n
honor of the god included at first no other competition except that of
bards, who sang each a paean with the harp. The Amphictyonic assembly
held one of its half-yearly meetings near the temple of Pytho, the other
at Thermopylae.

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