It may have been from his friend Klea that Plutarch learnt the pleasant story of the Thyiades and the women of Phocis, which he records in his treatise on the ‘Virtues of Women[1004].’ ‘When the tyrants of Phocis had taken Delphi and undertook against them what was known as the Sacred War, the women who attended Dionysos whom they call Thyiades being distraught wandered out of their way and came without knowing it to Amphissa. And being very weary and not yet having come to their right mind they flung themselves down in the agora and fell asleep anyhow where they lay. And the women of Amphissa were afraid lest, as their city had made an alliance with the Phocians and the place was full of the soldiery of the tyrants, the Thyiades might suffer some harm. And they left their houses and ran to the agora and made a ring in silence round them and stood there without disturbing them as they slept, and when they woke up they severally tended them and brought them food and finally got leave from their husbands to set them on their way in safety as far as the mountains.’ These Thyiades are the historical counterparts of the Maenads of countless vases and bas-reliefs, the same mad revelry, the same utter exhaustion and prostrate sleep. They are the same too as the Bacchant Women of Euripides[1005] on the slopes of Cithaeron: ‘There, beneath the trees Sleeping they lay, like wild things flung at ease In the forest, one half sinking on a bed Of deep pine greenery, one with careless head Amid the fallen oak-leaves.’ In the reverence shown by the women of Amphissa we see that though the Thyiades were real women they were something more than real. This brings us to another of the cultus titles enumerated by Timotheos, ‘Phoibad.’ Phoibas is the female correlative of Phoebus, a title we are apt to associate exclusively with Apollo. Apollo, Liddell and Scott say, was called Phoebus because of the purity and radiant beauty of youth. The epithet has more to do with purity than with radiant beauty; if with beauty at all it is ‘the beauty of holiness.’ Plutarch in discussing this title of Apollo makes the following interesting statement[1006]: ‘The ancients, it seems to me, called everything that was pure and sanctified _phoebic_ as the Thessalians still, I believe, say of their priests when they are living in seclusion apart on certain prescribed days that they are living phoebically.’ The meaning of this passage, which is practically untranslateable, is clear. The root of the word Phoebus meant ‘in a condition of ceremonial purity, holy in a ritual sense,’ and as such specially inspired by and under the protection of the god, under a taboo. Apollo probably took over his title of Phoebus from the old order of women divinities to whom he succeeded. Third in order of succession after Gaia and Themis[1007]: ‘Another Titaness, daughter of Earth, Phoebe, possessed it, and for birthday gift To Phoebus gave it, and he took her name.’