previous next

The Boeotians, coming together in an assembly, voted to rally to the support of the oracle and immediately dispatched troops. While these things were going on, Philomelus threw a wall around the shrine and began to assemble a large number of mercenaries by raising the pay to half as much again, and selecting the bravest of the Phocians he enrolled them and quickly had a considerable army; for with no less than five thousand troops he took up a position in defence of Delphi, already a formidable adversary for those who wished to make war upon him. [2] Later on, having led an expedition into the territory of the Locrians and laid waste much of the enemy's land, he encamped near a river that flowed past a stronghold. Though he made assaults upon this, he was unable to take it and finally desisted from the siege, but joining battle with the Locrians he lost twenty of his men, and not being able to get possession of their bodies, he asked through a herald the privilege of taking them up. The Locrians, refusing to grant this, gave answer that amongst all the Greeks it was the general law that temple-robbers should be cast forth without burial. [3] Philomelus so resented this that he joined battle with the Locrians and, bending every effort, slew some of the enemy, and having got possession of their bodies compelled the Locrians to make an exchange of the dead. As he was master of the open country, he sacked a large portion of Locris and returned to Delphi, having given his soldiers their fill of the spoils of war. After this, since he wished to consult the oracle for the war, he compelled the Pythian priestess to mount her tripod and deliver the oracle.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: