Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/334

 318 HISTORY OF GREECK. the current services of the conquered people towards ihe godtt, such services being conceived as attaching to the soil : hence, the celebration of the Olympic games became numbered among the incumbences of Elis, just in the same way as the worship of the Eleusinian Demeter, when Eleusis lost its autonomy, was included among the religious obligations of Athens. Tha Pisa- tans, however, never willingly acquiesced in this absorption of what had once been their separate privilege ; they long main- tained their conviction, that the celebration of the gams was their right, and strove on several occasions to regain it. On those occasions, the earliest, so fur as we hear, was connected with the intervention of Pheidon. It was at their invitation that the king of Argos went to Olympia, and celebrated the games him- self, in conjunction with the Pisatans, as the lineal successor of Herakles ; while the Eleians, being thus forcibly dispossessed, refused to include the 8th Olympiad in their register of the vic- torious runners. But their humiliation did not last long, for the Spartans took their part, and the contest ended in the defeat of Pheidon. In the next Olympiad, the Eleian management and the regular enrolment appear as before, and the Spartans are even said to have confirmed Elis in her possession both of Pisa- tis and Triphylia. 1 Unfortunately, these scanty particulars are all which we learn respecting the armed conflict at the 8th Olympiad, in which the religious and the political grounds of quarrel are so intimately blended, as we shall find to be often the case in Grecian his- tory. But there is one act of Pheidon yet more memorable, of which also nothing beyond a meagre notice has come down to us. He first coined both copper and silver money in JEgina, and first established a scale of weights and measures, 2 which, through his influence, became adopted throughout Peloponnesus, and acquired, ultimately, footing both in all the Dorian states, and in Boeotia, Thessaly, northern Hellas generally, and Mace- donia, under the name of the ^Eginaean Scale. There arose 1 Pausan. v. 22, 2 ; Strabo, viii. pp. 354-358 ; Herodot. vi. 127. The nam of the victor (Antikles the MessenianJ, however, belonging to the 8th Olym piad, appears July in the lists ; it must have been supplied afterwards.
 * Herodot. vi. 127 ; Ephor. ap. Strab. viii. pp. 358-376.