This book opened with a discussion of the Lelantine War. In this concluding chapter, I wish to turn to another famous conflict whose historicity is no less controversial. As with the Lelantine War, the problems associated with the source tradition for the First Sacred War are typical of the methodological pitfalls that characterize the study of early Greek history generally and may therefore serve as an entry-point into a final discussion of what it is that allows us to treat the Archaic Greek world as a coherent geographical unit and the period ca. 1200-479 as a single chronological entity.
According to tradition, the First Sacred War was the forerunner of successive Sacred Wars whose historicity is not in doubt. In all cases, what made the conflicts “sacred” was the fact that they were fought for control over Apollo’s oracular sanctuary at Delphi (Figure 11.2). The second war broke out in 448/7, when an Athenian force wrested the sanctuary away from the Spartan-backed Delphians and gave it to the Phocians, under whose control it remained until the Peace of Nicias in 421 (Thucydides 1.112.5, 5.18.2). The third war was prompted by the accusation that the Phocians had been illegally cultivating the sacred land of Cirrha/Crisa - the names are employed interchangeably in our sources although, more properly, Cirrha was the port for Crisa. In response, the Phocians captured the sanctuary in 356, provoking the Boeotians, Thessalians, and Locrians to make war on them on behalf of the Delphic Amphictyony - the league of states that administered the sanctuary - although some amphic-tyonic members such as Athens and Sparta supported the Phocians. The war
A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, Second Edition. Jonathan M. Hall. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Lasted ten years and was ended by the intervention of Philip II of Macedon and the defeat of the Phocians (Diodorus 16.23-40, 16.53-60). The fourth war occurred in 339/8; this time, those accused of cultivating the sacred land of Cirrha were the Locrians of Amphissa. Once again, an amphictyonic army under the command of Philip was victorious (Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon 113-58; Demosthenes, On the Crown 143-58).
The First Sacred War, instead, is said to have been provoked by the lawlessness of the Cirrhaeans and the Kragalidai - local populations who were harassing pilgrims to Apollo’s oracular shrine. The Pylaean Amphictyony, which met at the sanctuary of Demeter at Anthela, near Thermopylae, decided to intervene to wrest Delphi from local control by sending an army in which the largest contingents were represented by the Thessalians under Eurylokhos, the Athenians under either Solon or Alcmaeon, and the Sicyonians under Cleisthenes. According to Aristotle and his nephew, Callisthenes (fr. 1), the conflict lasted ten years between 594 and 585. Various stratagems employed during the war were later to become notorious: Solon, for example, is said initially to have diverted the course of the River Pleistos to cut off a supply of drinking water to the Cirrhaeans but then, when the latter proved more than able to withstand this minor inconvenience, restored the stream’s course and contaminated the water with the poisonous roots of the hellebore plant (Pausanias 10.37.7). The amphictyonic force eventually prevailed, destroying Cirrha, enslaving its inhabitants, and dedicating its land to Pythian Apollo, Artemis, Leto, and Athena Pronaia (Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon 112). The amphictyony, now in firm possession of the sanctuary, is said to have reorganized and, in 582, re-inaugurated the Pythian Games.
The problem is that virtually none of the literary evidence for the First Sacred War predates the fourth century, with much of it clustering in the 340s and 330s - precisely the period in which the Third and Fourth Sacred Wars were being fought. Some of our fullest information for the causes of the war and the constituent members of the amphictyony is provided by the Athenian orator Aeschines in his On the Embassy of 343 and his Against Ctesiphon of 330. Callisthenes’ and Aristotle’s Table of Victors at the Pythian Games was also compiled around 330 and, although no fragment of this work survives, it was probably an important source for the scholiasts who commented on Pindar’s Pythian Odes. The First Sacred War was evidently treated by Antipatros of Magnesia (fr. 2), thought to be writing a history of Greece in Athens shortly after the middle of the fourth century. A little earlier, Isocrates (Plataicus 31) describes the Crisaean plain as a “sheep run” (meloboton), though makes no explicit reference to any war or as to how the plain had fallen into this condition.
