However, we have to take account of - and if possible explain in reasonable terms, rather than invoking the hold-all charge of witlessness - a number of seeming discrepancies in Diodorus’ account. Since his is the only surviving extended narrative covering these events, this becomes a matter of some importance. I shall deal with major chronological matters first, and try to establish a framework against which various other problems can then be examined.
(a) At 14.3, under the 357/6 archon-year, we are told that the war lasted eleven years, not ten.
(b) Then at 23.1, under the 355/4 archon-year, Diodorus notes that ‘‘the so-called Sacred War began and lasted nine years.’’ It is regularly assumed (e. g., by Buckler 1989: 155) that he also inconsistently assigns the seizure of Delphi to this year.
(c) At 59.1-4, Diodorus narrates the end of the Sacred War under the archon-year 346/5, at the same time affirming that it had lasted ten years.
(d) At 30.1, under the archon-year 354/3, he states that Philomelus was forced to plunder the Delphic offerings, though at 28.2 and 56.5 it is claimed that he kept his hands off them.
With regard to (a), Diodorus calculates eleven years from the occupation of Delphi at the close of 357/6 until ‘‘the destruction of those who had shared out the wealth between them.’’ This of course postdates the end of the war, and Diodorus spends some time (61-63 passim) describing the various unpleasant fates suffered by the guilty. Indeed, if he errs here it is through underestimation: Phayllus (61.3) contracted a chronic disease that killed him slowly, while Phalaecus was burned to death during the siege of Cydonia (63.3-4), after the death of king Archidamus III in Italy (Paus. 3.10.5), an event that took place as late as 338. In any case Diodorus’ eleven years from 357/6 take him to 346/5, his date for the conclusion of the Sacred War, for which see under (c) below.
(b) presents an altogether more complex problem. Though Diodorus - both in this chapter (23) and elsewhere throughout his account of the Sacred War - moves very freely back and forth in time, without strict adherence to the archon-year under which he is narrating events, he states specifically that the Sacred War ‘‘was joined’’ (suneste) during the archon-year of Callistratus (355/4) and lasted nine years, i. e., until his end-date of 346/5. The latter we now understand, but what are we to make of his beginning date here? Sordi in fact solved the problem as long ago as 1958 (1958b; repeated in Sordi 1969: 47), when she correctly stated that what Diodorus was referring to was the offidal declaration of war by the Amphictyonic Council, ‘‘in the summer or autumn of 355, immediately after the end of the War of the Allies.’’ Only with this Amphictyonic vote could the title ‘‘Sacred War’’ be properly applied to the conflict, which till then had consisted of random skirmishing between Philome-lus’ forces and the troops of Locris and Boeotia.
Confirmation of this date can be found in the Delphian accounts (dealing with payments to the temple contractors (naopoioi) responsible for maintaining and extending structures belonging to the shrine (Fouilles de Delphe III.5, nos. 19-20; cf. Buckler 1989: 151-153). At the autumn meeting (pulaia) of the Delphic Council in 356, soon after Philomelus’ seizure of the shrine, there were, not surprisingly, numerous absentees. In 355 no naopoioi were present at either the spring or the autumn meetings. When they reappear, at the spring meeting of 354/3, they are all ‘‘either Phocians or allies of Phocis’’ (Buckler 1989: 152). Further, they are from now on referred to as ‘‘the wartime temple contractors.’’ If the Amphictyonic declaration was promulgated, as Sordi argues, in the fall of 355, this change in nomenclature makes perfect sense. It also confirms Diodorus’ 355/4 context. I can see no reason whatsoever for Buckler’s backdating the official commencement of the Sacred War on this evidence to ‘‘the late autumn or early winter of 356 bce’’ (154), before the War of the Allies was over, and while there was still dangerous political near-anarchy in Thessaly (see Hammond and Griffith 1979: 227-228). Nor can I understand his assertion that at 23.1 Diodorus describes Philomelus as seizing the shrine in 355/4: the text clearly indicates that what we have here is a retrospective summary.
The chronology of this War of the Allies - commonly, but to modern ears confusingly, translated as the ‘‘Social War’’ - has itself been much debated. Diodorus at 7.3 makes it last for three years, starting in the archonship of Cephisodotus (358/7), but later, at 22.2, for four, ending in the archonship of Elpines (356/5). Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Lys. 12) places it ‘‘during the archonships of Agathocles and Elpines,’’ i. e., 357/6-356/5. Diodorus’ apparent mistake led most historians, wrongly, to accept Dionysius' figures. Though the Athenian attack on Chios that follows is clearly datable to 357/6, this was in response to prior secessionary action by Chios, Rhodes, Cos, and Byzantium, who were clearly taking advantage of Athens' preoccupation with Euboea and Thrace (where Chabrias had been sent earlier, without adequate forces: Dem. 23.171-173). In other words, the war began in 358/7, and ended, as both Diodorus and Dionysius agree, in 356/5. Once again we have events spanning a midsummer division between one year and the next. How long in fact did the war last? Four years, if we include (as was so often done) those partial years covering beginning and end. Not quite three, if we reckon up a contiguous time span, with 357/6 as the core, and months tacked on from 358 and 355. (For the most useful work on this problem, though I disagree with many of their conclusions, see Vertetsis 1989, esp. 119-129; Peake 1994; and Ruzicka 1998.)
Diodorus’ claim (c) that the Third Sacred War ended in 346/5 after lasting ten years presents few difficulties. Counting back inclusively from 346/5 took him to 355/4, which confirms that he thought of the war’s official commencement as being the Amphictyonic Council’s declaration of hostilities in the autumn of 355. We should also note that he regarded the war as being truly over - see 14.3, and above on (a) - only with the deaths of the shrine’s sacrilegious despoliators (‘‘This war lasted eleven years, until the destruction of those who had shared out the sacred treasures between them’’): a point which, combined with his discussion of truce negotiations at 59.3-4, suggests that he had understandable reasons for regarding the final winding up of the war as taking place in the fall of 345. He may even have identified it with action taken then, at its autumn meeting, by the Amphictyonic Council, to which (59.4) Philip delegated ‘‘decisive responsibility for all necessary decisions.’’
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