Amphictyons

When the Amphictyons paid three hundred talents to have the temple that now stands at Delphi finished (as that which was formerly there burnt down by accident), it was the Delphians ' lot to pay a fourth of the cost.

They went about from city to city collecting gifts, and got most from Egypt;

Between the river and Thermopylae there is a village named Anthele, past which the Asopus flows out into the sea, and there is a wide space around it in which stand a temple of Amphictyonid Demeter, seats for the Amphictyons, and a temple of Amphictyon himself

Now when they had received this oracle, the Amphictyons voted, on motion of Solon of Athens, a man able as a law-giver and versed in poetry and philosophy, to march against the accursed men according to the oracle of the god.

call to mind the oaths that your fathers swore together with all the other Amphictyons.

As the outcome of all that was said,they voted that before the next Pylaea the hieromnemons should assemble at Thermopylae at a time designated, bringing with them a resolution for the punishment of the Amphissians for their sins against the god and the sacred land and the Amphictyons.

for when the representatives from Oetaea went so far as to say that they ought to cast the grown men over the cliffs, I brought the Phocians into the assembly of the Amphictyons and secured a hearing for them.

At the same time I reviewed from the beginning the story of the founding of the shrine, and of the first synod of the Amphictyons that was ever held;

But you undertook to say that I at first refused to serve on the embassy to the Amphictyons, and later went on the embassy and was guilty of misconduct, and you read the one decree and suppressed the other.

We, Callias of Sunium, Zeno of Phlya, Cleon of Phalerum, Demonicus of Marathon, on behalf of all the councillors, bear witness for Demosthenes that, when the people elected Aeschines state-advocate before the Amphictyons in the matter of the temple at Delos, we in Council judged Hypereides more worthy to speak on behalf of the state, and Hypereides was accordingly commissioned.

The war at Amphissa, that is, the war that brought Philip to Elatea, and caused the election, as general of the Amphictyons, of a man who turned all Greece upside down, was due to the machinations of this man.

Today we prowl the streets wondering what the other communities have resolved, all agog to hear what is the news from Arcadia, what is the news from the Amphictyons, what will be Philip’s next movement, whether he is alive or dead.

The second precaution, men of Athens, is to avoid giving the self-styled Amphictyons now assembled any call or excuse for a crusade against us.

and the Greeks were incensed at this, and the Plataeans brought suit on behalf of the allies against the Lacedaemonians before the Amphictyons for one thousand talents, and compelled them to erase the distich and to inscribe the names of all the states which had had a part in the work.

Has he not the right of precedence at the Oracle, ousting us and the Thessalians and the Dorians and the rest of the Amphictyons from a privilege which not even all Greek states can claim?

and none of the Amphictyons would have endured it.

Next, Cleisthenes, after he had been driven from Athens by the tyrants, succeeded by his eloquence in persuading the Amphictyons to lend him money from the treasury of Apollo, and thus restored the people to power, expelled the tyrants, and established that democracy to which the world of Hellas owes its greatest blessings.