Greek Lands and Letters

“What time the mid-month moon in golden car flamed back her light and lit the eye of Evening full, pure judgment of Great Games did Heracles ordain and fifth year’s festival beside Alphēus and his holy banks.”

Whatever may be the final decision of archæologists, it was natural for Pausanias to identify the reclining figures in the east gable of the Zeus temple at Olympia as the Alpheus and Cladeus. The right angle made by the junction of these rivers is in a fertile plain where the Altis, the sacred enclosure of Olympia, lies at the foot of the Kronos hill. The Alpheus river is inseparably connected in Greek literature with the Great Games. For more than one thousand summers successively the full moon looked down upon the myriads of visitors who came from inland or from island homes, from Tenedos in the East, or from Sicily in the West. By the Alpheus they encamped and sank into dreamless sleep after their journeyings or, it may be, one or another, himself a competitor or an anxious relative, would be roused up by nightmares and outriders of grim Taraxippus, the Horse Frightener, whose ghost long held in mortmain the critical turning point in the Hippodrome. When the contests were ended, the same moon would silver the weather-beaten columns of the old Heræum or light up with its benignant splendour the new and stately shafts of the Zeus temple, the gray-green sacred olive tree, the great wings of the hovering Victory, the Parian marbles and the burnished bronzes, or still more beautiful, the naked ivory of the athletes’ limbs. And then, crowning all, the epinician hymn, newborn from Pindar’s brain, rose up on the wings of victorious music to the very summit of the Kronos hill.

The athletes had not far to journey from their last training place in Elis. The spectators had come from various directions, some from the sea-coast, some, as do the majority of modern visitors, from Patras on the coast of Achæa. But then, as now, the direct artery from the heart of Greece was the green valley of the Alpheus. The river clamps Arcadia and Elis together. Down this valley year by year in antiquity pilgrims journeyed to see the games and to attend the great Fair; here in modern times bands of tourists still pick their way up and down over smooth roads and rocky torrent-beds and cross the ford of the swollen stream; and a projected railroad, connecting (on paper) Megalopolis and Olympia, also follows the general course of the Alpheus. The river has two main sources. Its northern branch, the Ladon, draws its water from the rugged mountains of northern Arcadia. The other branch comes flowing down from the northwest end of Taygetus, curves through the plain of Megalopolis, plunges through the ravine of Karytæna and joins the Ladon near the western border of Arcadia, and the two united make their way through Elis to the Ionian sea. Nor even there is its end. In pursuit of the fountain nymph, Arethusa, Alpheus must needs reach Sicily. To the Greeks the Mediterranean was their highway, not the “salt, estranging sea.” According to Lucian, as Alpheus enters the sea, Poseidon, brimming over with curiosity, stops him and enquires: “What’s this, Alpheus? You alone of all rivers don’t go in for dissipation, and you keep your waters fresh and free from brine as you hurry on?”

(Alpheus) “It’s a love affair, Poseidon, so don’t cross-question me. You’ve been in love yourself and often too!”

The sea-god on learning of the object of Alpheus’s passion expresses much approval. But Alpheus cuts him short: “I am pressed with engagements. You detain me, Poseidon, by your superfluous questions!”

(Poseidon) “You’re right. Be off to your Beloved. Rise up from the water, mingle with the fountain and be ye twain one stream.”

Lucian’s contemporary Pausanias is troubled with no doubts, and solemnly reaffirms the wedlock of Alpheus and Arethusa, although the more sceptical Strabo in the preceding century had naïvely argued against the credibility of the popular belief that a cup thrown into the Alpheus reappears in the fountain at Syracuse. Antigonus Carystus had stoutly maintained that “when the entrails of the victims are thrown into the Alpheus the waters of Arethusa in Sicily grow turbid.”

Be all that as it may, Alpheus mingling his waters with the Sicilian fountain is typical of the stream of competitors who were constantly returning from the Olympic games to Magna Græcia. Of Pindar’s fourteen Olympic odes nine were written for Sicilian or Italian victors. In general one of the most noteworthy facts in the history of the games is the widespread distribution of the clientèle. The competitors and visitors converging from Greece; the innumerable votive offerings here dedicated; the common motives of religion here illustrated in art and literature generated a centripetal national spirit that could retard though not destroy the centrifugal individualism of the Greeks.

