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 Argian, who were returning from the temple.
Thus stood the case, apparently, about B.C. 595, when the Amphictyonic
meeting interfered--either prompted by the Phocians, or perhaps on their
own spontaneous impulse, out of regard to the temple--to punish the
Cirrhaeans. After a war of ten years, the first sacred war in Greece,
this object was completely accomplished by a joint force of Thessalians
under Eurolychus, Sicyonians under Clisthenes, and Athenians under
Alemaeon; the Athenian Solon being the person who originated and enforced
in the Amphictyonic council the proposition of interference. Cirrha
appears to have made a strenuous resistance until its supplies from the
sea were intercepted by the naval force of the Sicyonian Clisthenes.
Even after the town was taken, its inhabitants defended themselves for
some time on the heights of Cirphis. At length, however, they were
thoroughly subdued. Their town was destroyed or left to subsist merely
us a landing-place; while the whole adjoining plain was consecrated to
the Delphian god, whose domains thus touched the sea. Under this
sentence, pronounced by the religious fooling of Greece, and sanctified
by a solemn oath publicly sworn and inscribed at Delphi, the land was
condemned to remain untilled and implanted, without any species of human
care, and serving only for the pasturage of cattle. The latter
circumstance was convenient to the temple, inasmuch as it furnished
abundance of victims for the pilgrims who landed and came to
sacrifice--for without preliminary sacrifice no man could consult the
oracle; while the entire prohibition of tillage was the only means of
obviating the growth of another troublesome neighbor on the seaboard.
The ruin of Cirrha in this war is certain: though the necessity of a
harbor for visitors arriving by sea, led to the gradual revival of the
town upon a humbler scale of pretension. But the fate of Crissa is not
so clear, nor do we know whether it was destroyed, or left subsisting in
a position of inferiority with regard to Delphi. From this time forward,
however, the Delphian community appear as substantive and autonomous,
exercising in their own right the management of the temple; though we
shall find, on more than one occasion, that the Phocians contest this
right, and lay claim to the management of it for themselves--a remnant
of that early period when the oracle stood in the domain of the Phocian
Crissa. There seems, moreover, to have been a standing antipathy
between the Delphians and the Phocians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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