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Meanwhile the Phocians made an expedition against Doris, the old home of the Lacedaemonians, containing the towns of Boeum, Kitinium, and Erineum.
To show how little they intended to obey, they not only kept the land they had taken, but robbed the temple at Delphi. Then they used the money thus obtained to win over some allies, and soon began to make war against the people who obeyed the council. The loyal Greeks fought against the Phocians for a long time, but were unable to conquer them: so Philip proposed to come and help the council.
As for Philip, although he probably cared not an iota for the Delphian god, he shrewdly professed to be on a crusade against the impious Phocians, and drowned all his prisoners as guilty of sacrilege. A third leader, Phayllus by name, now took command of the Phocians, and the temple of Apollo was rifled still more freely than before. The splendid gifts of King Croesus had not yet been touched.
The Phocians pleaded that the payment of the fine would ruin them; but instead of listening to their remonstrances, the Amphictyons doubled the amount, and threatened, in case of their continued refusal to reduce them to the condition of serfs. Thus driven to desperation, the Phocians resolved to complete the sacrilege with which they had been branded, by seizing the very temple of Delphi itself.
The Amphictyonic Council, which became subsequently so famous, was made up of Thessalians, Bœotians, Dorians, Ionians, Achæans, Locrians, and Phocians—all Hellenic in race. Their great centre was the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
All this while he contrived to deceive Athens and the Phocians, with the connivance of Æschines, whom he had bribed or cheated. But he did not deceive Demosthenes, who entreated his countrymen to make a stand against him, even at the eleventh hour, for he was then within three days’ march of the Pass. But the eloquence and warnings of Demosthenes were in vain.
When the Spartans, in 448, restored to the Delphians the guardianship of the temple and treasures of Delphi, of which they had been deprived by the Phocians, the Athenians immediately after marched an army thither and reinstated the latter. Three years later an insurrection broke out in the tributary Megara and Euboea, and the Spartans again appeared in the field as the allies of the insurgents.
The prospects of Athens now became alarming, her possessions in the Chersonese were threatened, as well as the freedom of the Greek towns upon the Hellespont. The Athenians had supported the Phocians in the Sacred War, and were thus at war with Thebes.
Hostilities were at first confined to Sparta and Thebes. A quarrel having arisen between the Opuntian Locrians and the Phocians respecting a strip of border land, the former people appealed to the Thebans, who invaded Phocis.
It was, perhaps, not much more than a goat-track, and apparently they had regarded it as scarcely practicable, since they had thought its defence might be safely entrusted to a thousand Phocians. Xerxes, however, on learning the existence of the track, resolved at once to make trial of it. His Persian soldiers were excellent mountaineers.
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