Here a new question was raised, respecting the right of presidency over the most venerated sanctuary in Greece; a question fraught with ruin to the peace of the Hellenic world. The claim of the Phokians was not a mere fiction, but founded on an ancient reality, and doubtless believed by themselves to be just. Delphi and its inhabitants were originally a portion of the Phokian name. In the Homeric Catalogue, which Philomelus emphatically cited, it stands enumerated among the Phokians commanded by Schedius and Epistrophus, under the name of the “rocky Pytho,”—a name still applied to it by Herodotus.[516] The Delphians had acquired sufficient force to sever themselves from their Phokian brethren—to stand out as a community by themselves—and to assume the lucrative privilege of administering the temple as their own peculiar. Their severance had been first brought about, and their pretensions as administrators espoused by Sparta,[517] upon whose powerful interest they mainly depended. But the Phokians had never ceased to press their claim, and so far was the dispute from being settled against them, even in 450 B. C., that they then had in their hands the actual administration. The Spartans despatched an army for the express purpose of taking it away from them and transferring it to the Delphians; but very shortly afterwards, when the Spartan forces had retired, the Athenians marched thither, and dispossessed the Delphians,[518] restoring the temple to the Phokians. This contest went by the name of the Sacred War. At that time the Athenians were masters of most parts of Bœotia, as well as of Megara and Pegæ; and had they continued so, the Phokians would probably have been sustained in their administration of the holy place; the rights of the Delphians on one side, against those of the Phokians on the other, being then obviously dependent on the comparative strength of Athens and Sparta. But presently evil days came upon Athens, so that she lost all her inland possessions north of Attica, and could no longer uphold her allies in Phokis. The Phokians now in fact passed into allies of Sparta, and were forced to relinquish their temple-management to the Delphians; who were confirmed in it by a formal article of the peace of Nikias in 421 B. C.,[519] and retained it without question, under the recognized Hellenic supremacy of Sparta, down to the battle of Leuktra. Even then, too, it continued undisturbed; since Thebes was nowise inclined to favor the claim of her enemies the Phokians, but was on the contrary glad to be assisted in crushing them by their rivals the Delphians, who, as managers of the temple, could materially contribute to a severe sentence of the Amphiktyonic assembly. [516] Herodot. i. 54. [517] Strabo, ix. p. 423. [518] Thucyd. i. 12. [519] Thucyd. v. 18.