The only fact more conspicuous than the wide territory represented is the longevity of the Olympic celebrations. The Great Games were continued both under Macedonian rule and even for long years after the Hellenic world, east and west, subjugated, dismembered, and rearranged like parti-colored bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, had fallen into place in the imperial pattern of the great Roman mosaic. The splendid Philippeum at Olympia was witness to the eagerness with which Philip and Alexander made good their legitimate claim to Hellenic blood. Roman emperors, like Tiberius and Nero, by their very presence, however arrogant, gave one more sign of the Greeks’ intellectual suzerainty over their captors.

Although Elis, even in October after the long hot summer, presents a contrast to the burnt plains and hills about Athens, yet the traveller will be best rewarded if he comes to Olympia by the end of February or early in March. If he comes from Patras and will penetrate a little inland from the railroad near the river Stimana, the ancient Larisos, he will find himself in the midst of beautiful woodland scenery. The whole country, with its fine oak trees, reminded the traveller Mure of “the wilder parts of Windsor Park.” Even at the little stations are seen shepherds in their shaggy coats, with conversation-beads and staffs and flocks of sheep. At Olympia itself the new green of the trees and grass, the pink of the almond blossoms on the banks of the Alpheus, and all the awakening of the early spring help to dissipate the melancholy that is wont to invade the mind in a lonely site amidst ruins which record some by-gone efflorescence of human activity. This Olympian plain, through which the Alpheus sweeps down to the sea between fields and vineyards, offered ample room for the vast throngs of visitors. There was no city accommodation. They must encamp in the open as they do to-day at many a modern festival. But the smiling valley was a fit place to worship Zeus, the god of the open sky. Xenophon, who lived on his estate just beyond the hills which bound the plain to the south, tells in the “Anabasis” how the returning Greeks, when they sighted the Euxine sea from the mountain ridge, held impromptu games and races on an impossible slope where men and horses tumbled amidst the jeers of the spectators. The plain of the Alpheus was perfectly adapted both for the games and all that the festival implied. It is easy to see how contests would become popular here before they were instituted on the narrow ledges of Parnassus at Delphi.

For the Greeks of the classical period the mythical founding of the games in prehistoric times threw back the first contests into a conveniently dim perspective. In this penumbra of Greek mythology like-named replicas of gods, heroes, or mortals now blend together, now assert their independence. The Cretan Heracles is said to have brought the infant Zeus from Mount Ida to the Kronos hill in the Golden Age and to have first instituted the games. Then again it is the national hero Heracles, himself Zeus-descended, who cleanses the stables of King Augeas in Elis with the help of the Alpheus and the Cladeus river-gods, and thereupon founds the games.

To the reverent Greek his mythology was not an entertaining treasury of mere fairy tales. The stories of two contests were selected with intent as the theme for the sculptures most prominent of all in the sacred enclosure. In the east gable of the Zeus temple was represented Hippodameia, the daughter of Œnomaus. Her father has already in his swift chariot overtaken and slain many suitors who had failed to outspeed him while contending for his daughter’s hand. At the side of Hippodameia stands Pelops just starting to win, by the favour of Zeus and the treachery of Œnomaus’s charioteer, a prehistoric Olympic victory.

In the west gable was the contest between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. The latter are represented as invading the festival at the marriage of another Hippodameia to Pirithous, whose friend and ally of old was the hero, Theseus of Athens. The brute Centaurs presumably symbolize the barbaric power of the Persians, whose defeat by Athens and her allies was here fittingly celebrated as another Olympic victory. This may be taken as the official expression, at the supreme moment of Greek history, of one of the wider meanings of the games.

The first view of the excavations at Olympia is disappointing and bewildering to the amateur visitor, and a mere topographical survey hopelesslyhopelessly confounds history. Even a superficial appreciation of the ruins presupposes a more special preparation than is necessary, for example, at Pompeii. At Olympia, although it, too, was overwhelmed, being destroyed by earthquakes and buried in soft earth by the loyal river-gods, the imagination must concern itself with various epochs: the prehistoric; the period from the first Olympiad to the Persian wars; the age of Pericles; the following century; the Macedonian period; and, finally, that of the Greek world under Roman sway.

