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54 ence of official deputations (called Theoriæ) from the various states, vying with each other in the magnificence of their dress and equipment. The numerous well-appointed cars, each drawn by four spirited horses, which started together for the chariot-race, must in themselves have been an exciting spectacle. And the athletes in their manly beauty and splendid muscular development provoked enthusiastic demonstrations from the spectators. A midsummer sun beat with only too fierce a radiance upon the scene by day; and at night, from a hundred banquets, songs of triumph and festivity rose into the clear sky illumined by the full orb of the harvest-moon.

The Olympian games were celebrated at intervals of four years. During the month in which they were held a sacred armistice was proclaimed by heralds throughout Greece. Thus all its various and often discordant tribes, laying aside for a while their mutual animosities, met in peaceful intercourse to swell the gathering at Olympia. As further illustrating the importance of the games in the eyes of Greeks, it may be mentioned that their unfailing occurrence at regular intervals supplied Greek historians with their chief basis of chronological computation. Such and such an event, they would say, happened in the third year of the 80th Olympiad. The contests themselves were by no means the only sources of attraction to the