It was at the ancient tomb of Pelops, Pindar tells us, that Heracles the son of Zeus, returning from his victory over Augeas, founded the Olympian games. There “he measured a sacred grove for the Father, and having fenced round the Altis marked the bounds thereof. There he set apart the choicest of the spoil for an offering from the war and sacrificed and ordained the fifth year feast.” “In the foot-race down the straight course was Likymnius’ son Oeonus first, from Nidea had he led his host; in the wrestling was Tegea glorified by Echemus; Doryclus won the prize of boxing, a dweller in the city of Tiryns, and with the four-horse chariot Samos of Mantinea, Halirrhothius’ son; with the javelin Phrastor hit the mark; in distance Eniceus beyond all others hurled the stone with a circling sweep, and all the warrior company thundered a great applause.”[48] The poet has glorified into a Peloponnesian festival what can have been no more than a local gathering in which the neighbouring chieftains took part, and the introduction of Heracles may have been an invention of the Eleans; for, according to Pausanias, it was Iphitus who first induced the Eleans, or, as he should have said, the Pisatans, to sacrifice to Heracles whom they had before regarded as their enemy. Yet there is probably some truth in the connexion of the games with Pelops’ grave, a tradition which we find also in Pindar’s great rival Bacchylides. But who was Pelops? Was he god, man, or hero? Like the oracle of Delphi when asked a similar question about Lycurgus, we may well doubt. Yet in spite of certain modern authorities, who see local gods in most of the heroes of legend, it is perhaps safer to accept the universal belief of the Greeks that he was a man, some chieftain who after his death was worshipped as a hero. Moreover, the tradition of his Phrygian origin is a strong argument against the view that he was a native pre-Achaean god of the Peloponnese, though it is by no means incompatible with his connexion with the Achaeans in view of the original kinship of the latter with the Phrygians. At all events Pelops is pre-Dorian, and the victors in these games, according to Pindar, are pre-Dorians.