The Memory of the Sacred Wars and Some Origin Stories

According to a reconstruction that is partly ancient and partly modern, the First Sacred War broke out in the nineties of the 6th century BC, as Thessaly, Athens and Sycion, with the blessing of the Amphictyony of Anthela, attacked the impious (asebeis) Cirrhaians, who had cultivated the sacred land surrounding the sanctuary of Apollo in Delphi. In fact, different archaic and classical reports of attacks on Delphi were merged – at the time of the Third Sacred War and in the following decades – into one war, probably the first. However, this first war was not invented ex novo, as Robertson assumed. A reconsideration of the literary sources linked to the archaeological remains suggests that the archaeological case for locating a major horizon of violence and destruction in the years around and after the 580s is getting stronger and stronger, especially if one takes into account the dating of the first peribolos to the end of the 570s (at the earliest) and the destruction of the Maison Rouge c. 585–575. It was – in fact – the image of the First Sacred War which was heavily reinvented. The reinvention of this image shaped, in turn, the origin stories about peoples living in Central Greece: the origin of Phlegyans, Dryopes and Kragalidai was some way connected to places playing a key role in the Third and the Fourth Sacred Wars.