Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/333

 ADMINISTRATION OF THE OLYMPIC GAMKC. 317 been instituted by Herakles, and among these was numbered the Olympic Agon, then, however, enjoying but a slender fraction of the lustre which afterwards came to attach to it. The presi- dency of any of the more celebrated festivals current throughout Greece, was a privilege immensely prized. It was at once dig- nified and lucrative, and the course of our history will present more than one example in which blood was shed to determine what state should enjoy it. Pheidon marched to Olympia, at the epoch of the 8th recorded Olympiad, or 747 B. c. ; on the occasion of which event we are made acquainted with the real state of parties in the peninsula. The plain of Olympia, now ennobled only by immortal recollections, but once crowded with all the decorations of religion and art, and forming for many centuries the brightest centre of attraction known in the ancient world, was situated on the river Alpheius, in the territory called the Pisatid, hard by the borders of Arcadia. At what time its agonistic festival, recurring every fifth year, at the first full moon after the sum- mer solstice, first began or first acquired its character of special sanctity, we have no means of determining. As with so many of the native waters of Greece, we follow the stream upward to a certain point, but the fountain-head, and the earlier flow of his- tory, is buried under mountains of unsearchable legend. The first celebration of the Olympic contests was ascribed by Grecian legendary faith to Herakles, and the site of the place, in the middle of the Pisatid, with its eight small townships, is quite suf- ficient to prove that the inhabitants of that little territory were warranted in describing themselves as the original administrator? of the ceremony. 1 But this state of things seems to have been altered by the JEtolian settlement in Elis, which is represented as having been conducted by Oxylus and identified with the Eeturn of the Herakleids. The JEtolo-Eleians, bordering upon the Pisatid to the north, employed their superior power in sub- duing their weaker neighbors, 2 who thus lost their autonomy and became annexed to the territory of Elis. It was the general rule throughout Greece, that a victorious state undertook to perform 3 1 Xenoph. Hcllcn. vii. 4, 28 ; Diodor. xv. 78.
 * Strabo, viii. p. 354. 3 Thucyd. iv. 98