Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/49

24 principal exercises. At the Olympian games, the order was leaping, running, throwing, boxing, wrestling.

It may be truly said that the supremacy of Greece as the teacher of the Western and Northern world in all the higher forms of civilization, was intimately related to the marvellous competition of physical and intellectual manhood in these "sacred games. So profoundly was the Greek mind affected by the games, which were held every four years at Olympia, that time was divided into Olympiads, and this method of reckoning continued for many centuries.

Prizes at these games were given not only for athletic exercises, but for music, singing, oratory, and poetry. Herodotus read his history at the Olympic, and Orpheus won the first prize for music at the Pythian games. Alcibiades, the Athenian scholar, soldier, ruler, says Plutarch, was the most successful and the most magnificent in his exercises of all that ever contended in these games. He obtained at one solemnity (the Olympic, which lasted five days), the first, second, and fourth prizes for chariot-racing.

There is a lesson for moderns in these national games of Greece. There was no other occasion on which the Greek was so forcibly impressed with the glory of his own race and nationality.