Still more significant than these names is the number of competitors. Pindar, in his ode on the victory of Arcesilas, states that in this race no less than forty chariots fell. The entries, then, must have been still more numerous. We may doubt whether such a field was possible at Olympia. The princes of the West can have formed but a small portion of the entries; few of them can have cared to undertake the expense and labour necessary to compete so far from home unless they had a good prospect of success. A field of forty implies large entries from the home district, and the home district of Delphi afforded an abundant supply of competitors. Northern Greece was a land of horses, and therefore, as Aristotle remarks, of oligarchies. Thessaly, in particular, was famed for producing the finest horses in Greece, and Thebes was famous for its chariots.[334] In both countries the power was in the hand of the land-owning classes, whose wealth consisted largely in their studs of horses. In Thessaly cavalry were first organized and employed for war. Thebes was credited with the first victory in the chariot-race, Thessaly with the first victory in the horse-race at Olympia. They had celebrated local festivals. Pindar’s second Pythian is in honour of a victory in the chariot-race won by Hieron at some Theban festival, either the Heraclea or the Iolaea, and the thirteenth ode of Bacchylides celebrates the victory of Cleoptolemus of Thessaly in the Thessalian Petraea. Some idea of the proportion of local entries at the Pythia may be formed from the list of competitors given in the description of the chariot-race in the _Electra_ of Sophocles. There are ten competitors. One comes from Sparta, one from Achaea; Orestes himself is proclaimed an Argive, but drives a team of Thessalian horses; two are Libyans from Barca, which reminds us of the victory of Arcesilas; the remaining five are an Athenian, a Boeotian, an Aetolian, a Magnesian, and an Aenianian. The Magnetes and Aenianes were Thessalian tribes belonging to the ancient Amphictyony. Thus five came from Northern Greece, two from the colonies, and three from the Peloponnese, if we suppose the Achaean to belong to the Peloponnesian and not to the Thessalian Achaeans. The few records which we possess of the fourth century and later suggest that the competition was now practically confined to Northern Greece, the only exception being the victory of Ptolemaeus, the son of Lagus, in 314 B.C., and he, though king of Egypt, was a Macedonian. In the second century there seem to have been horse-races in connexion with the official deputations, Pythaids, sent from time to time from Athens to Delphi; but these deputations had no necessary connexion with the Pythian games. In Roman times we find no mention of horse or chariot races at Delphi, and we may therefore assume that, owing to the impoverishment of Greece, these competitions had ceased to exist.