Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/231

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games. More curious than these details is an item which figures among their receipts. Fines, equivalent to about £30 a head, had been levied on certain Delians guilty of assaulting the Athenian officials in the island,—dragging them from the temple of Apollo,—and beating them. Delos still possessed the shadowy privilege of nominating archons; and the Delian archons contemporary with this outrage bear in three instances the same names as the culprits. If the Delian archons were not chosen by lot, prominence in an insult to the tyrants from over the water would doubtless have commended a candidate to the constituency with a force which we can easily understand.

The existence of a home-rule party in the Sacred Island is indeed attested by a less obscure incident which occurred some years later. Delians who resented the usurpation of Athens might well think that their grievances could never have a better chance of being redressed than at the moment when Philip of Macedon had succeeded to the place of Phocis in the Council of the Delphic Amphictyony (346 B.C.). A court which at all times was peculiarly bound to chastise sacrilege now had for its virtual president a judge not too partial to Athens. In 345 B.C. the case (διαδικασία) came before the Amphictyonic Council. Euthycrates, the betrayer of Olynthus, was the advocate of the Delians. The Athenian cause had been entrusted by the Ecclesia to Aeschines, whose former relations with the Amphictyonic Council, and whose favour with Philip,