Asia, he honours these three great shrines, as Alexander, in whose steps he aspired to tread, had designed to honour them when his work in the East was done[1]. The Sacred Isle, which belongs so wholly to the pagan world, fitly passes out of view with this last champion of the pagan gods,—with him who in visions of the night saw the Genius of the Empire receding with veiled head from his tent, and to whom, on the eve of his death among the Persian hills, a lurid meteor showed the warning face of Mars[2].
Julian died in 363 A.D. In 376 the Scythians and Goths ravaged the Cyclades. If worship had not already ceased in Delos, it probably came to an end under Theodosius (378-395), or at latest in the reign of Justinian (527-565). The final destruction of the monuments must have been hastened by the Saracens[3], the Slavs in the eighth century, and the Agarenian pirates from Spain in the ninth. Some remains on the top of Cynthus have been supposed to mark the site of a castle built by the Knights of
- ↑ Delphi, Dodona, and Delos were the three holy places beyond the limits of Macedonia at which Alexander had intended to build new temples: Droysen, Gesch. des Hellenismus, ii. 38.
- ↑ The presage of the meteor ("facem cadenti similem...minax Martis sidus," Ammian. Marcell. xxv. 2) may have been more instantly striking to Julian, if he had in his mind the only oracle concerning his campaign of which Theodoretus (l. c.) gives the terms: νῦν πάντες ὡρμήθημεν θεοὶ νίκης τρόπαια κομίσασθαι παρὰ Θηρὶ ποταμῷ (the Tigris). τῶν δ' ἐγὼ ἡγεμονεύσω, θοῦρος πολεμόκλονος Ἄρης.
- ↑ Finlay, Hist. of Greece, vol. ii. p. 190.
