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 ALLIES AGAINST PHILIP. 495 nately without distinct information. We pick up only a rew hints and allusions which do not enable us to understand what passed. We, cannot make out either the auxiliaries engaged, or the total numbers in the field, on either side. Demosthenes boasts of having procured for Athens as allies, the Eubceans, Achaeans, Corinthians, The- bans, Megarians, Leukadians, and Korkyraeans arraying along with the Athenian soldiers not less than fifteen thousand infantry difficulties and controversies regarding it have arisen from resting on the spurious decrees embodied in the speech of Demosthenes De Corona, as if they were so much genuine history. Mr. Clinton, in his Fasti Hellenici, cites these decrees as if they were parts of Demosthenes himself. When we once put aside these documents, the general statements both of Demos- thenes and ^Eschines, though they are not precise or specific, will appear perfectly clear and consistent respecting the chronology of the period. That the battle of Chasroneia took place on the 7th of the Attic month Metageitnion (August) u. c. 338 (the second month of the archon Chsei-on- das at Athens) is affirmed by Plutarch (Camill. c. 19) and generally ad- mitted. The time when Philip first occupied Elateia has been stated by Mr. Clin- ton and most authors as the preceding month of Skirrophorion, fifty days or thereabouts earlier. But this rests exclusively on the evidence of the pre- tended decree, for alliance between Athens and Thebes, which appears in Demosthenes De Corona, p. 289. Even those who defend the authenticity of the decree, can hardly confide in the truth of the month-date, when the name of the archon Nausikles is confessedly wrong. To me neither this document, nor the other so-called Athenian decrees professing to bear date in Munychion and Elaphebolion (p. 282), carry any evidence whatever. The general statements both of Demosthenes and -<Eschines, indicate the appointment of Philip as Amphiktyonic general to have been made in the autumnal convocation of Amphiktyons at Thermopylae. Shortly after this appointment, Philip marched his army into Greece with the professed pui- pose of acting upon it. In this march he came upon Elateia and began t-i fortify it; probably about the month of October 339 B. c. The Athenians, Thebans, and other Greeks, carried on the war against him in Phokis for about ten months, until the battle of Chseroneia. That this war must have lasted as long as ten months, we may see by the facts mentioned in my last j^age the reestablishment of the Phokians and their towns, and especially the elaborate fortification of Ambrysus. Bohnecke (Forschungen, p. 533) points out justly (though I do not agree with his general arrangement of the events of the war) that this restoration of the Paokian towns implies a considerable interval between the occupation of Elateia and the battle o*' Chaeroneia. We have also two battles gained against Philip, one of thorn a u-'ixn x L / l P iv n, which perfectly suits with this arrangement.