Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/45

20 free rations for life in the Prytaneum; if a Spartan, he had the post of honor in battle. Great poets like Pindar, Sinionidcs, and Euripides sung his praises, and sculptors like Phidias and Praxiteles were engaged by the State to carve his statute. . . Altars were built, and sacrifices offered to a successful athlete."

No wonder, then, that an Olympian prize was regarded as the crown of human happiness.

Cicero tells the story of Diagoras of Rhodes, who, having himself won a first prize at Olympia, and seen his two sons crowned as winners on the same day, was addressed by a Laconian in these words: "Die, Diagoras, for thou hast nothing short of divinity to desire." Alcibiades, when declaring his services to the State, puts first his victory at Olympia, and the prestige he had won at Athens for his magnificent display.

But, perhaps, the most remarkable evidence of the value the Greeks attached to athletic powers is a casual expression of Thucydides, when describing the enthusiastic reception of Brasidas at Scione. "The Government," he says, "voted him a crown of gold, and the multitude flocked round him and decked him with garlands, as though he were an athlete."