first quinquennial festival of the Delian games was celebrated there.
Four years later, all inhabitants of the island were removed to Atramyttium in Asia as a further purification.[5] After the Persian Wars the island became the natural meeting-ground for the Delian League, founded in 478 BC, the congresses being held in the temple (a separate quarter was reserved for foreigners and the sanctuaries of foreign deities). The League's common treasury was kept here as well until 454 BC when Pericles removed it to Athens.[6] The island had no productive capacity for food, fiber, or timber, which was all imported. Limited water was exploited with an extensive cistern and aqueduct system, wells, and sanitary drains. Various regions operated agoras (markets). Suda writes that the Greeks used the proverb "ᾌδεις ὥσπερ εἰς Δῆλον πλέων", meaning you sing as if sailing into Delos in reference to someone who is happy, light-hearted and enjoying himself.[7] Iamblichus writes that there were Delos Mysteries (similar to the Eleusinian Mysteries).
Strabo states that in 166 BC the Romans converted Delos into a free port, which was partially motivated by seeking to damage the trade of Rhodes, at the time the target of Roman hostility. In 167 or 166 BC, after the Roman victory in the Third Macedonian War, the Roman Republic ceded the island of Delos to the Athenians, who expelled most of the original inhabitants.[9] Roman traders came to purchase tens of thousands of slaves captured by the Cilician pirates or captured in the wars following the disintegration of the Seleucid Empire. It became the center of the slave trade, with the largest slave market in the larger region being maintained here.
The Roman destruction of Corinth in 146 BC allowed Delos to at least partially assume Corinth's role as the premier trading center of Greece. However, Delos' commercial prosperity, construction activity, and population waned significantly after the island was assaulted by the forces of Mithridates VI of Pontus in 88 and 69 BC, during the Mithridatic Wars with Rome.[10] Before the end of the 1st century BC, trade routes had changed; Delos was replaced by Puteoli as the chief focus of Italian trade with the East, and as a cult-centre too it entered a sharp decline. Despite its decline, Delos maintained some population in the early Roman Imperial period. Pausanias (8,33,2), writing in the 2nd century AD, states that Delos was uninhabited apart from a few custodians of the sanctuaries. Evidence has been found of Roman baths, coins, an aqueduct, residential and elite houses, as well as multiple churches, basilicas and a monastery all from the 1st–6th centuries AD, which, however, does not suggest that the island was continuously inhabited in the period.[11][12] The pottery found indicates that produce, like wine and oil, continued to be imported from regional centres. There are also a number of wine presses amidst the ruins of the ancient city that date to this period, suggesting that the population at this time was engaged in considerable viticultural endeavour.[13]
Delos was eventually abandoned around the 8th century AD
