10.1.1 Evidently, the part of Phokis that surrounds Tithorea and Delphi was named that way, from the earliest times onweard, after a Corinthian man, Phokos son of Ornytion. Not many years afterwards, the name was given to the entire region of what is today called Phokis. It happened when people from Aegina sailed over to this region in their ships ships, accompanied by Phokos, the son of Aiakos.

10.1.2 So, the territory facing the Peloponnesus and pointing toward Boeotia is occupied by the Phocians [Phōkeîs], that is, the people of Phokis.This territory stretches to the seaand makes contact with it on one side at Cirrha, the port of Delphi, and on the other side at the city of Antikyra. In the direction of the Lamian Gulf, there is a population that prevents the people of Phokis from being coastal dwellers: this population, situated between Phokis and the sea, are the people who are named Lokroi Hypoknēmidioi [= people of Lokris who dwell in the foothills]. By these people is the boundary of Phokis defined in this direction, by the people of Skarpheia on the other side of Elateia, and by Opous and its port Kūnos beyond Hyampolis and Abai.

10.1.3 The most renowned deeds of the people of Phokis were achieved by them all in unison [en koinōi]. They took part in the Trojan war, and fought against the Thessalians before the Persian invasion of Greece, when they accomplished [epi-deiknunai] deeds destined for remembrance [mnēmē].

10.1.4 The Thessalians, more enraged than ever against the people of Phokis, gathered recruits from all their cities and marched out against them. Whereupon the people of Phokis, rather terrified by the army of the Thessalians, especially by the number of their cavalry and by the disciplined training of both the horses and their riders, dispatched a mission to Delphi, asking the god how they might escape the danger that threatened them. And the oracular utterance [manteuma] that came back to them [from the Oracle] was this:

10.1.5 On receiving this oracle, the people of Phokis sent three hundred picked men with Gelon in command to make an attack on the enemy. The night was just falling, and the orders given were to reconnoiter without being observed, to return to the main body by the least known route, and to remain strictly on the defensive. These picked men along with their leader, Gelon, were trampled by the horses and butchered by their enemies. So they all perished at the hands of the Thessalians.

10.1.6 Their disaster created such panic among the people of Phokis in the camp that they actually gathered together in one spot their women, children, movable property, and also their clothes, gold, silver, and images of the gods, and making a vast pyre, they left in charge a force of thirty men.

10.1.7 They were under orders that, if the men of Phokis should happen to be defeated in the battle, they they would first put to death the women and the children, then to put them on the pyre like animal-victims-of-sacrifice [hiereia] along with the valuables, and finally to set the pyre on fire and perish themselves, either by each other’s hands or by charging the cavalry of the Thessalians. That is why the Greeks refer to any kind of plans [bouleumata] that are unfeeling-of-pain [an-algē-ta] as ‘the despair [apo-noia] of the people of Phokis’. At this point the men of Phokis set out to attack the Thessalians.

10.1.8 The commander of their cavalry was Daiphantes of Hyampolis, of their infantry, Rhoios of Ambrossos. But the position of supreme commandwas held by Tellias, a seer [mantis] of Elis, in whom the people of Phokis invested all their hopes [elpides] for salvation [sōtēriā].

10.1.9 When the opposing forces reached the point of hand-to-hand combat, the men of Phokis had before their eyes what they had resolved to do to their women and children, and seeing that their own salvation [sōtēriā] was tottering in the balance, they dared the most desperate deeds, and, with the good will [tò eu-menes] of the gods [theoi], they achieved the most famous victory of that era.

10.1.10 Then did all Greece understand the oracular-pronouncement [logion] given to the people of Phokis by Apollo. For the watchword [sun-thēma] given by the Thessalian generals in each situation of the battle was ‘Athena Itōniā’, and by the generals of the people of Phokis, the watchword was ‘Phokos’, after whom the people of Phokis were named. Because of this engagement, the people of Phokis sent as offerings [anathēmata] to Delphi statues of Apollo, of Tellias the seer, and of all their other generals in the battle, together with the heroes [hērōes] of the local population [epikhōrioi]. The images [eikones] were the work of the Argive, Aristomedon.

10.1.11 After this, the men of Phokis came up with a stratagem quite as clever as their former ones. When the two armies were encamped opposite each other at the pass into Phokis, five hundred picked men of Phokis, waiting until the moon was full, attacked the Thessalians on that night, first smearing themselves with gypsum [gupsos] and, in addition to the gypsum [gupsos], putting on white armor [leuka]. It is said that there then occurred a wholesale slaughter of the Thessalians, who thought this apparition of the night to be too superhuman [theion] to be an attack of their enemies. It was Tellias of Elis who devised this stratagem as well for the men of Phokis to use against the Thessalians.