Prior to the fourth century, there are only two possible references to the First Sacred War. The first appears in the closing verses of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo - a poem that was probably composed in the first decades of the sixth century. Having installed Cretan pirates as priests in his oracular shrine, Apollo warns them that if they commit evil deeds or are disobedient, then “other men will be your masters, by whom you will be forcibly dominated for all your days” (542-3). The implication seems to be that control of the sanctuary will shift to the hands of others should the priests engage in lawlessness, but it is also fairly evident that these lines must have been added at a later date since the rest of the hymn provides no charter for amphictyonic control. Unfortunately, there is simply no way of telling just how soon after the initial composition of the hymn these lines were interpolated. The Shield of Heracles, erroneously attributed in antiquity to Hesiod and possibly dating to ca. 570, closes with a reference to the lawlessness of Cycnus, son of the god Ares, who used to plunder violently the rich hecatombs that were brought to Delphi (478-80). It is just possible that Heracles’ slaughter of Cycnus stands as an allegory for the defeat of local brigands by the amphictyony on the grounds that Heracles met his death and apotheosis on Mount Oeta in the territory of Malis, one of the original members of the amphictyony, but that is far from certain. Far more troubling is Herodotus’ silence about a First Sacred War. Given that he is one of our earliest sources of information for Solon, Alcmaeon, and Cleisthenes of Sicyon, it is rather surprising that he should have neglected to mention their participation in the war if it was known to him.
Our sources for the First Sacred War score poorly, then, on the test of temporal proximity. That in itself need not be decisive but, as with the traditions concerning overseas foundations (chapter 5), there are decided divergences between the testimonia concerning details and this is probably sufficient to rule out the possibility that they are following an earlier, authoritative - but now lost - source. For example, Plutarch (Sol. 11) maintains that an author named Euanthes of Samos was wrong to claim that Solon had been appointed general of the Athenian forces since Aeschines made no such statement and, according to the records kept at Delphi (where Plutarch at one point served as a priest), it was Alcmaeon, not Solon, who led the contingent of Athenians. Similarly, although Pausanias (10.37.7) credits Solon with poisoning the River Pleistos with hellebore root, this is a tactic that Frontinus (Stratagems 3.7.6) attributes to Cleisthenes.
The test of intentionality - especially regarding one of our fullest sources, Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon - is also revealing. The speech is an indictment of a man named Ctesiphon, for having proposed to award an honorific crown to Aeschines’ chief political rival, Demosthenes. Part of Aeschines’ task is to demonstrate that Demosthenes is singularly unworthy of such an honor and one of the charges he decides to lay against Demosthenes, in addition to having recklessly endangered the security of Athens, is that of impiety. Demosthenes, alleges Aeschines, had opposed the amphictyony’s plans to punish the Locrians of Amphissa during the Fourth Sacred War because he had been bribed by the latter. And yet, the Locrians had been at fault in cultivating the sacred land of Cirrha and Demosthenes had violated the sacred oaths that had been taken by his Athenian ancestors, along with the other amphictyons, after the first attempt to liberate Delphi from local depredation. On that occasion, Aeschines tells us, the members of the amphictyony swore not to till the sacred land of Apollo nor allow another to till it but to go to the aid of the god and the sacred land with hand and foot and voice, and with all their might. Anybody who violated this oath, whether polis or individual or ethnos, was to be under the curse of Apollo, Artemis, Leto, and Athena Pronaia. Aeschines does not, then, mention the First Sacred War out of pure antiquarian interest. It is important for establishing a sacred law that Demosthenes is alleged to have violated and the closer the circumstances of the First War appear to match the transgressions of which Demosthenes is accused, the more patent his guilt - or so Aeschines hopes.
As for contextual fit, there is little to assist us in evaluating whether an early sixth-century context suits the circumstances of the First Sacred War. The (re) inauguration of the Pythian Games is likely to be approximately correct since it is close in time to the supposed reorganization of the Isthmian and Nemean Games. It is, then, possible that it was a change of administration that prompted or facilitated the new program of contests. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether all the characters recorded by tradition could have participated in the war. There is, as we have seen, a discrepancy between our sources as to whether Solon or Alcmaeon commanded the Athenian forces, but this is also a chronological issue in addition to one of simple identification. Although Herodotus makes both contemporaries of the Lydian king Croesus, most scholars are agreed that the meeting the historian describes (1.29-33) between Croesus and Solon cannot be historical since Solon belongs to the beginning, not the middle, of the sixth century. Alcmaeon is more likely to have been coetaneous with Croesus, which would certainly help to explain why a youth named Croesus was buried in what appears to have been an Alcmaeonid cemetery in southern Attica (p. 181). Cleisthenes of Sicyon was probably similar in age to Alcmaeon, given that it was Alcmaeon’s son, Megacles, who married Cleisthenes’ daughter, Agariste (Herodotus 6.130.2), but neither can be very comfortably accommodated in the first decade of the sixth century where Aristotle and Callisthenes would place the war.