All the buildings for the athletes and for the contests—the Palæstra, the Gymnasium, the Stadium, and the Hippodrome—lay outside of the sacred enclosure, while the Altis itself was reserved for the real purpose of this consecrated spot, the worship of Zeus, under all his manifold activities, and of the other gods who helped to round out and to satisfy the aspirations, the hopes, and fears of the Greek heart that was “in all things very religious.” To cover all possible oversights there was at Olympia, as by the Areopagus of St. Paul’s day, or at Phalerum, an altar to Unknown Gods. Just as the drama was a religious spectacle, so the games were conducted by the real Greek in the same spirit. The athletes went forth from the Altis to the contest, the victors reëntered it to receive the olive crown, and within it their statues and offerings were set up in the immediate presence of the gods.

In the Altis the ancient Heræum, with its indications of an earlier wooden structure, carries back the thought far beyond the first Olympiad in the eighth century B. C. The new god Zeus was just emerging from the tutelage of his predecessor on the Kronos hill above. In this early age he seems hardly more than a Prince Consort by the side of Hera who, in Pindar’s sixth Olympian, is invoked as the “Maiden” or ever Zeus had led her to the bridal chamber. One of the least obtrusive ruins in the Altis marks the site near the Heræum of the great altar of Zeus or, possibly, the common shrine of Zeus and Hera. Annually the priests kneaded with water from the Alpheus the ashes of the thighs of victims offered, as in the Iliad, to the god, and plastered a layer upon this primitive altar. Only the water of the Alpheus was acceptable to the god in preparing this clay, and thus year by year was cemented the union between the visible and the unseen, the beneficent river-god of the land and the Olympian god whose dome overarched the widespread land of Hellas.

Approaching historic records we read that Iphitus in 793 B. C. or, by the usual reckoning, in 776 B. C., four hundred and eight years after the traditional capture of Troy, renewed the games which had been discontinued for twenty-eight Olympiads after the time of Pelops and Heracles. The Heræum, until recently known as the most ancient temple in Greece, certainly existed at this time, although differing in material and in contents from the temple that Pausanias describes. Both the ground structure and enough of the lower part of the walls remain to enable the expert to reconstruct in imagination the whole building up to the gable upon which rested the terra-cotta acroterion now preserved in the Museum. At the west end of the cella we see the base of the great statues of Hera and Zeus. Suitably enough, while Zeus has disappeared the archaic head of Hera was found and is now in the Museum. And, prostrate before one of the side niches, just where Pausanias describes it, was found the Hermes of Praxiteles with the infant Dionysus on his arm. This beautiful statue alone would have repaid the cost of the whole excavation. It unites the beauty of the athlete’s body with the Greek conception of divinity in frank, idealizing anthropomorphism.

The catholicity of Greek polytheism may be illustrated by the rest of the company within the Heræum as described by Pausanias. It was not that every god “had his day,” like the rotation in office of the Athenian prytanes, but there was a precinct and a function for each and every manifestation of pulsating life, from the humblest Nereid to Olympian Hera. “Known to each other are all the immortal gods,” as Homer says. They were all entered in their Almanach de Gotha and could upon occasion live in harmony, except when some Eris threw her apple of discord in their midst or “golden” Aphrodite struggled in the Council of the Gods for precedence over the mere bigness of the Colossus of Rhodes. At any rate, in Hera’s temple were placed statues of the Seasons and of Themis, their mother, personifying orderly and unchanging Law; the five Hesperides, stimulating the eager Hellenic mind to reach out after the unknown; Athena, goddess in peace and war; the Maid and Demeter, embodying the fruitful beneficence of nature and the mysteries of the unseen; Apollo and Artemis, welcomed or feared by turns for their arrows of light or shafts of destruction; Latona, their mother, whose Delian refuge was firmly moored to every other sacred shrine in Greece. Here too was Fortune, who had a not insignificant rôle in Greek as in Roman life, and Dionysus, god of Tragedy and of Comedy, was represented as accompanied by a winged Victory.

