Near the centre of the Altis has been found the foundation of the great altar of Zeus (which was made of ashes and rose to a height of 22 feet), and not far off an ancient altar of Hera, where an immense quantity of small bronzes and terra-cotta figures has been found. In the same neighbourhood has been traced the _Pelopium_, a precinct sacred to the memory of Pelops, where he was worshipped as a hero with a ritual of a sad and gloomy nature, directed to a pit as an emblem of the grave, and more akin to the primitive worship of the Chthonian or infernal gods than to that of the deities who were enthroned on lofty Olympus. The fame of Olympia may be said to have rested even more on its games than on its religious associations, though the secular and sacred were so bound up with one another, in ancient Greece, that it is scarcely possible to form a true conception of the one without the other. The Olympian games held the foremost place among those competitive exhibitions, which were so illustrative of the spirit of emulation characteristic of the Greeks, as well as of their ideal of a harmonious development of body and soul. There were three other foundations of the same kind: the Pythian, in honour of Apollo, likewise held every four years; the Nemean (under the care of Argos), every second year, in honour of Zeus; and the Isthmian (under Corinth), also held every second year, in honour of Poseidon. The prizes were respectively a wreath of bay, of pine, and of parsley, a palm-branch being also placed in the hand of the victor. The prize at Olympia was a wreath of olive, cut with a golden sickle by a boy, both of whose parents had to be alive--as among the Gauls the priest had to cut the sacred mistletoe with the same precious metal. At the three other places just mentioned the games dated practically from the first quarter of the sixth century B.C. But the register of victors in the Olympian games went back to 776 B.C., which is the first definite and reliable date (called the First Olympiad) in Greek chronology. The origin of all these gatherings may probably be traced to the funeral games mentioned in Homer and Hesiod, which were celebrated by a chief in honour of a departed friend or relative. According to one account the Olympian games were instituted by Heracles in honour of Pelops, grandfather of Agamemnon and brother of the ill-fated Niobe, who had come to Pisa from the Lydian kingdom of his father Tantalus--that presumptuous guest at the table of the gods whose name is immortalised for us in the English word which describes the nature of his penal sufferings. The traditional connection of Olympia with Asia Minor is borne out by the resemblance of the bronzes above mentioned to early Phrygian art, as well as by other circumstances; and there is no reason to doubt that Olympia was at one time in the hands of the Achæans.