TITLE: DELOS IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GARDEN

ABSTRACT: The Aegean island of Delos was a rich source of antiquities for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century collectors.  Densely populated in Antiquity, it had become completely uninhabited, and passing travellers could help themselves to anything which would fit into their ship, without needing to negotiate with the Ottoman authorities.  Visitors started to complain that there was nothing left on the island worth taking.Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (d.1646) was an eager buyer of Delian antiquities, and at Arundel House and in its gardens he “continued to transplant old Greece into England”.  His collection was split up after his death and some of it eventually reached Easton Neston in Northamptonshire where the Earl of Pomfret (d.1753) displayed “an intire column of marble ... taken from among the ruins of the temple of Apollo at the isle of Delos” in his garden, along with a throne for a priest of Isis and a range of Greek and Roman statuary.Cylindrical marble altars could be rolled down to the Delian shore, which is what Sir Kenelm Digby did in 1628 and the Earl of Elgin in 1802.  Some found use as plinths for statues in the Ashmolean Museum, but others became garden ornaments, such as a group of five which Topham Beauclerk (a friend of Dr Johnson) kept at his Muswell Hill villa.  More may have been on display in the Privy Garden at Whitehall until the fire there in 1698. Delian Doric enjoyed a brief vogue as an architectural style, used for the church of Ayot St Laurence in the 1770s which was in effect a large garden ornament in the grounds of Sir Lionel Lyde.  Genuinely Delian objects added to the classical atmosphere of some aristocratic gardens, even if their exact provenance tended to be forgotten during the eighteenth century.