In those early times when the Homeric Hymn to Apollo was composed, the town of Crissa appears to have been great and powerful, possessing all the broad plain between Parnassus, Cirphis, and the gulf, to which latter it gave its name—­and possessing also, what was a property not less valuable, the adjoining sanctuary of Pytho itself, which the Hymn identifies with Crissa, not indicating Delphi as a separate place.  The Crissaeans doubtless derived great profits from the number of visitors who came to visit Delphi, both by land and by sea, and Cirrha was originally only the name for their seaport.  Gradually, however, the port appears to have grown in importance at the expense of the town, just as Apollonia and Ptolemais came to equal Cyrene and Barca, and as Plymouth Dock has swelled into Devonport; while at the same time the sanctuary of Pytho with its administrators expanded into the town of Delphi, and came to claim an independent existence of its own.  The original relations between Crissa, Cirrha, and Delphi, were in this manner at length subverted, the first declining and the two latter rising.  The Crissaeans found themselves dispossessed of the management of the temple, which passed to the Delphians; as well as of the profits arising from the visitors, whose disbursements went to enrich the inhabitants of Cirrha.  Crissa was a primitive city of the Phocian name, and could boast of a place as such in the Homeric Catalogue, so that her loss of importance was not likely to be quietly endured.  Moreover, in addition to the above facts, already sufficient in themselves as seeds of quarrel, we are told that the Cirrhaeans abused their position as masters of the avenue to the temple by sea, and levied exorbitant tolls on the visitors who landed there—­a number constantly increasing from the multiplication of the transmarine colonies, and from the prosperity of those in Italy and Sicily.  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