1. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo presents to us the island of Dêlos as the centre of a great periodical festival in honor of Apollo, celebrated by all the cities, insular and continental, of the Ionic name. What the date of this hymn is, we have no means of determining: Thucydidês quotes it, without hesitation, as the production of Homer, and, doubtless, it was in his time universally accepted as such,—though modern critics concur in regarding both that and the other hymns as much later than the Iliad and Odyssey: it cannot probably be later than 600 B. C. The description of the Ionic visitors presented to us in this hymn is splendid and imposing: the number of their ships, the display of their finery, the beauty of their women, the athletic exhibitions as well as the matches of song and dance,—all these are represented as making an ineffaceable impression on the spectator:[279] “the assembled Ionians look as if they were beyond the reach of old age or death.” Such was the magnificence of which Dêlos was the periodical theatre, and which called forth the voices and poetical genius not merely of itinerant bards, but also of the Delian maidens in the temple of Apollo, during the century preceding 560 B. C. At that time it was the great central festival of the Ionians in Asia and Europe; frequented by the twelve Ionic cities, in and near Asia Minor, as well as by Athens and Chalkis in Europe: it had not yet been superseded by the Ephesia as the exclusive festival of the former, nor had the Panathenæa of Athens reached the importance which afterwards came to belong to them during the plenitude of the Athenian power. [279] Hom. Hymn. Apoll. Del. 146-176; Thucyd. iii, 104:— Φαίη κ᾽ ἀθανάτους καὶ ἀγήρως ἔμμεναι αἰεὶ, Ὃς τότ᾽ ἐπαντιάσει᾽, ὅτ᾽ Ἰάονες ἄθροοι εἶεν· Πάντων γάρ κεν ἴδοιτο χάριν, τέρψαιτο δὲ θυμὸν, Ἄνδρας τ᾽ εἰσορόων καλλιζώνους τε γυναῖκας, Νῆάς τ᾽ ὠκείας ἠδ᾽ αὐτῶν κρήματα πολλά.