Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

All the buildings for the athletes and for the contests—the Palæstra, the Gymnasium, the Stadium, and the Hippodrome—lay outside of the sacred enclosure, while the Altis itself was reserved for the real purpose of this consecrated spot, the worship of Zeus, under all his manifold activities, and of the other gods who helped to round out and to satisfy the aspirations, the hopes, and fears of the Greek heart that was “in all things very religious.” To cover all possible oversights there was at Olympia, as by the Areopagus of St. Paul’s day, or at Phalerum, an altar to Unknown Gods. Just as the drama was a religious spectacle, so the games were conducted by the real Greek in the same spirit. The athletes went forth from the Altis to the contest, the victors reëntered it to receive the olive crown, and within it their statues and offerings were set up in the immediate presence of the gods.

In the Altis the ancient Heræum, with its indications of an earlier wooden structure, carries back the thought far beyond the first Olympiad in the eighth century B. C. The new god Zeus was just emerging from the tutelage of his predecessor on the Kronos hill above. In this early age he seems hardly more than a Prince Consort by the side of Hera who, in Pindar’s sixth Olympian, is invoked as the “Maiden” or ever Zeus had led her to the bridal chamber. One of the least obtrusive ruins in the Altis marks the site near the Heræum of the great altar of Zeus or, possibly, the common shrine of Zeus and Hera. Annually the priests kneaded with water from the Alpheus the ashes of the thighs of victims offered, as in the Iliad, to the god, and plastered a layer upon this primitive altar. Only the water of the Alpheus was acceptable to the god in preparing this clay, and thus year by year was cemented the union between the visible and the unseen, the beneficent river-god of the land and the Olympian god whose dome overarched the widespread land of Hellas.

Approaching historic records we read that Iphitus in 793 B. C. or, by the usual reckoning, in 776 B. C., four hundred and eight years after the traditional capture of Troy, renewed the games which had been discontinued for twenty-eight Olympiads after the time of Pelops and Heracles. The Heræum, until recently known as the most ancient temple in Greece, certainly existed at this time, although differing in material and in contents from the temple that Pausanias describes. Both the ground structure and enough of the lower part of the walls remain to enable the expert to reconstruct in imagination the whole building up to the gable upon which rested the terra-cotta acroterion now preserved in the Museum. At the west end of the cella we see the base of the great statues of Hera and Zeus. Suitably enough, while Zeus has disappeared the archaic head of Hera was found and is now in the Museum. And, prostrate before one of the side niches, just where Pausanias describes it, was found the Hermes of Praxiteles with the infant Dionysus on his arm. This beautiful statue alone would have repaid the cost of the whole excavation. It unites the beauty of the athlete’s body with the Greek conception of divinity in frank, idealizing anthropomorphism.

The catholicity of Greek polytheism may be illustrated by the rest of the company within the Heræum as described by Pausanias. It was not that every god “had his day,” like the rotation in office of the Athenian prytanes, but there was a precinct and a function for each and every manifestation of pulsating life, from the humblest Nereid to Olympian Hera. “Known to each other are all the immortal gods,” as Homer says. They were all entered in their Almanach de Gotha and could upon occasion live in harmony, except when some Eris threw her apple of discord in their midst or “golden” Aphrodite struggled in the Council of the Gods for precedence over the mere bigness of the Colossus of Rhodes. At any rate, in Hera’s temple were placed statues of the Seasons and of Themis, their mother, personifying orderly and unchanging Law; the five Hesperides, stimulating the eager Hellenic mind to reach out after the unknown; Athena, goddess in peace and war; the Maid and Demeter, embodying the fruitful beneficence of nature and the mysteries of the unseen; Apollo and Artemis, welcomed or feared by turns for their arrows of light or shafts of destruction; Latona, their mother, whose Delian refuge was firmly moored to every other sacred shrine in Greece. Here too was Fortune, who had a not insignificant rôle in Greek as in Roman life, and Dionysus, god of Tragedy and of Comedy, was represented as accompanied by a winged Victory.

The Prytaneum of the Eleans, trustees of the land and of the games, was enclosed within the Altis at the northwest corner of the Heræum. It was built over in Roman times, but the Greek structure beneath seems to have been of very early date. Here were sung ancient songs in the Doric dialect, and here, in the banquet-hall, the Olympic victors were feasted.

