It is thus that we have to consider the council as an element in Grecian affairs—­an ancient institution, one among many instances of the primitive habit of religious fraternization, but wider and more comprehensive than the rest; at first purely religious, then religious and political at once, lastly more the latter than the former; highly valuable in the infancy, but unsuited to the maturity of Greece, and called into real working only on rare occasions, when its efficiency happened to fall in with the views of Athens, Thebes, or the king of Macedon.  In such special moments it shines with a transient light which affords a partial pretense for the imposing title bestowed on it by Cicero—­commune Graeciae concilium; but we should completely misinterpret Grecian history if we regarded it as a federal council habitually directed or habitually obeyed.  Had there existed any such “commune concilium” of tolerable wisdom and patriotism, and had the tendencies of the Hellenic mind been capable of adapting themselves to it, the whole course of later Grecian history would probably have been altered; the Macedonian kings would have remained only as respectable neighbors, borrowing civilization from Greece and expending their military energies upon Thracians and Illyrians; while united Hellas might even have maintained her own territory against the conquering legions of Rome.

The twelve constituent Amphictyonic races remained unchanged until the Sacred War against the Phocians (B.C. 355), after which, though the number twelve was continued, the Phocians were disfranchised, and their votes transferred to Philip of Macedon.  It has been already mentioned that these twelve did not exhaust the whole of Hellas.  Arcadians, Eleans, Pisans, Minyae, Dryopes, AEtolians, all genuine Hellenes, are not comprehended in it; but all of them had a right to make use of the temple of Delphi, and to contend in the Pythian and Olympic games.  The Pythian games, celebrated near Delphi, were under the superintendence of the Amphictyons, or of some acting magistrate chosen by and presumed to represent them.  Like the Olympic games, they came round every four years (the interval between one celebration and another being four complete years, which the Greeks called a Pentaeteris):  the Isthmian and Nemean games recurred every two years.  In its first humble form a competition among bards to sing a hymn in praise of Apollo, this festival was doubtless of immemorial antiquity; but the first extension of it into pan-Hellenic notoriety (as I have already remarked), the first multiplication of the subjects of competition, and the first introduction of a continuous record of the conquerors, date only from the time when it came under the presidency of the Amphictyon, at the close of the Sacred War against Cirrha, What is called the first Pythian contest coincides with the third year of the 48th Olympiad, or B.C. 585.  From that period forward the games become crowded and celebrated:  but the date just named, nearly two centuries after the first Olympiad, is a proof that the habit of periodical frequentation of festivals, by numbers and from distant parts, grew up but slowly in the Grecian world.