Harper's Round Table, May 12, 1896

Copyright, 1896, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.

Thronged to the gates is the little town of Elis on this the night before the Olympic Games. Here are present not only men of every Grecian city and province, but strange wanderers from the uttermost corners of the world have assembled to view the games that honor the Ruler of the Gods.
Far away across the plain—so far that the many-voiced tumult of the crowded city is but an echo—in dark silence stand the sacred olive groves. Against the grayish-green foliage gleam the white tents of the athletes, chosen from all Greece, who are to compete on the morrow. Close to where towers the vast temple of Olympian Zeus, the world-wonder that Lidon made, is a little group of tents that shelter the men of Croton, famed for the might of her athletes. One of all the competitors lies wakeful. Dion, the son of Glaucus, gazes from his couch with wide-open eyes out into the night, sees the glimmer of the stars through the flickering leaves, listens to the whisper of the boughs overhead, and sleeps not. On the morrow he, a youth of eighteen, is to run in the dolichos, the hardest race of the games. His breath comes in gasps and the blood drums in the boy's ears as for the hundredth time in fancy he runs his race. The horrible waiting, the strain of suspense, have unnerved many an athlete more seasoned than Dion. A short hour before, Hippomaches, the grizzled old trainer of Croton, had made a final visit to see that all was well with his charges. Close on his departure came Glaucus, the boy's father, a man well past three score, yet with massive frame seemingly untouched by time as when, forty-four years ago, the mighty Milo of Syracuse had fallen before him under such a deadly cestus-stroke that the blow of Glaucus passed into a proverb. Dion, who had inherited the slighter frame and almost girlish beauty of a Thessalian mother, has always felt more of awe than affection for his silent Lacedæmonian father, little knowing what a wealth of love for his latest-born the grim old Spartan concealed under his impassive coldness.