In those early times when the Homeric Hymn to Apollo was composed, the town of Krissa appears to have been great and powerful, possessing all the broad plain between Parnassus, Kirphis, and the gulf, to which latter it gave its name,—and possessing also, what was a property not less valuable, the adjoining sanctuary of Pytho itself, which the Hymn identifies with Krissa, not indicating Delphi as a separate place. The Krissæans, doubtless, derived great profits from the number of visitors who came to visit Delphi, both by land and by sea, and Kirrha was originally only the name for their seaport. Gradually, however, the port appears to have grown in importance at the expense of the town, just as Apollonia and Ptolemais came to equal Kyrênê and Barka, and as Plymouth Dock has swelled into Devonport; while at the same time, the sanctuary of Pytho with its administrators expanded into the town of Delphi, and came to claim an independent existence of its own. The original relations between Krissa, Kirrha, and Delphi, were in this manner at length subverted, the first declining and the two latter rising. The Krissæans found themselves dispossessed of the management of the temple, which passed to the Delphians, as well as of the profits arising from the visitors, whose disbursements went to enrich the inhabitants of Kirrha. Krissa was a primitive city of the Phocian name, and could boast of a place as such in the Homeric Catalogue, so that her loss of importance was not likely to be quietly endured. Moreover, in addition to the above facts, already sufficient in themselves as seeds of quarrel, we are told that the Kirrhæans abused their position as masters of the avenue to the temple by sea, and levied exorbitant tolls on the visitors who landed there,—a number constantly increasing from the multiplication of the transmarine colonies, and from the prosperity of those in Italy and Sicily. Besides such offence against the general Grecian public, they had also incurred the enmity of their Phocian neighbors by outrages upon women, Phocian as well as Argeian, who were returning from the temple.[116] [116] Athenæus, xiii, p. 560; Æschinês cont. Ktesiphont. c. 36, p. 406; Strabo, ix, p. 418. Of the Akragallidæ, or Kraugallidæ, whom Æschinês mentions along with the Kirrhæans as another impious race who dwelt in the neighborhood of the god,—and who were overthrown along with the Kirrhæans,—we have no farther information. O. Müller’s conjecture would identify them with the Dryopes (Dorians, i, 2, 5, and his Orchomenos, p. 496); Harpokration, v. Κραυγαλλίδαι.