The Prytaneum of the Eleans, trustees of the land and of the games, was enclosed within the Altis at the northwest corner of the Heræum. It was built over in Roman times, but the Greek structure beneath seems to have been of very early date. Here were sung ancient songs in the Doric dialect, and here, in the banquet-hall, the Olympic victors were feasted.

Next in historic order come the remains of a row of twelve treasuries, ranged along close to the Kronos hill from the Heræum to the Stadium entrance. They are ascribed to the sixth century B. C. or, in the case of part of the most easterly one, to the beginning of the fifth century. These little buildings are of great architectonic and historic import. Half of them were dedicated by communities from over the seas; five by Italian and Sicilian Greeks. The fragments from the treasury of Selinus recall at once the archaic temples and sculpture on the shore of Sicily that faces Carthage. The Syracusan Treasury was re-named “Carthaginian” by reason of spoils, taken by the Syracusans from their Punic enemies in the battle of Himera and placed here to unite at this common shrine the victors of Salamis with their brothers in the west.

In the fifth century B. C. the flush of victory at Salamis not only lit up the Acropolis at Athens but spread to this green valley in Elis. The great Zeus temple was built. Its pediments, as we have already seen, were adorned with sculptured myths appealing at once to local pride and to wider Hellenic patriotism. In the eastern gable Zeus stood upright as arbiter in the chariot contest of Pelops; in the western gable the archaic yet majestic Apollo appeared as the defender against the Centaurs, the barbarian invaders. To emphasize the honour due to Athens there was painted on the throne within the temple a representation of Pirithöus, the bridegroom of Hippodameia, and his friend, the Athenian Theseus. The victories over the Persians were again symbolized by the contest between Theseus and the Amazons wrought upon the footstool of the seated god, and, as if to put the meaning beyond all doubt, here too were Greece and Salamis personified, the latter holding in her hand the figurehead of a ship. The metope sculptures represented the labours of Heracles who, as founder of the games, typified to patriot and athlete bodily powers and indomitable will. The cella of the temple was reserved for the great gold-ivory statue of Zeus, who was seated while others stood. Phidias established his workshop by the sacred enclosure and wrought. And the result of his handiwork was a world’s wonder for long centuries. Into his creation were breathed Homeric dignity, Attic beauty, and Hellenic pride. Dio Chrysostom in the first century of the Christian era could say of it: “Methinks that if any one who is heavy-laden in mind, who has drained the cup of misfortunes and sorrows in life, and whom sweet sleep visits no more, were to stand before this image, he would forget all the griefs and troubles that are incidental to the life of man.”

Time and earthquakes and plunderers have worked almost utter ruin. But the ground plan of the temple remains to tell a detailed story, and some of the great shafts lie prostrate where they fell. In the Museum is preserved, more or less complete, the major part of the gable sculptures, fortunately including the very noble figure of Apollo, and the mutilated but beautiful metopes. The gold-ivory statue has disappeared long since. It is possible that it may have been destroyed when the temple was burnt in the reign of Theodosius II, but a Byzantine historian claims that the statue was still standing in a palace at Constantinople when it was consumed by fire in 475 A. D. In front of the Zeus temple are still to be seen some blocks of the lofty triangular column over which Pæonius caused his winged Nike to hover. The statue itself, in large part intact, is set up in the Museum and belongs to the more beautiful of our inheritances from antiquity.

If now we add, in imagination, the great council hall, possibly lying southeast from the temple, and the older colonnade bounding the east side of the Altis, and if we add the pentagonal Pelopion and the minor sanctuaries, and fill in the forest of statues of athletes and of gods, we shall have the more salient features of the sacred enclosure down through the great period immediately following the Persian wars. To the beginning of the fourth century is attributed the little temple of the Mother of the Gods east of the Heræum. Running in a line from this up to the very entrance of the Stadium is a long row of pedestals. Upon these stood the Zanes, or bronze statues of Zeus, which were erected from fines imposed upon offenders against the rules of the games. They stood where the contestants must see them just as they passed from the Altis into the Stadium. It is significant that the first recorded serious violation of athletic honour did not occur until 388 B. C., only a half century before free Greece was crushed at Chæronea, and that the next occasion was in the 112th Olympiad, six years after Macedonian rule was established. This second time it was an Athenian who had bribed his competitors, and the Athenians, like some modern sympathizers with athletic criminals, were shameless enough to press the Eleans to remit the fine. But the god at Delphi compelled the Athenians to submit. Standing before the Opisthodomus, the rear porch of the Zeus temple, from which poet, historian, and philosopher were wont to utter high words on noble themes, the crowd may have looked up at the great Apollo with his hand outstretched and imagined him dictating the inscription placed, on a similar occasion, upon the base of one of the Zanes: “An Olympic victory is to be gained not by money but by fleetness of foot and strength of body.”

