Dion Chrysostom gives us an interesting glimpse of the Isthmia during the first century, in the story he tells of Diogenes’ visit to the festival.[250] The scene is laid in the fourth century B.C., but the details are clearly drawn from the orator’s own experience. Diogenes the Cynic happens to visit Corinth at the time of the festival. There, at the cross-roads of the world, he finds gathered together visitors from Ionia and Sicily, from Italy and Libya, from Massilia and the Borysthenes. Around the temple of Poseidon are wretched sophists shouting and abusing one another, their pupils are fighting, historians are reading meaningless compositions, poets are reciting verses, miracle-mongers are working miracles, augurs are interpreting omens, thousands of orators are wrangling, and merchants of every sort are bargaining. The crowd, regardless of all other interests, is watching the performances of the athletes, “mere slaves,” he calls them, “that run and jump and dance.” Here Diogenes sees a band of friends carrying a victor in the foot-race in triumphant procession, while the people shout and cheer and heap upon him fillets and garlands. The Cynic stops him and points out that after all he is not as swift as the hare or the deer, the most cowardly of animals. He himself has won a victory over adversaries that cannot be overcome by men “stuffed and puffed, who spend whole days in eating and snore all night like pigs,” for he has won a victory over pain and pleasure. Finally he boldly puts upon his head the celery crown, and when the indignant officials protest, asks them, “Will ye take the crown from me and give it to him who is stuffed with most meat?” The rhetoric is for the most part mere commonplace of the schools; yet we cannot doubt that the description is true of the Isthmia and of other festivals, especially of those in the rich cities of the East. In such soil corruption throve. Philostratus, writing more than a century later, tells us that victories were publicly bought and sold; even the trainers encouraged the traffic, lending money for bribery to athletes at exorbitant rates of interest.[251] At the Isthmia a competitor who had promised his rival 3000 drachmae to let him win, refused to pay on the ground that he had won on his merits. Recourse was had to the oath, and the defeated competitor publicly swore before the altar of Poseidon that he had been promised the money if he allowed himself to be defeated. “What,” adds Philostratus, “might not happen in Ionia or in Asia?”