Delos

Delos is an island at the centre of the Cyclades, held sacred as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, whom Leto bore beneath Mount Cynthus. It was a pilgrimage centre of the Ionians. In 426 BC the Athenians removed the dead and forbade births and burials on the island, which hosted the Delian games.

After the Persian Wars it became the treasury of the Delian League, founded in 478 BC, until Pericles moved it to Athens in 454 BC. Rome made Delos a free port in 166 BC, and it grew into the busiest slave market in the eastern Mediterranean.

Assaults by the forces of Mithridates in 88 and 69 BC broke its prosperity. Trade shifted elsewhere, and by the second century AD Pausanias found only temple custodians on the island; it was abandoned altogether around the eighth century.