Macedon also left its records. When Philip had defeated the Greeks at Chæronea in 338 B. C., his first care was to prove that he was Hellene and not the barbarian that Demosthenes considered him. The Philippeum was dedicated, and in it were erected gold-ivory statues of Philip’s father Amyntas, of Philip, of the mother and grandmother of Alexander, and of Alexander himself. Alexander’s right to contend at the games was vindicated. In this period also was added on the eastern side of the Altis the beautiful Echo colonnade with its sevenfold echo.

When Greece came under Roman rule, no longer could free-born Greeks boast of exclusive right to participate at Olympia. Champions from all parts of the empire, Tiberius and Nero among them, took part in the games. Pausanias speaks of a statue of Augustus, made of amber, and a statue of Trajan, dedicated by the Greek nation, and also of one of Hadrian set up by the Achæan confederacy. Nero, who contended both in the Olympic and Pythian games, dedicated four crowns in the Zeus temple. Under the Antonines the external splendour of the Altis and the comfort of the visiting throngs were enhanced by the public-spirited Herodes Atticus, a Greek from Marathon and the preceptor of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Lucian, who was repeatedly at the Games, gives in his “Life’s End of Peregrinus” a vivid picture of one of the quadrennial celebrations in the time of the Antonines. In place of the deserted ruins of to-day we can see the temples, statues, marble exedra, the echo colonnade, the athletes, and the thronging crowds gossiping, wrangling, gaping after novelty. As the Cynic partisan harangues the people from the pulpit of the Opisthodomus we realize how for centuries Greek life had focused in these gatherings. The festival had become a Greek Exchange. Here, if we are to believe Lucian, Herodotus first gave to the public his history, the great epinician epic that recounted the triumphs of the Greek over the barbarian. Among his audience would be some whose brothers or fathers had fought at Thermopylæ, and all would hear with pride how Xerxes asked: “What are the Greeks doing?” and how he was answered: “They are holding the Olympic games, seeing the athletic sports and the chariot races;” and then, when Xerxes was told that the prize was a mere olive wreath, how a Persian exclaimed: “What manner of men are these who contend with one another not for money but for honour!” Brain and brawn were alike praised at Olympia. The sophist Hippias was Elis-born, and the statue of Gorgias from Sicily was erected among those of the athletes. And here rhetoricians from Gorgias to Lucian delivered their epideictic speeches; artists, painters, and musicians appealed to the eye or the ear; philosophies new or old were hotly debated.

But no Roman patronage could galvanize into real life the dying spirit of freedom. Professionalism grew apace. Christianity, established in the eastern empire, extinguished the fire on the ancient altar of Zeus. The fitful return to polytheism under Julian the Apostate only served to show its decadence, and in 393 A. D. the emperor Theodosius finally suppressed the Olympic games. When the “truce” of the Olympic god no longer interposed a defence, the Altis itself became a Byzantine fortress and the monuments were partially destroyed to build its walls. Amongst the ruins of the Palæstra and the Workshop of Phidias can be seen the remains of a Byzantine church. Earthquakes in the sixth century threw down the Zeus temple, and in this and the following century the Cladeus and the Alpheus, the only gods who still retained their power, united in preserving under deep layers of earth the mutilated monuments for a kindlier age to uncover and to honour. After this destruction and burial, for more than one thousand years the summer moons waxed and waned above the desolated valley disturbed only by the hoof-beats of the horses ridden by the vassal bands of the Dukes of the Morea. Here, as elsewhere in Greece, temples robbed of their acolytes and statues, no longer symbols of a living religion, forgot the incense of a happy past and could look forward to no festal renascence. Sterling, in his “Dædalus,” pictures these orphaned children of Olympus in a loneliness only less pathetic than their irksome imprisonment within unsympathetic Museum walls:—

In 1875 the German government subsidized the systematic excavations that restored to the modern world some of its most valued treasures and laid bare the greater part of the ruined Altis, the adjacent buildings and the entrance to the Stadium.

