In the meantime, so soon as the disaster at Thermopylai had come about, the Thessalians sent a herald forthwith to the Phocians, against whom they had a grudge always, but especially because of the latest disaster which they had suffered: for when both the Thessalians themselves and their allies had invaded the Phocian land not many years before this expedition of the king, they had been defeated by the Phocians and handled by them roughly. For the Phocians had been shut up in Mount Parnassos having with them a soothsayer, Tellias the Eleian; and this Tellias contrived for them a device of the following kind:⁠—he took six hundred men, the best of the Phocians, and whitened them over with chalk, both themselves and their armour, and then he attacked the Thessalians by night, telling the Phocians beforehand to slay every man whom they should see not coloured over with white. So not only the sentinels of the Thessalians, who saw these first, were terrified by them, supposing it to be something portentous and other than it was, but also after the sentinels the main body of their army; so that the Phocians remained in possession of four thousand bodies of slain men and shields; of which last they dedicated half at Abai and half at Delphi; and from the tithe of booty got by this battle were made the large statues which are contending for the tripod in front of the temple