sentatives of their
common Dorian race. The Athenian government could not but deem it
desirable to wrest from the Delphians the charge over the oracle and
the temple, since that charge might at any time be rendered
subservient to the Spartan cause; and accordingly they appear to have
connived at a bold attempt of the Phocians, who were now their allies.
These hardier neighbours of the sacred city claimed and forcibly
seized the right of superintendence of the temple. The Spartans,
alarmed and aroused, despatched an armed force to Delphi, and restored
their former privileges to the citizens. They piously gave to their
excursion the name of the Sacred War. Delphi formally renounced the
Phocian league, declared itself an independent state, and even defined
the boundaries between its own and the Phocian domains. Sparta was
rewarded for its aid by the privilege of precedence in consulting the
oracle, and this decree the Spartans inscribed on a brazen wolf in the
sacred city. The Athenians no longer now acted through others--they
recognised all the advantage of securing to their friends and wresting
from their foes the management of an oracle, on whose voice depended
fortune in war and prosperity in peace. Scarce had the Spartans
withdrawn, than an Athenian force, headed by Pericles, who is said to
have been freed by Anaxagoras from superstitious prejudices, entered
the city, and restored the temple to the Phocians. The same image
which had recorded the privilege of the Spartans now bore an
inscription which awarded the right of precedence to the Athenians.
The good fortune of this expedition was soon reversed.

III. When the Athenians, after the battle of Oenophyta, had
established in the Boeotian cities democratic forms of government, the
principal members of the defeated oligarchy, either from choice or by
compulsion, betook themselves to exile. These malecontents, aided, no
doubt, by partisans who did not share their banishment, now seized
upon Chaeronea, Orchomenus, and some other Boeotian towns. The
Athenians, who had valued themselves on restoring liberty to Boeotia,
and, for the first time since the Persian war, had honoured with
burial at the public expense those who fell under Myronides, could not
regard this attempt at counterrevolution with indifference. Policy
aided their love of liberty; for it must never be forgotten that the
change from democratic to oligarchic government in the Grecian states
was