Pindar’s description of the ancient consecration of the Altis may serve to justify the Labours of Heracles carved upon the Zeus temple:—

His praise of the discus victor comes to mind when we see a copy of Myron’s Discobolus or the graceful throw of a contemporary Greek in the Stadium of modern Athens:—

And we seem ourselves to share in the evening celebration in the Altis when—

We can share too in the undertone of pathos in Pindar’s reference to the dead father of a young athlete. Asopichus is winner in the boys’ footrace, and the news of his victory is sent to his father in Hades. The Arcadian nymph Echo is the messenger:—

Perhaps the most radiant picture of “festal mirth” is called up by Pindar’s seventh Olympian, written for Diagoras of Rhodes. Diagoras’s two sons and his grandson were also Olympic victors. This acted, on at least two occasions, as a family prophylactic. His daughter, as we have seen, was pardoned by reason of this for her intrusion in disguise at the Olympic games, and Dorieus, his son, when captured by the Athenians in a sea-fight, escaped the only alternatives usual in the case of a prisoner of war. He was neither put to death nor forced to pay a ransom, but set free, just as Balaustion, the Rhodian girl, was set free by the Syracusans because she delighted her captors by repeating a new drama of Euripides. And the Rhodians wrote up Pindar’s ode in letters of gold in the Athena temple on the acropolis of Lindus. The modern visitor to this enchanting island climbs up the lofty headland that rises abruptly between the shining water of the two indenting bays, and, before he passes through the ruins of the ancient propylæa and the still imposing portals of the fortress of the Knights of St. John, he sees upon the solid rock the after part of a huge trireme with the steering-oar and the rippling water carved in stone. He can imagine a trireme of a former day entering the harbour below with triumphal sweep of oars, bringing Diagoras and his victory back to his townsfolk in this far-off corner of the Greek world. He can picture the procession of Lindians to Athena’s temple; the brilliant colouring of robes and chitons; the choral music; the exultation in their townsman’s physical prowess and their intoxication of delight because the greatest of lyric poets is reaching out to them, as to the bridegroom at a wedding-feast, a chalice of pure gold resplendent, brimming with the “distilled nectar” of his song.

But Pindar soars beyond the pride of life even as he universalizes the individual experience. It was not only St. Paul’s idealism that perceived the great contest in which humanity is forever engaged. In Pindar’s second Olympian the athlete’s triumph suggests the victory over Death, and the Kronos hill becomes the “tower of Kronos” to which the victor travels over “the highway of Olympian Zeus.” So the arch-idealist Plato, in closing his great constructive vision of the Ideal State, can find no more fitting comparison for him that overcometh than by likening him to the victors in the Games: “If we take my advice, believing that the soul is immortal, we shall ever hold to that upward pathway and at every turn shall practice justice joined to intelligence that we may be at once friends of ourselves and of the gods and may fare well ... both while we abide here and when, like the prize-winners, we come to gather in the prizes of the games.”

But aside from lofty thoughts like these, native to the greater interpretative intelligences of Greece, the recently discovered poems of Bacchylides tell us much of the actual spirit of the games. Bacchylides was nephew of Simonides, the poet-laureate of the nation from Thermopylæ to Platæa, and he was also the grandson and namesake of a famous athlete. He was qualified to sing both the Games and the Graces. And the native of the little island of Ceos did not hesitate to enter the contest with the splendidly arrogant Theban who could compare his inferior rivals to “crows that chatter against the divine bird of Zeus.”^[41]

Of the twelve epinician odes of Bacchylides three were addressed to Hieron, at whose court he enjoyed especial favour. Two Olympic odes were written for Lachon, a young athlete from the poet’s native island. One of these is a short serenade sung before the victor’s own house by his fellow-citizens. Nothing could better illustrate the intensity of local pride and enthusiasm. Now the victorious athlete is praised, now his very identity is merged in the personification of his native land. It is Ceos herself that has won the boxing and the foot-race. Lachon, as the ode reminds us, has already been greeted by the impromptu choral sung at Olympia on the evening of his triumph. Now he is welcomed at home by another choral for which there has been ample time to make ready. Bacchylides may well have written this little serenade not as a paid commission but as a spontaneous outburst of patriotic pride and affection for his country and his fellow countrymen. We should prefer to have it so. In any case we feel a human interest in the young athlete whose strong body and swift feet have won the prize:—

From little Ceos, the second in order of those bright stepping-stones that dot the Ægean from Attica to Rhodes, we may quickly cross to the mainland and find our way to Marathon. From there to Athens we trace that greatest of all ancient race-courses over which the Greek runner ran in full armour to give with his dying breath the warning and the news of victory, and to win a memorial beside which the olive-wreath might well turn pale.^[42]

When the modern Athenians revived the Olympic Games the chariot-races were beyond their resources. Contests of personal, physical strength and skill constitute the fitting nucleus of the games held in the old Stadium, now newly covered with marble from the “mountain that looks on Marathon.” And it was a happy and natural thought to add as the closing event the great Marathon race. While perpetuating the glory of the Athenians it reënforces the loyalty of all the Greeks to their national capital. In this race centres the chief ambition of the Greeks. The other events are of secondary importance. If fanciful critics demand any further excuse for the change of venue from Olympia to Athens, it may be enough to remind them that Heracles (according to one tradition) brought in the first place from the banks of the Ilissus the original graft of the sacred olive-tree from which, at Olympia, the victor’s crown was cut with the golden sickle. With graceful sentiment, however, the olive sprigs are now in turn brought to Athens from Olympia.

Despite all the modern barnacles that encrust the ancient torso, the student of old Greek life can find much to stimulate him in the revival of contests inherited, or directly developed, from ancient times—such as the foot-race, short and long distance; javelin-throwing; leaping; and, chief of all, the discus-throw in the ancient style. The interest of the Greeks to-day in this latter event is second only to that in the Marathon race.

A modern, seated in the Stadium at Athens, has cause for meditation. Behind the gaudy hats and parasols of women, the more sombre clothing of men, or the brilliant uniforms of officials gleams Pentelic marble. Over many tens of thousands of spectators, gathered from all Greece and Europe and from beyond the Atlantic, float the flags of powerful nations: of Turkey; of the lands that look upon the northern seas; of the mighty spawn of the Anglo-Roman; and of the New Atlantis. None of these nations had emerged from barbarism when this same choir of encircling hills sang together the triumph song of Salamis. Prometheus, the incarnation of human self-assertion, rebel to the rule of Zeus, pinioned on a crag overlooking those same northern seas, is made by the Greek prophet to utter the pessimistic cry: “New gods rule Olympus.” Now, as a modern Greek remarked to an American visitor, “the old gods have migrated to a new Olympus.”

But although the gold-ivory statue of Zeus cannot reappear from the ruins of Olympia, yet “the godhead of supernal song” remains in the literature of the Greeks, interpreting and interpreted by the contributions of the archæologists. Swinburne’s words are not mere poetic license:—