The war lasted ten years, till, at the suggestion of Solon, the waters of the Pleistus were turned off, then poisoned, and turned again into the city. The besieged drank their fill, and Crissa was soon razed to the ground; and thus, if it were an Amphictyonic city, was a solemn oath doubly violated. Its territory--the rich Cirrhaean plain--was consecrated to the god, and curses imprecated upon whomsoever should till or dwell in it. Thus ended the First Sacred War (B.C. 585), in which the Athenians were the instruments of Delphian vengeance. The second or Phocian war (B.C. 350) was the most important in which the Amphictyons were concerned; and in this the Thebans availed themselves of the sanction of the council to take vengeance on their enemies, the Phocians. To do this, however, it was necessary to call in Philip of Macedon, who readily proclaimed himself the champion of Apollo, as it opened a pathway to his own ambition. The Phocians were subdued (B.C. 346), and the council decreed that all their cities, except Abae, should be razed, and the inhabitants dispersed in villages not containing more than fifty persons. Their two votes were given to Philip, who thereby gained a pretext for interfering with the affairs of Greece; and also obtained the recognition of his subjects as Hellenes. The Third Sacred War arose from the Amphissians tilling the devoted Cirrhaean plain. The Amphictyons called in the assistance of Philip, who soon reduced the Amphissians to subjection. Their submission was immediately followed by the battle of Chaeroneia (B.C. 338), and the extinction of the independence of Greece. In the following year, a congress of the Amphictyonic states was held, in which war was declared as if by united Greece against Persia, and Philip elected commander-in-chief. On this occasion the Amphictyons assumed the character of national representatives as of old, when they set a price upon the head of Ephialtes, for his treason to Greece at Thermopylae. It has been sufficiently shown that the Amphictyons themselves did not observe the oaths they took; and that they did not much alleviate the horrors of war, or enforce what they had sworn to do, is proved by many instances. Thus, for instance, Mycenae was destroyed by Argos (B.C. 535), Thespiae and Plataeae by Thebes, and Thebes herself swept from the face of the earth by Alexander, without the Amphictyons raising one word in opposition. Indeed, a few years before the Peloponnesian war, the council was a passive spectator of what Thucydides calls the Sacred War (ὁ ἱερὸς πόλεμος), when the Lacedaemonians made an expedition to Delphi, and put the temple into the hands of the Delphians, the Athenians, after their departure, restoring it to the Phocians. The council is rarely mentioned after the time of Philip. We are told that Augustus wished his new city, Nicopolis (A.D. 31), to be enrolled among the members. Pausanias, in the second century of our era, mentions it as still