These five days included sacrifices, sports, and feasts. Sacrifices and feasts, both private and public, formed part of each day’s programme, especially of the first and last days, which must have been largely, if not entirely, occupied by such ceremonies. How many days were devoted to the actual sports we do not know. A scholiast states that they took place on five days,[290] but the statement is unsupported and certainly was not true of earlier times. The growth of the programme must have necessitated readjustment from time to time, and an extension of the time allotted to competitions. Such an extension took place, according to Pausanias, in Ol. 77, though it did not, of course, take effect till Ol. 78. “The order of the competition,” he says,[291] “existing in our time—which is that the sacrifice to the god is offered after the pentathlon and the horse-race—this order was introduced in the 77th Olympiad. Previous to this date, events both for men and horses took place on the same day. But on this occasion the competitors in the pankration were kept on into the night, not having been called in time, and the delay was caused by the horse-races and still more by the pentathlon.” This passage gives no countenance to the statement commonly made that at this time the length of the festival, or the number of days allotted to sport was suddenly extended from one day to five. Nor does it prove that before this date _all_ events for men took place on the same day as events for horses, and that after this date _none_ did. If the literal meaning of the words is pressed, it may be argued, and indeed has been argued, that from this date a separate day was assigned to the horse-races, and a separate day to the pentathlon. Unfortunately, we have a definite statement by Xenophon[292] proving that in Ol. 104 the horse-races preceded the pentathlon on the same day. Those who assert that they took place on different days are forced[293] to reject the evidence of a contemporary writer, who lived for years in the neighbourhood of Olympia, in favour of a doubtful interpretation of an obscure and ill-expressed passage written by a traveller who owed his information to a visit paid to Olympia some five hundred years later. The alternative is to assume that after Xenophon’s time a separate day was assigned to the horse-races, presumably at the time when the programme of these events was raised to its full complement of six. But this is a mere supposition. All that we can definitely assert is that, after Ol. 77, the pentathlon and horse-races were transferred to the _day before the sacrifice to the god_.