Siphnos in 218 B.C.

Siphnos — Spring 218 BC · After the Golden Age.

A small Cycladic island once proverbially rich. In the old days the Siphnians, made wealthy by their gold and silver mines, were a byword for prosperity across Greece; they built a marble treasury at Delphi and paid Apollo a yearly tithe of gold. But the mines were in time worked out — men told how the sea broke in and drowned the workings when the islanders, grown greedy, withheld the god’s tithe — and Siphnos sank to a quieter fame, keeping its terraced watchtowers and the memory of its golden age. In 218 BC it is a modest independent polis among the islands, its seas watched by the fleets of Egypt, Macedon and Rhodes.

No island of the Cyclades was once spoken of as Siphnos was. Its gold and silver mines made the Siphnians the wealthiest of the islanders, so rich that they shared out the surplus of their revenues among the citizens each year and still had gold to spare for the god — a marble treasury at Delphi, and a yearly tithe sent to Apollo. Then the mines failed. The islanders, the story goes, grew greedy and kept back the god’s due; the sea broke into the galleries and drowned them, and the golden revenue was gone for ever. By 218 BC Siphnos is a quiet, modest island, living on its terraced fields and the sea, its old greatness surviving only in the marble at Delphi and the ring of stone towers set about its hills.