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Rh the country and its towns as he had dealt two years before with Chalcidice and its towns. Phocis was utterly ruined. Another Greek state had now fallen before the Macedonian destroyer, and the prospects of Greece generally might well seem gloomy.

The calamity, however, was not so shocking to the Greek world as one might have supposed it would have been. The Phocians, as has been explained, had been offenders against the common law and traditions of Greece, and their destruction might be regarded as a divine judgment. Even the man who executed it, though a barbarian according to Greek notions, might have some claim to be considered as the representative of a sacred cause. In one sense he had been doing the very thing which the voice of Greece had been calling for. The Thebans were especially grateful to him, and forgot in their blindness the mischief which by this last stroke he had inflicted on Greece. Now that the Phocians had ceased to exist as a Greek people, their place in the Amphictyonic Council was, when the great Pythian festival came round after a four years' interval, conferred on Philip. He was even nominated president of the august ceremony. In all this Thebes heartily concurred, as also did several smaller states. Athens and Sparta, indeed, held aloof. But when Philip's envoys announced to the Athenians the new position he had acquired with the consent of so many Greek states, they did not like to refuse concurrence in what a large part of Greece seemed to approve.

Strong as Philip was before, he was now immensely strengthened, and fresh chances were open to him for