Herodotus, Histories 1.64.2 · 1.64.2
Purifying Delos
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( καὶ γὰρ ταύτην ὁ Πεισίστρατος κατεστρέψατο πολέμῳ καὶ ἐπέτρεψε Λυγδάμι) πρὸς τε ἔτι τούτοισι τὴν νῆσον Δῆλον καθήρας ἐκ τῶν λογίων καθήρας δὲ ὧδε· ἐπʼ ὅσον ἔποψις τοῦ ἱροῦ εἶχε, ἐκ τούτου τοῦ χώρου παντὸς ἐξορύξας τοὺς νεκροὺς μετεφόρεε ἐς ἄλλον χῶρον τῆς Δήλου.
(For Pisistratus had conquered this island too, by war, and entrusted it to Lygdamis.) And besides this, he purified the island of Delos in accordance with the oracles, and this is how he purified it: as far as the sight of the temple reached, he dug up all the dead from that whole area and carried them to another part of Delos.
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The setting
Pisistratus had already taken Naxos by force; now, acting on oracles, he cleanses the sacred island of Delos.
A note on this passage
The parenthesis about Lygdamis is Herodotus doing accounting in the middle of a sentence, a fact too useful to leave out and too small to need its own chapter. Lygdamis had backed Pisistratus's push to retake Athens, and the reward is immediate: Naxos itself, conquered now by force and handed to him to rule. It is proof that Pisistratus thinks in networks of client rulers, not only in soldiers and walls.
The purification of Dēlon, Delos, is the chapter's real turn: a tyrant who has just finished routing his own citizens with mercenaries now digs up graves to honor Apollo. The method is specific and almost clinical, measured by epopsis, "sight-line": every grave within view of the temple moves, and nothing beyond that line is touched. Thucydides later records a second, far more thorough purging of Delos by Athens, banning birth and death on the island outright, and names this very episode of Pisistratus's as the partial measure he is completing.
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