Description of Greece

The most renowned exploits of the Phocian people were undertaken by the whole nation. They took part in the Trojan war, and fought against the Thessalians before the Persian invasion of Greece, when they accomplished some noteworthy deeds. Expecting that the Thessalians would invade their land at Hyampolis, they buried there earthen water-pots, covered these with earth, and so waited for the Thessalian cavalry. Ignorant of the Phocian stratagem, the Thessalians without knowing it drove their horses on to the water-pots, where stumbling into them the horses were lamed, and threw or killed their riders.

The Thessalians, more enraged than ever against the Phocians, gathered levies from all their cities and marched out against them. Whereupon the Phocians, greatly terrified at the army of the Thessalians, especially at the number of their cavalry and the practised discipline of both mounts and riders, despatched a mission to Delphi, praying the god that they might escape the danger that threatened them. The oracle given them was this:—

1. I will match in fight mortal and immortal,
2. And to both will I give victory, but more to the mortal.

On receiving this oracle, the Phocians sent three hundred picked men with Gelon in command to make an attack on the enemy. The night was just falling, and the orders given were to reconnoiter without being observed, to return to the main body by the least known route, and to remain strictly on the defensive. These picked men along with their leader Gelon, trampled on by horses and butchered by their enemies, perished to a man at the hands of the Thessalians.

Their disaster created such panic among the Phocians in the camp that they actually gathered together in one spot their women, children, movable property, and also their clothes, gold, silver and images of the gods, and making a vast pyre they left in charge a force of thirty men.