Kenelm Digby was not the only Englishman searching for antiquities in the Mediterranean in the 1620s.   Thomas Roe, our ambassador at the Ottoman court in Constantinople, wrote to the Earl of Arundel on 27 January 1622 how ‘Concerning antiquities in marbles, there are many in divers parts, but especially at Delphos (by which he meant Delos), unesteemed here;  and, I doubt not, easy to be procured for the charge of digging and fetching’.   In 1625, he told the Duke of Buckingham to send an expeditionary force so that they ‘may take, without trouble or prohibition, whatsoever they please’.   Roe sent a consignment of antiquities to Buckingham in 1628, but too late.   He had been assassinated.

I was intrigued to read that Kenelm Digby visited Delos.   Indeed he did.   In his Voyage into the Mediterranean, he records how on a privateering expedition against the Ottomans in 1628 he found ‘brave marble stones heaped up in the great ruines of Apollo’s temple’.   But his admiration did not prevent him from deciding ‘to avayle myselfe of the convenuencie of carrying away some antiquities there’, so asked his sailors, in case they had ‘untoward fantasies’, to occupy themselves in ‘rolling of stones down to the seaside’.   His trophies included ‘Old-greeke-marble-bases, columnes, and altars’ which he later sold to Charles I.