PUNISHMENT OF THE PHOCIANS
[346 B.C.]
The sentence was sufficiently severe. The court, attended only by representatives of the peoples which, like the Thebans, Locrians, and Thessalians, had taken part in the Sacred War, followed the dictates of revenge and passion. The Phocians, as being accursed, were expelled from the Amphictyonic league and the two votes which they had hitherto possessed were transferred to Philip and his successors; all the towns, twenty-two in number, were (with the exception of Abæ) to be destroyed and the inhabitants to settle in villages of not more than fifty inhabitants. The fugitives were to be accursed and outlawed wherever they were encountered; those who remained were to pay Apollo a yearly tribute of fifty talents [£10,000 or $50,000] and to be despoiled of their arms and horses until the stolen treasure should be made up. Philip was in future to preside at the Pythian games. The desire for vengeance went so far that the Œtæans even made a suggestion that the whole male population, exclusive of the boys and the old men, should be thrown down from the rock as temple robbers: an inhuman proposal which Philip rejected with anger. In contrast with such unbridled fury the Macedonian king, who had little mercy for his own enemies, appeared as a mild ruler.
The execution of the sentence was undertaken with relentless severity; ancient towns like Hyampolis, Panopeus, Daulis, Lilæa disappear henceforth from history; their former inhabitants either wandered homeless in foreign countries or lived out their days in mournful servitude. Many joined the bands of mercenaries which Timoleon the Corinthian conducted to Syracuse in the following year; others passed over with Phalæcus into Crete, where some time afterwards the leader met his death at the siege of Cydonia. All the Phocians who had taken part in the robbing of the temple met with a fearful end, but the lot of those who remained behind was not more enviable. Some years later, when Demosthenes went to Delphi, he beheld a picture of misery: “houses torn down, walls in ruins, the country emptied of men of vigorous age, and a few mourning women and children and old people; such wretchedness as admits of no description in words.”