But it must also be pointed out that although the Phigalians had taste and patriotism, no architect or artist rose among them to shape their stone. Ictinus and his fellow artists must come from Athens worthily to incarnate their desires. So a generation earlier they had been obliged to persuade Onatas, the master of the Æginetan school of sculpture, to carve for them a statue of Demeter. Nor were the Phigalians less skilled than other Arcadians. Scopas had to come from Paros to build the temple to Athena at Tegea. And it was foreign poets who turned the legends of Cyllenian Hermes and Pan into literature, and later enshrined in pastoral verse the tossing mountain forests and the cool rivers of Arcady.
This was Arcadia’s destiny, to offer the raw material of her domain to the shaping hand of more gifted races. Her greatest son was a soldier. Her own deeds were deeds of blood and strife, her own life was one of work and poverty. But because poets and artists of other blood wrought for her, her name and her inherent beauty have become forever domiciled in our own literature, even in our daily speech and commoner affections.
CHAPTER XVIII
OLYMPIA
“What time the mid-month moon in golden car flamed back her light and lit the eye of Evening full, pure judgment of Great Games did Heracles ordain and fifth year’s festival beside Alphēus and his holy banks.”
Pindar.
Whatever may be the final decision of archæologists, it was natural for Pausanias to identify the reclining figures in the east gable of the Zeus temple at Olympia as the Alpheus and Cladeus. The right angle made by the junction of these rivers is in a fertile plain where the Altis, the sacred enclosure of Olympia, lies at the foot of the Kronos hill. The Alpheus river is inseparably connected in Greek literature with the Great Games. For more than one thousand summers successively the full moon looked down upon the myriads of visitors who came from inland or from island homes, from Tenedos in the East, or from Sicily in the West. By the Alpheus they encamped and sank into dreamless sleep after their journeyings or, it may be, one or another, himself a competitor or an anxious relative, would be roused up by nightmares and outriders of grim Taraxippus, the Horse Frightener, whose ghost long held in mortmain the critical turning point in the Hippodrome. When the contests were ended, the same moon would silver the weather-beaten columns of the old Heræum or light up with its benignant splendour the new and stately shafts of the Zeus temple, the gray-green sacred olive tree, the great wings of the hovering Victory, the Parian marbles and the burnished bronzes, or still more beautiful, the naked ivory of the athletes’ limbs. And then, crowning all, the epinician hymn, newborn from Pindar’s brain, rose up on the wings of victorious music to the very summit of the Kronos hill.
OLYMPIA
Kronos Hill. The ruins of the Altis
The athletes had not far to journey from their last training place in Elis. The spectators had come from various directions, some from the sea-coast, some, as do the majority of modern visitors, from Patras on the coast of Achæa. But then, as now, the direct artery from the heart of Greece was the green valley of the Alpheus. The river clamps Arcadia and Elis together. Down this valley year by year in antiquity pilgrims journeyed to see the games and to attend the great Fair; here in modern times bands of tourists still pick their way up and down over smooth roads and rocky torrent-beds and cross the ford of the swollen stream; and a projected railroad, connecting (on paper) Megalopolis and Olympia, also follows the general course of the Alpheus. The river has two main sources. Its northern branch, the Ladon, draws its water from the rugged mountains of northern Arcadia. The other branch comes flowing down from the northwest end of Taygetus, curves through the plain of Megalopolis, plunges through the ravine of Karytæna and joins the Ladon near the western border of Arcadia, and the two united make their way through Elis to the Ionian sea. Nor even there is its end. In pursuit of the fountain nymph, Arethusa, Alpheus must needs reach Sicily. To the Greeks the Mediterranean was their highway, not the “salt, estranging sea.” According to Lucian, as Alpheus enters the sea, Poseidon, brimming over with curiosity, stops him and enquires: “What’s this, Alpheus? You alone of all rivers don’t go in for dissipation, and you keep your waters fresh and free from brine as you hurry on?”
(Alpheus) “It’s a love affair, Poseidon, so don’t cross-question me. You’ve been in love yourself and often too!”