previous next
27.

In the meantime, immediately after the misfortune at Thermopylae, the Thessalians sent a herald to the Phocians, because they bore an old grudge against them and still more because of their latest disaster. [2] Now a few years before the king's expedition, the Thessalians and their allies had invaded Phocis with their whole army but had been worsted and roughly handled by the Phocians. [3] When the Phocians were besieged on Parnassus, they had with them the diviner Tellias of Elis; Tellias devised a stratagem for them: he covered six hundred of the bravest Phocians with gypsum, themselves and their armor, and led them to attack the Thessalians by night, bidding them slay whomever they should see not whitened. [4] The Thessalian sentinels were the first to see these men and to flee for fear, supposing falsely that it was something supernatural, and after the sentinels the whole army fled as well. The Phocians made themselves masters of four thousand dead, and their shields, of which they dedicated half at Abae and the rest at Delphi. [5] A tithe of what they won in that fight went to the making of the great statues that stand around the tripod in front of the shrine at Delphi, and there are others like them dedicated at Abae.

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 Notes (W. W. How, J. Wells)
load focus Notes (Reginald Walter Macan)
load focus Greek (1920)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

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

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Delphi (Greece) (2)
Abai (2)
Thermopylae (1)
Phocis (Greece) (1)
Parnassus (Greece) (1)
Elis (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (17 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: