The sixth century is the age of organized athletics. The rise of Sparta and her success in sport and war gave to the Greek world an object lesson on the value of systematic training, and henceforth the training of the body was an essential part of Greek education. Palaestrae and gymnasia were established everywhere, and Solon found it necessary to lay down laws for their conduct. These institutions were originally intended for the training of the young, but the growth of athletic competition soon called into being a new and specialized form of training, the training of competitors for the great games. An art of training sprung up, and in the time of Pindar the professors of the new art, besides reaping a rich harvest from their pupils, received honour scarcely inferior to that of the victors themselves. The rapid development of the Olympic festival had shown the value of athletics as a bond of union between Greeks throughout the world, and the general yearning after a unity which was destined never to be realized found expression in the establishment of other festivals for which Olympia served as a model.
At Delphi, the Isthmus, and Nemea, local festivals and competitions had long existed.[[72]] The oracle of Delphi had already acquired a Panhellenic, almost a cosmopolitan importance, rivalling that of Olympia. The Pythian festival was said to have been founded to commemorate Apollo’s victory over the Python. To expiate the death of the dragon, Apollo had been condemned to nine years of exile, and the festival was therefore held every ninth year, or, according to our reckoning, once in eight years. Later legend asserted that there had been athletic games at Delphi, and various heroes were named as victors in these sports. But it seems probable that the original competitions at Delphi were purely musical, and in the hymn for Apollo Delphusa expressly commends Delphi as the home for the god on the ground that there his altar will be undisturbed by the “whirling of fair chariots or the sound of swift-footed steeds.” The innate ambition of the Greek and his desire to outshine his fellows found vent in competitions of every sort. Musical competitions were specially connected with the worship of Apollo at Delos and at Sparta; at Delphi a prize was given for a hymn to Apollo chanted to the accompaniment of the cithara.
Such the festival remained till the outbreak of the first Sacred war. The war was due to the impious conduct of the Crisaeans, who, having command of the plain and the harbour of Cirrha, had enriched themselves at the expense of the Delphians and Apollo, by levying exorbitant tolls on the pilgrims who landed at Cirrha on their way to the oracle. The Delphians appealed to their natural protectors, the Amphictyonic League at Thermopylae, who straightway proclaimed a sacred war. The command of the expedition was given to the Thessalian Eurylochus; the Athenians, on the advice of Solon, sent a contingent under Alcmaeon, while Cleisthenes, the ambitious tyrant of Sicyon, eagerly embraced the opportunity of posing as a champion of Greek religion. The festival was restored and reorganized in 590 B.C. New musical events were added, a solo on the flute and a song accompanied by the flute; athletic and equestrian competitions also were introduced on the model of those at Olympia; but since Delphi as yet had no stadium, the games were held in the plain of Crisa below. The chariot-race for some reason or other was omitted, but two additional athletic events found a place, a long race and a diaulos race for boys.
The war, however, broke out afresh and lasted for six years, at the end of which, in 582, the festival was finally reorganized out of the spoil of Crisa as a pentaëteris, and placed under the control of the Amphictyons. The year 582 dates as the first Pythiad, and from this time the festival was held every fourth year, in the August of the third year of each Olympiad. The valuable prizes which had been offered of old were abolished, and in their place was substituted a crown of bay leaves plucked from the Vale of Tempe. The somewhat scanty details which we possess as to the festival and its history will be discussed in a later chapter. For the present it is sufficient to note one significant fact: the chariot-race which had been omitted in 590 was introduced in 582, and the first victor was Cleisthenes of Sicyon himself. The plains of Sicyon were admirably adapted for breeding horses, a pursuit which afforded its tyrants a ready means of increasing and displaying their wealth. Myron had already gained a victory in the chariot-race at Olympia, and his grandson Cleisthenes, shortly after his Pythian success, secured the same honour on the occasion when he issued his invitation to the suitors for the hand of Agariste. At Sicyon itself he commemorated the part which he had played in the Sacred war by a splendid colonnade built out of the spoils of Cirrha, and at the same time he reorganized as a local Pythia an ancient festival connected with the Argive hero Adrastus, whose memory he delighted to insult.[[73]] We may therefore safely regard the introduction of the chariot-race at Delphi as due to the tyrant’s influence, and the remodelling of the festival as part of his pushing Panhellenic policy.
Almost at the same time, perhaps in the same year, 582 B.C., the Isthmian festival was reorganized. This festival, which claimed an antiquity greater even than that of Olympia, was celebrated at the sanctuary of Poseidon, which stood in a grove of pine-trees at the south-east of the Isthmus, a little to the south of the eastern end of the present Corinth canal. The various legends of its origin are all connected directly or indirectly with the worship of Poseidon. The wreath of dry celery leaves, which in the time of Pindar was the prize, recalled the story that the games were first founded in honour of the luckless Melicertes at the spot to which his dead body was carried by a dolphin. According to another legend they were instituted by the Attic hero Theseus, when he had freed the land from the terror of the robber Sinis. This story points to the close connexion of the Isthmia with Athens. The Athenian envoys enjoyed the privilege of precedence (προεδρία) at this festival, and a space was reserved for them, as much as could be covered by the sail of the ship which brought them to the Isthmus. No other festival was so conveniently situated for the Athenians. Athens and Corinth had much in common, and were on most friendly terms before the relations between them were embittered by commercial rivalry, and their friendship was especially close in the period following the fall of the Cypselidae. Another version of the Theseus legend represents him as founding the Isthmia in rivalry of Heracles, who had founded the Olympic games; and here we may trace a certain jealousy existing between the two festivals.[[74]] We know on good authority that the Eleans were not allowed to compete at the Isthmia. This ban, which Elean tradition represented as a self-denying ordinance imposed by the curse of Molione, may well have originated in this rivalry. We can imagine that the Elean authorities regarded with no favour the rise of a rival festival on a site so central, the meeting-place of the trade of East and West. Yet, after all, Olympia had no reason to fear its rival. The central position of Corinth involving her in all the feuds and wars of Greek history, prevented the Isthmia from ever acquiring that unique independence which characterized the more remote Olympia. There can be little doubt, too, that from the first the festival reflected the luxurious commercial character of Corinth. There the joyous life of the Ionian race found vent in a sort of cosmopolitan carnival which contrasted strangely with the more strenuous Dorian festival of remote Olympia.