The remains excavated outside the Altis bring us to the contests themselves. Close to the western wall of the Altis were the elaborate Palæstra and Gymnasium, where the athletes could keep themselves in form for the contests. From the northeastern corner of the sacred enclosure leads the covered way into the Stadium, which has been only partially excavated at the two ends. To the south, or possibly east, of the Stadium lay the Hippodrome by the bank of the Alpheus. Frazer, contrary to the usual belief, thinks it possible that it may still be intact north of the new bed of the river. From Pausanias, who fortunately described the Hippodrome minutely, we can in imagination reconstruct the scene: the rising tiers of spectators; the bronze turning-posts, on which respectively stood statues of Pelops and of Hippodameia, at each end of the course around which the chariots drove twelve times; the umpires at the goal; the chariots waiting ready for the signal given at the hoisting of the bronze eagle and the dropping of the dolphin. For a typical chariot race of the best period we may turn to the “Electra” of Sophocles, although the scene of the race is laid at Delphi, not at Olympia. Sophocles, who himself embodied the Greek perfection of manly beauty, knew how to give essential details to critical hearers. The danger involved and the skill required on the race track made the owner of the victorious team, provided he was his own charioteer, a worthy recipient of Olympic honours. There are ten contestants in all, two of them Libyan Greeks. They draw lots for the assignment of inner and outer tracks and take their stations at command of the judges, and then—

Both the Olympic and Pythian games were held every four years. The Nemean and Isthmian came every two years. In all four the prize was similar: the wreath of wild olive at Olympia; of mountain bay at Delphi; of parsley or of native pine at Nemea; of parsley at Corinth. We are, indeed, justified in emphasizing, until the period of decadence, the absence of professionalism. The athlete, after undergoing the severest training, contested, with no degradation of gate-money, merely to win the honour of a simple wreath. But we need not shut our eyes to the fact that the honour did not fade with the wreath. It belonged to the athlete’s native place and to all his fellow-citizens. Thinking of the evanescent glory of the Isthmian parsley and with the long race in the stadium of Eternity in mind, the apostle Paul might indeed point the contrast for his hearers between a “corruptible crown” and “one that fadeth not away;” yet for the shorter race-course of life the emoluments of honour and preferment were secure. And, in addition to all these honours, an Olympian victor had a post-mortem value. He might be worshipped as a divinity and his statue might heal diseases, like the bones of a mediæval saint. Thus Lucian’s Momus, the god of critics, reminds Zeus that their own prestige is endangered by these new faith-cures: “Actually,” he says, “the statues of the athlete Polydamas at Olympia and of Theagenes at Thasus are curing fever-stricken patients.”

The athlete’s ambition might issue in a selfish “opportunism,” or it might be of the nobler kind to which Pindar, thinking perhaps of the altar dedicated in the Altis to the god “Opportunity” (καιρός), would lift the contestant’s ideal in his second Olympian:—

There was a sacred truce from hostilities amongst all Greeks for a month, to allow time for distant competitors and visitors to go and come in safety. The games were held in summer at the time of a full moon, whether in July or August is uncertain. The September full moon, in fact, has been suggested as the date in the even Olympiads. At this later moon the heat might be almost as great as at the summer solstice, but it may be that the earlier date, with the longer day, was in vogue as long as the contests were all held upon one day. At any rate, the longest midsummer day was too short for the increasing number of events, and after 472 B. C. we hear of five days. The order of the contests is uncertain. At first, it would appear, the foot-races had been the only event. Later it seems probable that the foot-races, the long race, the short race, and the double course, came upon one day; on a second day, the wrestling, boxing, and pancratium. The chariot-races and the pentathlum came on one and the same day. The pentathlum was justly popular as calculated to secure an all-round development of the human form. It included leaping, the foot-race, discus-throwing, javelin-throwing, and wrestling. The Spartans, who were never charged with being effeminate, were said to favour it while discountenancing the more brutal pancratium. We certainly are not much attracted by the license of the latter, evidently considered legitimate, as we read of two athletes habitually winning this event by bending back their antagonists’ fingers. One of them, Sostratus, was surnamed “Finger-bender.” But the judges presided with absolute authority and enforced severe penalties against violations of the rules.

