The Tradition about the First Sacred War

Abstract

Abstract Every historian of archaic Greece has to come to terms with the First Sacred War. Located with welcome precision in time by the source material in the 5 90s and 5 Sos, involving many of the major Greek cities and powers of the period, and significantly affecting the life and functions of one of the major sanctuaries and oracles of Greece, the war has to be incorporated into any narrative or analysis. Yet for the modern historiography of archaic Greece it presents acute dilemmas of method and credibility. The problems are not those presented by Athenian history, where it is the historicity or otherwise of a growing list of documents (or of ‘documents’) which poses the major challenge, compounded by growing awareness of the rolling nature of oral tradition and its impact on ‘history’.1 Rather, with the First Sacred War we have to deal with a tradition which suddenly appears in crystallized written form long after the event, so that modern scholarship has an unwelcome choice between cautious acceptance en bloc and a quasi-archaeological disinterment of the various layers which inevitably deconstructs the whole. The exposition which follows here will therefore have to oscillate between the registers of modern and ancient historiography, I hope without loss of clarity, in an effort to reach a formulation which stands some chance of conveying the truth.