Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

The sea-god on learning of the object of Alpheus’s passion expresses much approval. But Alpheus cuts him short: “I am pressed with engagements. You detain me, Poseidon, by your superfluous questions!”

(Poseidon) “You’re right. Be off to your Beloved. Rise up from the water, mingle with the fountain and be ye twain one stream.”

Lucian’s contemporary Pausanias is troubled with no doubts, and solemnly reaffirms the wedlock of Alpheus and Arethusa, although the more sceptical Strabo in the preceding century had naïvely argued against the credibility of the popular belief that a cup thrown into the Alpheus reappears in the fountain at Syracuse. Antigonus Carystus had stoutly maintained that “when the entrails of the victims are thrown into the Alpheus the waters of Arethusa in Sicily grow turbid.”

Be all that as it may, Alpheus mingling his waters with the Sicilian fountain is typical of the stream of competitors who were constantly returning from the Olympic games to Magna Græcia. Of Pindar’s fourteen Olympic odes nine were written for Sicilian or Italian victors. In general one of the most noteworthy facts in the history of the games is the widespread distribution of the clientèle. The competitors and visitors converging from Greece; the innumerable votive offerings here dedicated; the common motives of religion here illustrated in art and literature generated a centripetal national spirit that could retard though not destroy the centrifugal individualism of the Greeks.

The only fact more conspicuous than the wide territory represented is the longevity of the Olympic celebrations. The Great Games were continued both under Macedonian rule and even for long years after the Hellenic world, east and west, subjugated, dismembered, and rearranged like parti-colored bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, had fallen into place in the imperial pattern of the great Roman mosaic. The splendid Philippeum at Olympia was witness to the eagerness with which Philip and Alexander made good their legitimate claim to Hellenic blood. Roman emperors, like Tiberius and Nero, by their very presence, however arrogant, gave one more sign of the Greeks’ intellectual suzerainty over their captors.

Although Elis, even in October after the long hot summer, presents a contrast to the burnt plains and hills about Athens, yet the traveller will be best rewarded if he comes to Olympia by the end of February or early in March. If he comes from Patras and will penetrate a little inland from the railroad near the river Stimana, the ancient Larisos, he will find himself in the midst of beautiful woodland scenery. The whole country, with its fine oak trees, reminded the traveller Mure of “the wilder parts of Windsor Park.” Even at the little stations are seen shepherds in their shaggy coats, with conversation-beads and staffs and flocks of sheep. At Olympia itself the new green of the trees and grass, the pink of the almond blossoms on the banks of the Alpheus, and all the awakening of the early spring help to dissipate the melancholy that is wont to invade the mind in a lonely site amidst ruins which record some by-gone efflorescence of human activity. This Olympian plain, through which the Alpheus sweeps down to the sea between fields and vineyards, offered ample room for the vast throngs of visitors. There was no city accommodation. They must encamp in the open as they do to-day at many a modern festival. But the smiling valley was a fit place to worship Zeus, the god of the open sky. Xenophon, who lived on his estate just beyond the hills which bound the plain to the south, tells in the “Anabasis” how the returning Greeks, when they sighted the Euxine sea from the mountain ridge, held impromptu games and races on an impossible slope where men and horses tumbled amidst the jeers of the spectators. The plain of the Alpheus was perfectly adapted both for the games and all that the festival implied. It is easy to see how contests would become popular here before they were instituted on the narrow ledges of Parnassus at Delphi.

For the Greeks of the classical period the mythical founding of the games in prehistoric times threw back the first contests into a conveniently dim perspective. In this penumbra of Greek mythology like-named replicas of gods, heroes, or mortals now blend together, now assert their independence. The Cretan Heracles is said to have brought the infant Zeus from Mount Ida to the Kronos hill in the Golden Age and to have first instituted the games. Then again it is the national hero Heracles, himself Zeus-descended, who cleanses the stables of King Augeas in Elis with the help of the Alpheus and the Cladeus river-gods, and thereupon founds the games.

To the reverent Greek his mythology was not an entertaining treasury of mere fairy tales. The stories of two contests were selected with intent as the theme for the sculptures most prominent of all in the sacred enclosure. In the east gable of the Zeus temple was represented Hippodameia, the daughter of Œnomaus. Her father has already in his swift chariot overtaken and slain many suitors who had failed to outspeed him while contending for his daughter’s hand. At the side of Hippodameia stands Pelops just starting to win, by the favour of Zeus and the treachery of Œnomaus’s charioteer, a prehistoric Olympic victory.

In the west gable was the contest between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. The latter are represented as invading the festival at the marriage of another Hippodameia to Pirithous, whose friend and ally of old was the hero, Theseus of Athens. The brute Centaurs presumably symbolize the barbaric power of the Persians, whose defeat by Athens and her allies was here fittingly celebrated as another Olympic victory. This may be taken as the official expression, at the supreme moment of Greek history, of one of the wider meanings of the games.

The first view of the excavations at Olympia is disappointing and bewildering to the amateur visitor, and a mere topographical survey hopelessly[hopelessly] confounds history. Even a superficial appreciation of the ruins presupposes a more special preparation than is necessary, for example, at Pompeii. At Olympia, although it, too, was overwhelmed, being destroyed by earthquakes and buried in soft earth by the loyal river-gods, the imagination must concern itself with various epochs: the prehistoric; the period from the first Olympiad to the Persian wars; the age of Pericles; the following century; the Macedonian period; and, finally, that of the Greek world under Roman sway.