Women were prohibited under pain of death from even crossing the river and entering the sacred precinct during the time of the games. Pausanias records one violation. Kallipateira, or Pherenike (“Victoria”), the daughter of Diagoras, the Rhodian victor immortalized by Pindar, anxious to see her son compete, disguised herself as a trainer. In her exultation at her son’s success she betrayed her sex. The penalty attached was to be hurled from the Typæum rock on a mountain south of the Alpheus. In deference to the victories won by her father, her brothers, and her son, she was pardoned, but thereafter the trainers were compelled to enter naked like the athletes themselves.

The priestess of Demeter, however, was present ex officio, and Pausanias expressly states that virgins also were admitted as spectators. This statement is usually rejected, but it may have been true for certain times under the influence of Sparta, whose customs threw the sanction of public sentiment around the athletic contests of their maidens, the future mothers of their fighting men.

Although the modern reader is apt to think of the chariot-races in connection with Sicilian tyrants, they were, as we have seen from Sophocles, an integral part of Greek life. Herodotus, in the midst of his account of the battle of Marathon, calmly suspends hostilities while he tells how Cimon, father of Miltiades, won three successive Olympic victories with the same mares and, as fitting climax, adds that the mares were buried on the stately avenue of Athenian tombs, facing the grave of Cimon himself. If Herodotus really read this at Olympia the incident would not have seemed to his audience an intrusive digression.

In addition to the four-horse and two-horse chariot-races there was the race with mules—no mean animals in Greece and the Orient. Pindar repeatedly celebrates them in his Olympian odes. There was also the single race-horse ridden by a jockey. One horse from Syracuse, Pherenicus (“Victor”), was celebrated in song both by Pindar and Bacchylides. Pindar tells how he “ran the course, his body by the goad unurged” and brought victory to Hieron. Bacchylides, reminding us that the horse-races opened the events of the day, exclaims:—

Pausanias tells of a Corinthian race-horse, Aura (“Breeze”), perhaps one of the famous “Koppa”^[38] breed, sired by Pegasus. The jockey was thrown at the beginning of the race, but the mare continued without breaking form, rounded the turning stake, quickened her pace at the sound of the trumpet, reached the umpires first, knew that she had won, and stopped. The owner of the riderless horse was proclaimed victor.

It would be very unsafe to assert that the eager Greeks, if called back to our own age of ingenious mechanisms, would turn uninterested from the vicarious competition by motor-cars, or feel nothing but disgust at human forms crooked into the semblance of brutes over a flying bicycle, but it is safe to emphasize that all their contests, whether exhibiting the development of the perfect human body or the beauty of the horse, ministered to that sure sense of form and proportion which they demanded and obtained from poet, painter, and musician, sculptor, architect, and athlete. But horse and chariot-racing involved certain special temptations. As time went on, the “anything to win” spirit was sure, now and then, to assert itself. The legend of the lynch-pin withdrawn from the chariot of Œnomaus by the bribery of Pelops must have called for strenuous casuistry from the priests of Zeus when it was necessary to punish offenders for shady practices towards rivals. Pindar magnificently ignores the thought of treachery. With him it is a god that—

Although in later times the peripatetic professional developed and could claim as precedent the victories repeatedly won at various centres by the athletes of old, yet, at least for their own times, Pindar and Bacchylides were justified in assuming, alike for their Sicilian princes or for their boyish winners in the foot-race, the genuine amateur spirit of athletic rivalry. In the fourth century B. C. a Cretan, victor in the long race, was bribed to transfer his citizenship to Ephesus. The Olympian athlete had not then become, like the modern base-ball pitcher, a legitimate commodity of interstate commerce, and the Cretans with justifiable indignation pronounced the sentence of perpetual exile against Sotades the offender.

