The Ancient Olympics – 6

In those early times when the Homeric Hymn to Apollo was composed, the town of Crissa appears to have been great and powerful.

Continuing The Ancient Olympics,
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Previously in The Ancient Olympics.

Time: 585 BC
Place: Delphia

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 Crissæans 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 Crissæans 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 Cirrhæans 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 Cirrhæans. 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 Alemæon; 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 town was destroyed or left to subsist merely us a landing-place; while the whole adjoining plain was consecrated to the Delphian god, whose domains thus touched the sea. Under this sentence, pronounced by the religious fooling of Greece and sanctified by a solemn oath publicly sworn and inscribed at Delphi, the land was condemned to remain untilled and implanted, without any species of human care and serving only for the pasturage of cattle. The latter circumstance was convenient to the temple, inasmuch as it furnished abundance of victims for the pilgrims who landed and came to sacrifice — for without preliminary sacrifice no man could consult the oracle; while the entire prohibition of tillage was the only means of obviating the growth of another troublesome neighbor on the seaboard. The ruin of Cirrha in this war is certain: though the necessity of a harbor for visitors arriving by sea, led to the gradual revival of the town upon a humbler scale of pretension. But the fate of Crissa is not so clear, nor do we know whether it was destroyed or left subsisting in a position of inferiority with regard to Delphi. From this time forward, however, the Delphian community appear as substantive and autonomous, exercising in their own right the management of the temple; though we shall find, on more than one occasion, that the Phocians contest this right and lay claim to the management of it for themselves — a remnant of that early period when the oracle stood in the domain of the Phocian Crissa. There seems, moreover, to have been a standing antipathy between the Delphians and the Phocians.

The Sacred War emanating from a solemn Amphictyonic decree, carried on jointly by troops of different states whom we do not know to have ever before coöperated and directed exclusively toward an object of common interest — is in itself a fact of high importance, as manifesting a decided growth of pan-Hellenic feeling. Sparta is not named as interfering — a circumstance which seems remarkable when we consider both her power, even as it then stood and her intimate connection with the Delphian oracle — while the Athenians appear as the chief movers, through the greatest and best of their citizens. The credit of a large-minded patriotism rests prominently upon them.

But if this sacred war itself is a proof that the pan-Hellenic spirit was growing stronger, the positive result in which it ended reinforced that spirit still farther. The spoils of Cirrha were employed by the victorious allies in founding the Pythian games. The octennial festival hitherto celebrated at Delphi in honor of the god, including no other competition except in the harp and the pæen, was expanded into comprehensive games on the model of the Olympic, with matches not only of music but also of gymnastics and chariots — celebrated, not at Delphi itself but on the maritime plain near the ruined Cirrha — and under the direct superintendence of the Amphictyons themselves.

Continued.

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