In fact, the precise dates that Aristotle and Callisthenes assign to the First Sacred War probably derive from the tradition that Solon enacted his legislation while archon in 594 and immediately afterwards left Athens for a period of ten years (Aristotle, AC 11.1; Plutarch, Sol. 11.1). Yet our sources are also virtually unanimous that Solon spent the first part of his self-imposed exile in Egypt, which would rule out his participation in the conflict. Ten years is, of course, a formulaic figure for wars - one thinks primarily of the Trojan War - but it is probably not mere coincidence that this was precisely the duration of the Third Sacred War, especially since there are two other striking parallels between that conflict and the presumed first struggle for control of Delphi. Firstly, as with the Third Sacred War, some of the accounts of the first war describe two stages of hostilities - the second taking place on Mount Kirphis. Secondly, the name of the Thessalian general, Eurylokhos, is the same as that of one of the generals in Philip II’s army.
For all that, however, agnosticism is probably more warranted than outright denial. Aeschines may well have embellished details so that the “facts” of a primeval conflict fitted more closely the circumstances of the Fourth Sacred
War but to have invented an original Sacred War from nothing merely for the purposes of discrediting Demosthenes offered no guarantees of success and might even have carried considerable personal risks. And while there is reason to believe that the tradition concerning the war gradually attracted a cast of famous sixth-century notables - much as with the story concerning the courting of Agariste (p. 159) - there must have been some earlier tradition that could have served as a magnet in the process. The function of an earlier, less spectacular tradition cannot have been to cause eventual trouble for Demosthenes and was probably an attempt to explain two undeniable historical facts: firstly, the prohibition against cultivating the sacred land around Delphi, which was clearly already in effect at the time of Isocrates’ Plataicus; and secondly, the administration of Delphi by an amphictyony of various Greek states rather than local overseers - a state of affairs that seems to have existed for some time before the outbreak of the Persian War in 480, when all members of the amphictyony, save for the Phocians, the Ionians, and the Dorians, offered symbols of submission to Xerxes (Herodotus 7.132.1).
There is no particular reason to doubt the well attested tradition that the amphictyony was originally based at Anthela (Theopompus fr. 63; Parian Marble A5; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, RA 4.25.3; Strabo 9.3.7; Scholiast to Euripides, Orestes 1094). Among the earliest members are likely to have been the Dorians, the East Locrians, the Ainianes, and the Malians, all of whom resided in the vicinity of the sanctuary (Map 11.1; Figure 4.3). Quite how long the amphic-tyony had existed is impossible to determine, but even as late as the fourth century certain amphictyonic members such as the Magnesians, the Perrhaebi, and the Phthiotid Achaeans possessed the same voting power as the Thessalians who had long since reduced them to subordinates (e. g. Thucydides 4.78.6, 8.3.1; Xenophon, Hell. 6.1.12) and this ought to suggest that these members at least had been enrolled in the amphictyony prior to the Thessalians’ hegemony over their neighbors - something that had certainly occurred by the early sixth century and may even predate the end of the seventh. Although there can be no certitude, it is extremely plausible that amphictyonic control of Delphi was connected with the Thessalians’ desire to control the “Great Isthmus Corridor.” This was a chain of passes and upland plains connecting the Malian and Corinthian gulfs which was dominated, to the north, by the Sperkheios Valley and Demeter’s sanctuary at Anthela and, to the south, by the Crisaean plain and Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi. Just when the amphictyony assumed control over Delphi is hard to know. Some appeal to the archaeological record and argue that the appearance, ca. 725, of Cretan tripods and shields provides welcome support for the charter myth that is recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo while the tailing off of such Cretan imports in the sixth century should reflect the transition of control to the amphictyony. On the other hand, were we only to have the material evidence without any presuppositions imported from the literary tradition concerning the First Sacred War, it would be the last quarter of the eighth century, not the sixth century, that marks the real caesura dividing a purely local sanctuary from one with a greater “international” catchment.
In short, amphictyonic control of Delphi almost certainly involved hostilities against a resistant local population which could well have lasted a number of years. But if that reasonable supposition is taken to demonstrate a kernel of truth behind the tradition on the First Sacred War, it is a kernel so minute as to be practically insignificant. The cast of characters associated with the war is inherently unlikely: although inscriptions record that Sicyon served as a representative for the Dorians on the amphictyony in the fourth century, our literary sources do not count the city among the original signatories. The oaths that the amphictyons are supposed to have sworn not to attack one another, as well as the curses they invoked against anybody cultivating the Crisaean plain, are likewise probably later elaborations. Indeed, the latter could possibly have originated from the fact that the burgeoning sanctuary needed its own arable land for the crops that would support its infrastructure and pastures for the animals that it required to be sacrificed to Apollo. We must always remember that the transmission of tradition in the Archaic Greek world served an active purpose of explaining or justifying the present, not of preserving faithfully the irrelevant circumstances of the past.
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