For Pindar, indeed, it was necessary that every song should rise above the sordid, either in belief or practice. He was at once a supreme artist and a herald of the ideal. He even expurgates canonical mythology to infuse into his odes some deeper, nobler lesson suggested by the external and physical victory. And this, although several of his odes were addressed to rich tyrants like Hieron of Syracuse, at whose court were welcomed and honoured Æschylus, Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides and many more. “He was to them in some measure what Augustus was to Virgil and Horace, what Lorenzo de’ Medici was to the members of the Florentine Academy.”^[39] Pindar honestly regarded him as the patron of letters and as a bulwark against the barbarians. He had fought under Gelon against the Carthaginians, and, soon after the battles of Himera and Salamis, the Etruscans, who were also threatening Greek supremacy, were, in 474 B. C., defeated by him. Early in the nineteenth century, from a partial excavation at Olympia, a bronze helmet of Etruscan make found its way to the British Museum. On it is the inscription: “Hieron, son of Deinomenes, and the Syracusans (dedicated) to Zeus these Tyrrhene spoils from Cumæ.” It tantalizes with the sequence of historic associations. From lips within this helmet came words of war in the dead Etruscan tongue that still baffles linguistic classification; on it were inscribed Greek words in the dialect of the proud Greek colonists in Sicily; mingled Greek dialects greeted it when dedicated in the sacred centre of the motherland; and now it is again held as spoils by another and mightier island folk.

Pindar could not prophesy the fatal conflict between the tyrants of the west and the greedy imperialism of Athenian demagogues. He could not peer into the stone quarries at Syracuse and see the legatees of Salamis scorched under the lidless eye of a Sicilian sun. He could not foresee a Macedonian ruling over Hellas nor forecast the Greek world under Roman sway. He could not have understood how even Plato, with the additional perspective of another half century, crowded with disturbing shifts of value both in literature and government, would seek relief from the spectre of tyranny not in democracy but by converting the baser metal of the despot into the pure gold of the philosophic King. Yet Pindar is not without his misgivings. In words none too vague he warns the ruler, whose gold called forth his songs, of the dangers inherent in power. In the first Olympian he tells Hieron:—

With better right and greater force Æschylus, himself warrior of Marathon and Salamis, in the “Agamemnon” covertly warns his Athenian contemporaries, then engaged in imperial schemes of expansion in Egypt and elsewhere, against the haughty spirit that goeth before a fall. His words easily connect themselves with this Pindaric ode because the return of the Greek host from Troy brings out on Clytemnestra’s lips the metaphor drawn from the double racecourse—the δίαυλος. Ilium is but the turning-post at the farther end; Argos is both the starting-point and the goal; the stadium is the Ægean sea:—

To make selections from Pindar is to pry out jewels from an antique setting. But his Olympic odes give the best interpretation of the best meaning of the games. Some were impromptu odes crystallized under the stress of the victory and sung in the Altis while the full moon shone upon the hero of the day. Some were longer and written at leisure for the supplementary celebration at the victor’s home. But in any case the thought was not impromptu. The Theban eagle soared habitually and paused for a moment only at Olympia, sent by—

Yet with all his soaring Pindar never forgot the gracious beauty of human life. The Graces are ever near. Victory, he tells us, by the Graces’ aid is won, and the charioteers—

Pindar calls his song “a writing tally of the Muses.” Not he that runs may read, but whoever will be at pains to wrap the Greek scroll around the tally-stick can read the cypher and can find the clue to lead him safely through “the sounding labyrinths of song.”^[40] Pindar could presuppose an acquaintance with mythology at least as familiar as was to every child of a generation ago the knowledge of the Old Testament. Conflicting myths lived side by side in the popular consciousness. The sculptor and the poet could choose or reject at will. However recondite may seem at times the application of the myth to the Olympic victor in question, the pages of Pindar are constantly illuminated by some flash-light that photographs upon the particular a glimpse of the universal. From Olympia in Elis we are transported to Olympus. Heracles brought from Olympus the charter for the games; there, too, is both the starting-line and finish of the poet’s courser: “Pegasus is stabled in Olympus.” Pindar does not belittle the mysteries of the unseen. When the fame of Theron of Acragas (Girgenti) is said to over-pass Sicily and to touch the pillars of Heracles, the thought of the pathless ocean suggests a wider and uncharted Cosmos. His search-light projects for a moment its stare into infinity, but it is forthwith checked with characteristic restraint:—