The Theatre Quarter, a town of mosaic floors

This is where the people of the free port lived. After 166 BC, when Rome handed Delos to Athens as a duty-free harbour, traders from Italy, Syria, Egypt and Athens crowded in, and they built town houses that looked inward: a plain wall to the street, then a courtyard with a colonnade, a cistern below it and rooms opening off it, some of them two storeys high. In the House of the Trident, the courtyard mosaic shows a dolphin wrapped round an anchor; in the House of the Dolphins, winged riders steer pairs of dolphins, and the artist, Asclepiades of Arados, a city on the Syrian coast, signed his work, one of only two signed mosaics on the island. At its entrance is a symbol of the Punic goddess Tanit, a hint at the owner's origins.

The House of the Masks, above the theatre, is named for the mosaic of theatre masks in ivy scrolls on one of its floors, and it also holds a Dionysus riding a leopard; some think it lodged troupes of actors. Lower in the quarter, the House of Cleopatra and Dioskourides keeps the couple themselves: in 138 BC Cleopatra, an Athenian, set up statues of herself and her husband in their courtyard to record his gift of two silver tripods to Apollo. The headless figures you see in place are copies; the originals are in the museum.

The theatre was rebuilt in marble from shortly after 300 BC on the slope above the houses, and was large enough for several thousand spectators. Beside it, a deep cistern roofed on a row of arches collected the rain that ran off the slope, which on dry Delos was worth guarding. Dionysus, god of the theatre, had a stranger monument across the site, near the museum: the Stoibadeion, where two pillars were topped with colossal marble phalluses; the carved one was put up around 300 BC to celebrate a victory in the theatre.