Olympia, above all, appealed to the antiquarian spirit of the age. It is chiefly to the traveller and antiquarian Pausanias, who visited Elis in 173 A.D., that we owe our knowledge of the festival. The mass of details which he gathered from the official guides of Olympia is sure evidence of the interest which the festival aroused. Phlegon of Tralles, like Aristotle in Macedonian times, revised and edited the Olympic register, making it the chronological basis of his history from 776 B.C. to 137 A.D. One C. Asinius Quadratus carried his zeal for Olympia to such lengths as to place the founding of Rome in the year of the first Olympiad, for which act of flattery he received from the Eleans a monument, “because he had honoured Olympia both in word and deed.”[274] Others, not content with a chronology that dated back only to Coroebus, invented a new Olympic era 800 years earlier. On an inscribed diskos dedicated by Publius Asclepiades, a pentathlete of Corinth, the date is given according to the two chronologies, Ol. 255 and Ol. 456! and also by the name of the Alytarch for the year, “Flavius Scribonianus, kinsman of senators and consulars.” Archaism took a more practical shape in the minute observance of ceremonies and customs. In the inscription of Claudius Rufus, mentioned in a previous chapter, he is commended especially for having diligently practised in the sight of the Hellanodicae, “in accordance with the ancestral custom of the games.” Our knowledge of the usages of the festival is chiefly derived from authors of this period. We have already seen how these usages were reproduced in the new festivals.