Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/334

312 not be required to assist the Ambrakiots against Athens, nti the Ambrakiots to assist the Akamanians against the Peloponnesian league ; but against all other enemies, each engaged to lend aid to the other.

To Demosthenes personally, the events on the coast of the Ambrakian gulf proved a signal good fortune, well-earned indeed by the skill which he had displayed. He was enabled to atone for his imprudence in the Ætolian expedition, and to reestablish himself in the favor of the Athenian people. He sailed home in triumph to Athens, during the course of the winter, with his reserved present of three hundred panoplies, which acquired additional value from the accident, that the larger number of pan- oplies, reserved out of the spoil for the Athenian people, were captured at sea, and never reached Athens. Accordingly, those brought by Demosthenes were the only trophy of the victory, and as such were deposited in the Athenian temples, where Thucydides mentions them as still existing at the time when he wrote.

It was in the same autumn that the Athenians were induced by an oracle to undertake the more complete purification of the eacred island of Delos. This step was probably taken to propi- tiate Apollo, since they were under the persuasion that the terri- ble visitation of the epidemic was owing to his wrath. And as it was about this period that the second attack of the epidemic, after having lasted a year, disappeared, many of them prob- ably ascribed this relief to the effect of their pious cares at Delos. All the tombs in the island were opened ; the dead bodies were then exhumed, and reinterred in the neighboring island of Rheneia : and orders were given that for the future no deaths and no births should take place in the sacred island. Moreover, the ancient Delian festival once the common point of meeting and solemnity for the whole Ionic race, and celebrated for its musical contests, before the Lydian and Persian conquests had