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On the occasion of the one hundred and fourth Olympiad, war existing between Arcadia and Elis, a combat took place in the sacred ground itself, an unholy struggle which dishonored the sanctuary of Panhellenic brotherhood, and caused the great temple of Zeus to be turned into a fortress against the assailants.
'Were you addressing a sphinx of granite in the arid sands of Egypt, you would have more chance of melting her. The winged words might fly uninterruptedly from your lips for a whole Olympiad; you could not move my resolution in the slightest. A heart of brass dwells in this marble breast of mine. Die or kill!
There is no literary Greek history before the age of Hekataios and Herodotos, three centuries subsequent to the first recorded Olympiad. A portion of this period is satisfactorily covered by inscriptions, but even these fail us before we get within a century of this earliest ascertainable date.
What prospect does he hold out? when are you to be up? does he think you will be on the top next year by the Great Mysteries, or the Panathenaea, say? Her. Too soon, Lycinus. Ly. By next Olympiad, then? Her. All too short a time, even that, for habituation to Virtue and attainment of Happiness. Ly. Say two Olympiads, then, for an outside estimate.
It was the Olympiad in which the Rhodian Dorieus gained his second victory, and the envoys having been introduced to make their speech after the festival, spoke as follows: "Lacedaemonians and allies, the rule established among the Hellenes is not unknown to us.
At length, on the death of Alcmaeon the thirteenth and last perpetual archon a new and more popular change was introduced into the government. The sway of the archon was limited to ten years. This change slowly prepared the way to changes still more important. This institution continued to the last days of Athenian freedom. This change took place in the 24th Olympiad.
It is said that in the eighty-fourth Olympiad, Empedocles restored to life a woman who was about to be buried, and that this circumstance induced the Greeks, for the future protection of the supposed dead, to establish laws which enacted that no person should be interred until the sixth or seventh day.
Soon even the historians began to use this way of dating important events; and by counting four years for each Olympiad, as the time between the games was called, we can find out exactly when the chief events in Greek history took place.
With these facts relative to the intelligence of an older race before us, the question naturally arises: What was the degree of civilization attained at a time when the Deity worshipped was an abstract principle involving the actual creative processes throughout Nature? and, notwithstanding our prejudices, we are constrained to acknowledge that these earlier conceptions are scarcely compatible with the barbarism which we have been taught to regard as the condition of all the peoples which existed prior to the first Greek Olympiad.
These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Helen and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as real to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving them he writes out freely his humor, and gives them body to his own imagination.
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