On the Gold and Silver Mines of Siphnos

Extract

When on a visit to this island last winter, I felt much curiosity about the almost legendary gold and silver mines of Siphnos, which in former ages made the inhabitants so rich, and which enabled them to build their ‘Prytaneum and white-browed Agora.’ The story of these mines we owe to Herodotus, and as the veracity of the statements of this historian, so far as Orientalism is concerned, is being sorely impugned just now, it will be satisfactory to find that on Hellenic subjects he does not entirely draw on his imagination. He tells us that the Siphniotes were the richest of all the islanders, owing to the gold and silver mines which existed there, but that they were mean in their donations to the oracle at Delphi, and hence the Pythian oracle prophesied ill for them. ‘When in Siphnos there shall be a white Prytaneum, and a white-browed Agora, then will they have need of a shrewd man to protect them from the wooden troop and red herald.’ When the Samian fugitives came and sacked their town, the Siphniotes recognized too late the purport of this warning, for the Samiotes came in boats painted with red paint, doubtless with the miltos or red paint, mines of which still exist in the neighbouring island of Keos.