If then this was the case, Doric mountaineers from the heights of Parnassus, and Cretan colonists on the sea-coast, met together (according to a very uncertain computation about 200 years before the Doric migration into Peloponnesus), in order to establish the Delphian worship. The Doric dialect, it may be observed, which prevailed at Delphi, was common to both parties. It is known from many traditions and historical traces, that the connexion established by the Cretans continued for a long time.(910) The ancient tents made of feathers, and a wooden statue of Apollo, perhaps one of the most ancient specimens of rude carving, were also reported to have been brought from Crete. The fabulous series of Delphic minstrels began with Chrysothemis, the son of Carmanor, the above-mentioned priest of Tarrha.(911) Crete, however, did not merely send works of sculpture and hymns to Delphi, but sometimes even men,(912) for the service of the Pythian Apollo.
9. I know not whether these accounts are sufficient to afford an intelligible description of a time when the worship of Apollo, being established at the foot of Olympus, Parnassus, and in the distant island of Crete, and producing a certain degree of communication between these points, had not as yet penetrated to any part of Greece which lay to the south of Œta and Parnassus.
It is evident, moreover, that the extension of this worship met with a long opposition. Apollo is in ancient traditions represented as himself protecting his own temple.(913) The Phlegyans to the east, and the Ætolians to the west, appear to have been particularly adverse to the worship of the Delphian Apollo. That there was a national opposition caused by the Phlegyans possessing the stronghold of Panopeus in the mountain-passes towards Bœotia, is shown by the legends, that Phorbas their leader wrestled there with Apollo; that Phlegyas burned the temple to the ground; and lastly, that Apollo exterminated their whole race with thunder and lightning.(914) The same people is here represented as waging war with the great deity of the Dorians, which, under the name of Lapithæ, opposed the Dorians themselves in Thessaly. And on the other side, Apollo was related in the Poems of Hesiod, and the Minyad, to have assisted the Locrian Curetes against the Ætolians, and slain their prince Meleager.(915)