=Amphictyonies.=—­To protect the sanctuary of Delphi twelve of the principal peoples of Greece had formed an association called an Amphictyony.[60] Every year deputies from these peoples assembled at Delphi to celebrate the festival of Apollo and see that the temple was not threatened; for this temple contained immense wealth, a temptation to pillage it.  In the sixth century the people of Cirrha, a neighboring city of Delphi, appropriated these treasures.[61] The Amphictyons declared war against them for sacrilege.  Cirrha was taken and destroyed, the inhabitants sold as slaves, the territory left fallow.  In the fourth century the Amphictyons made war on the Phocidians also who had seized the treasury of Delphi, and on the people of Amphissa who had tilled a field dedicated to Apollo.

Still it is not necessary to believe that the assembly of the Amphictyons ever resembled a Greek senate.  It was concerned only with the temple of Apollo, not at all with political affairs.  It did not even prevent members of the Amphictyony fighting one another.  The oracle and the Amphictyony of Delphi were more potent than the other oracles and the other amphictyonies; but they never united the Greeks into a single nation.

FOOTNOTES: 

[51] See the account of the traveller Pausanias.

[52] “There are,” says Hesiod, “30,000 gods on the fruitful earth.”

[53] Greek scholars formed a select society of twelve gods and goddesses, but their choice was arbitrary, and all did not agree on the same series.  The Greeks of different countries and of different epochs often represented the same god under different forms.  Further, the majority of the gods seem to us to have vague and undetermined attributes; this is because they were not the same everywhere.

[54] Iliad, viii., 18.

[55] In the dialogue “Eutyphron.”

[56] Taine, “Philosophy of Art.”

[57] Herodotus, vi., 27

[58] Xenophon, “Anabasis,” iii, 2.

[59] This idea gained currency only in the later periods of Grecian history.—­ED.

[60] There were similar amphictyonies at Delos, Calauria, and Onchestus.

[61] The special charge against Cirrha was the levying of toll on pilgrims coming to Delphi.—­ED.

CHAPTER XI

SPARTA

THE PEOPLE

=Laconia.=—­When the Dorian mountaineers invaded the Peloponnesus, the main body of them settled at Sparta in Laconia.  Laconia is a narrow valley traversed by a considerable stream (the Eurotas) flowing between two massive mountain ranges with snowy summits.  A poet describes the country as follows:  “A land rich in tillable soil, but hard to cultivate, deep set among perpendicular mountains, rough in aspect, inaccessible to invasion.”  In this enclosed country lived the Dorians of Sparta in the midst of the ancient inhabitants who had become, some their subjects, others their serfs.  There were, then, in Laconia three classes:  Helots, Perioeci, Spartiates.