The name Lilaea appears for the first time in Homer's Iliad (in the Catalogue of Ships) as one of the nine Phocian towns which had participated at the Trojan War.
The inhabitants of Lilaea believed that the water of Castalian spring in Delphi was a gift of Cephissus, so some days in the year they threw sweets in the river, thinking that they would surface in Castalia.
[8] Lilaea was destroyed during the Third Sacred War by Philip II of Macedon in 346 BCE, but it was rebuilt during the following years in the course of the project for the reconstruction of the Phocian citadels.
[9] When Pausanias visited Lilaea, in the second century, he reported seeing a theatre, an agora, and baths, with temples of Apollo and Artemis, containing statues of Athenian workmanship and of Pentelic marble.
Among the visible antiquities of the region count the architectural members by the springs of Agia Eleoussa, where a fountain and the temple of Cephissus lay, as well as the early Byzantine remains of a basilica dedicated to St. Christopher.