The same love of beauty must have helped to check the growth of specialization with its exaggerated and one-sided development, and also to preserve the purity of sport against the influence of professionalism. Thanks largely to this ideal Olympia maintained her prestige, and to a great extent her high standard of athletic honour, long after the liberty of Greece had become a memory, and her gods a laughing-stock of the satirist. An inscription of the reign of Hadrian, discovered at Olympia, is a striking illustration of this vitality. It records a decree in honour of T. Claudius Rufus, a pankratiast of Smyrna, who, though matched in the final heat of the pankration with an opponent who had drawn a bye in the preceding heat, fought on till nightfall, and left the contest drawn.[135] The decree relates how he had resided at Olympia for the necessary course of training so that his σωφροσύνη was recognized by all men, how he had trained according to the traditional customs of the games, and had in the stadium given an exhibition worthy of Olympian Zeus, and of his own training and reputation, in recognition of which the Eleans had voted him the right of erecting his statue in the Altis. The decree is perhaps somewhat fulsome, and suggests that such examples of σωφροσύνη must have been exceptional at the time. Yet it shows that the memory at least of the old ideal survived even under the empire and was still cherished at Olympia. We have already seen what an impulse was given to athletics and to the Panhellenic festivals by the Persian wars. No festival was more Panhellenic than that of Olympia, and no place felt more keenly than Elis the invigorating effects of the new spirit of unity and of freedom. Elis had played an inglorious part in the national struggle. The narrow and unprogressive oligarchy showed the same lack of energy and initiative which they had shown in the management of the Olympic festival during the sixth century. The Elean contingent arrived at Plataea too late to take part in the battle. Returning home full of bitter self-reproach they at once determined to put an end to the old régime, and banished the leaders who had been responsible for the fiasco. This was the beginning of the Synoecism of Elis which was not finally completed till 471 B.C., when the government of the scattered, unwalled villages was for the first time centred in the newly founded city state of Elis. The change was facilitated by the eclipse of Spartan prestige in the Peloponnese, while the growing influence of Athens was clearly shown both in these political changes and in the outburst of artistic activity at Olympia which followed the founding of Elis. But the new order could not fail to excite violent opposition, especially among the conservative folk of Pisatis and Triphylia, and their opposition culminated in a civil war which only ended about the year 470 or 469 with the devastation of the whole district by the Eleans.