Next in historic order come the remains of a row of twelve treasuries, ranged along close to the Kronos hill from the Heræum to the Stadium entrance. They are ascribed to the sixth century B. C. or, in the case of part of the most easterly one, to the beginning of the fifth century. These little buildings are of great architectonic and historic import. Half of them were dedicated by communities from over the seas; five by Italian and Sicilian Greeks. The fragments from the treasury of Selinus recall at once the archaic temples and sculpture on the shore of Sicily that faces Carthage. The Syracusan Treasury was re-named “Carthaginian” by reason of spoils, taken by the Syracusans from their Punic enemies in the battle of Himera and placed here to unite at this common shrine the victors of Salamis with their brothers in the west.

In the fifth century B. C. the flush of victory at Salamis not only lit up the Acropolis at Athens but spread to this green valley in Elis. The great Zeus temple was built. Its pediments, as we have already seen, were adorned with sculptured myths appealing at once to local pride and to wider Hellenic patriotism. In the eastern gable Zeus stood upright as arbiter in the chariot contest of Pelops; in the western gable the archaic yet majestic Apollo appeared as the defender against the Centaurs, the barbarian invaders. To emphasize the honour due to Athens there was painted on the throne within the temple a representation of Pirithöus, the bridegroom of Hippodameia, and his friend, the Athenian Theseus. The victories over the Persians were again symbolized by the contest between Theseus and the Amazons wrought upon the footstool of the seated god, and, as if to put the meaning beyond all doubt, here too were Greece and Salamis personified, the latter holding in her hand the figurehead of a ship. The metope sculptures represented the labours of Heracles who, as founder of the games, typified to patriot and athlete bodily powers and indomitable will. The cella of the temple was reserved for the great gold-ivory statue of Zeus, who was seated while others stood. Phidias established his workshop by the sacred enclosure and wrought. And the result of his handiwork was a world’s wonder for long centuries. Into his creation were breathed Homeric dignity, Attic beauty, and Hellenic pride. Dio Chrysostom in the first century of the Christian era could say of it: “Methinks that if any one who is heavy-laden in mind, who has drained the cup of misfortunes and sorrows in life, and whom sweet sleep visits no more, were to stand before this image, he would forget all the griefs and troubles that are incidental to the life of man.”

Time and earthquakes and plunderers have worked almost utter ruin. But the ground plan of the temple remains to tell a detailed story, and some of the great shafts lie prostrate where they fell. In the Museum is preserved, more or less complete, the major part of the gable sculptures, fortunately including the very noble figure of Apollo, and the mutilated but beautiful metopes. The gold-ivory statue has disappeared long since. It is possible that it may have been destroyed when the temple was burnt in the reign of Theodosius II, but a Byzantine historian claims that the statue was still standing in a palace at Constantinople when it was consumed by fire in 475 A. D. In front of the Zeus temple are still to be seen some blocks of the lofty triangular column over which Pæonius caused his winged Nike to hover. The statue itself, in large part intact, is set up in the Museum and belongs to the more beautiful of our inheritances from antiquity.

If now we add, in imagination, the great council hall, possibly lying southeast from the temple, and the older colonnade bounding the east side of the Altis, and if we add the pentagonal Pelopion and the minor sanctuaries, and fill in the forest of statues of athletes and of gods, we shall have the more salient features of the sacred enclosure down through the great period immediately following the Persian wars. To the beginning of the fourth century is attributed the little temple of the Mother of the Gods east of the Heræum. Running in a line from this up to the very entrance of the Stadium is a long row of pedestals. Upon these stood the Zanes, or bronze statues of Zeus, which were erected from fines imposed upon offenders against the rules of the games. They stood where the contestants must see them just as they passed from the Altis into the Stadium. It is significant that the first recorded serious violation of athletic honour did not occur until 388 B. C., only a half century before free Greece was crushed at Chæronea, and that the next occasion was in the 112th Olympiad, six years after Macedonian rule was established. This second time it was an Athenian who had bribed his competitors, and the Athenians, like some modern sympathizers with athletic criminals, were shameless enough to press the Eleans to remit the fine. But the god at Delphi compelled the Athenians to submit. Standing before the Opisthodomus, the rear porch of the Zeus temple, from which poet, historian, and philosopher were wont to utter high words on noble themes, the crowd may have looked up at the great Apollo with his hand outstretched and imagined him dictating the inscription placed, on a similar occasion, upon the base of one of the Zanes: “An Olympic victory is to be gained not by money but by fleetness of foot and strength of body.”

Macedon also left its records. When Philip had defeated the Greeks at Chæronea in 338 B. C., his first care was to prove that he was Hellene and not the barbarian that Demosthenes considered him. The Philippeum was dedicated, and in it were erected gold-ivory statues of Philip’s father Amyntas, of Philip, of the mother and grandmother of Alexander, and of Alexander himself. Alexander’s right to contend at the games was vindicated. In this period also was added on the eastern side of the Altis the beautiful Echo colonnade with its sevenfold echo.