The remodelled festival was a trieteris, held in the spring of the second and fourth years of each Olympiad. The programme was a varied one, including, besides athletics and horse-races, musical competitions, and possibly a regatta. The presidency of the festival belonged to the Corinthians. Whether its establishment as a Panhellenic festival was due to the tyrant Periander or expressed the joy of the people at their liberation from his rule, the evidence does not allow us to determine. The latter seems to me more probable. The great tyrant, laid by his victory in the chariot-race at Olympia, and by costly offerings to Olympia and Delphi, tried to win the support of the authorities at these places, and it may well be that the founding of a rival festival marked the popular reaction against his policy. Be this as it may, the establishment of the Isthmia is another sign of the great national movement towards unity. Tyrants recognized and tried to utilize the movement for their own advantage. But Panhellenism was independent of tyrants; it was a spontaneous movement of the people, and it need cause no surprise that one Panhellenic festival should owe its origin to a tyrant, another to the people.
A similar doubt attaches to the last of the Greek festivals, the Nemea. The cypress grove of Nemea, where stood the temple of the Nemean Zeus, lay in a secluded valley among the hills, half-way between Phlius and Cleonae. Here under the presidency of the latter state local games had long been celebrated. They were said to have been founded by Adrastus as funeral games in honour of the child Opheltes, who, having been left by his nurse in the grove, had been devoured by a serpent. According to another story, they were founded by Heracles after his slaying of the Nemean lion, and by him dedicated to Zeus. They were reorganized in the year 573 B.C. as a trieteris, and took place like the Isthmia in the second and fourth year of each Olympiad, probably at the very beginning of the Olympic year in July. The prize was a wreath of fresh celery, but was said to have been originally a wreath of olive. As at Olympia, the managers of the games bore the title of Hellanodicae. As at Olympia, the contests were until later times purely athletic and equestrian. The striking resemblances to Olympia are clearly due to Dorian influence, and may perhaps help us to understand how it was that, within a few years of the founding of the Isthmia, a second Panhellenic festival was established in its immediate neighbourhood.
The little town of Cleonae, which held the presidency of the Nemea down to the time of Pindar, could certainly never have raised its festival unaided to Panhellenic dignity. Cleonae seems to have been for a time under the dominion of Cleisthenes of Sicyon; yet it seems hardly likely that the tyrant, who had already helped in establishing the Pythia at Delphi, besides a local Pythia at Sicyon, and whose policy was so markedly anti-Dorian, should have founded a second Panhellenic festival of so purely Dorian a type. Moreover, it seems that Cleonae had already thrown off the yoke of Cleisthenes, whose power was on the decline. Argos, too, was on the decline, and though Argos in the year 460 B.C. usurped the presidency of the games, we find similar claims put forward by Corinth and by Mycenae. The fact that so many states claimed the presidency of the festival suggests that its re-establishment was not the work of any one state but of the Dorians of the north-eastern Peloponnese generally. If we are right about the jealousy felt by the authorities of Olympia towards the newly-founded Isthmia, and the character of the latter festival, we may perhaps see in the founding of the Nemea the protest of Dorian puritanism against innovations which seemed to degrade the serious business of athletics. Scandalized by the laxness of the new festival, with its traffic and its pleasures and its multitude of entertainments, the Dorians of Argolis conceived the idea of founding at Cleonae an eastern counterpart of Olympia. The strenuousness of athletics in Argolis is surely indicated in the strength and severity characterizing the athletic school of sculpture which had its origin in Sicyon and Argos, half-way between which places appropriately lay Cleonae. The view suggested above is of course hypothetical, but it accords with what we know of the Isthmia and the Nemea, and satisfactorily explains the Panhellenic character of the latter.
Thus by the year 570 the four Panhellenic festivals were established. They were distinctively the sacred meetings (ἱεροὶ ἀγῶνες) and the games of the crown (στεφανῖται), so called to distinguish them from the numerous games where prizes of value were given (θεματικοί). It is no little proof of the true athletic feeling of the Greeks that in their four greatest festivals no prize was given but the simple crown of leaves. The cycle of these festivals will be best understood by a glance at the following table, which shows the order of the festivals during a single Olympiad.[[75]] It must be remembered that the Greek year began with the summer solstice, and consequently belongs half to one, half to the next year, according to our reckoning.
| Olympiad. | B.C. | ||||
| 55. 1 | 560/559 | 560 | Late Summer | Olympia. | |
| 2 | 559/8 | { | 559 | Summer | Nemea. |
| { | 558 | Spring | Isthmia. | ||
| 3 | 558/7 | 558 | August | Pythia. | |
| 4 | 557/6 | { | 557 | Summer | Nemea. |
| { | 556 | Spring | Isthmia. | ||
| 56. 1 | 556/5 | 556 | Late Summer | Olympia. | |