The Isthmian festival, though inferior in athletic standard to the Olympia and in sanctity to the Pythia, was perhaps the most frequented of all the Panhellenic festivals.[339] It was held in the second and fourth year of each Olympiad, under the presidency of Corinth; and though there is some doubt as to the exact date, it seems certain that it was held in the spring, probably in April or early May.[340] No festival was so central and so accessible to all parts of the Greek world, whether by land or sea, and no place offered such innumerable attractions to visitors of every sort as Corinth, the city of commerce and of pleasure. The description which Dion Chrysostom has left of the crowds which flocked to the Isthmia in the first century A.D. has already been quoted. It reminds one of the crowd at a modern race-meeting, where princes, statesmen, millionaires, jostle with beggars, mountebanks, and sharpers. “The Isthmian festival,” says Livy,[341] “owed its popularity not only to the national love of witnessing contests of every sort in arts or strength or agility, but especially to the advantageous situation of the Isthmus, which, commanding the resources of two seas, was the natural meeting-place of the human race, the mart of Greece and Asia.” In these words we have, summed up, the essential characteristics of the Isthmia, the attractiveness and variety of their programme, their cosmopolitanism, and last but not least their commercial importance. Livy is speaking of the time in the opening years of the second century, when Flamininus proclaimed the liberty of Greece at the Isthmian festival. We cannot doubt that he had also in his mind the revived splendour of the festival in his own time, since Corinth which had been destroyed by Mummius had been refounded by Julius Caesar and become the capital of Achaia. Of the earlier history of the festival we unfortunately know little; but the few notices which have survived indicate that from the very first the character of the festival differed little from that ascribed to it by Livy and Dion Chrysostom. The reorganization of the ancient local festival in honour of Poseidon as a Panhellenic trieteris seems to have taken place either during the closing years of the Cypselidae, or shortly after their fall. These princes had laid the foundation of the maritime and commercial greatness of Corinth, which, under their patronage, took the lead in trade and literature and art. From this time her wealth and luxury were proverbial; but wealth and luxury are not the soil on which athletics flourish best. Corinth was not an athletic state; few great athletes hailed from her, and, whatever athletic vigour existed in early times in families such as the Oligaethidae soon died away. The character of the Isthmia cannot fail to have been determined by the character and relations of Corinth.