Connected with this story of the evolution of the games is the precedence given to the stade-race, the winner of which gave his name to the Olympiad. This custom, as we have seen, is not earlier than the third century, and arose not from the excessive importance of that event, but from the mere accident of its coming first on the programme and also on the list of victors. The Greek sportsman had doubtless long been in the habit of dating the years by reference to the victory of some famous athlete, especially if he were a fellow-countryman. Thucydides twice quotes in dates Olympic victories, each time victories in the pankration, an event very popular at Athens. In the earliest inscription that uses the Olympiads for chronology the pankration is also the event mentioned.[60] Hence one is inclined to suspect the completeness of the list of winners in the stade-race. Possibly early records and traditions often stated the fact of a victory without mentioning the event in which it was won, and the compiler of the register, having adopted his theory of development, assumed that all such victories were won in the foot-race. In 776 B.C. Olympia itself had as yet changed but little. The only building was the Heraeum, a long, low, narrow temple built originally of wood. One of the wooden pillars was still standing in the time of Pausanias. As the wooden pillars decayed they were replaced by stone pillars. Hence the pillars, many of which are still standing, differed in size, in material, in their fluting and their capitals, the earliest belonging in style to the seventh or sixth centuries, the latest to the Roman period. The temple was a treasure-house. There was kept the diskos of Iphitus, and at a later period the chest of Cypselus, and the table of ivory and gold on which the crowns for the victors were placed. Of the wealth of votive offerings and statues that once adorned this temple nearly all have perished; but there, at the exact spot described by Pausanias, the German excavators found the Hermes of Praxiteles, which represents the most perfect type of that physical beauty and harmonious development that Greek athletics produced. The number of altars had no doubt grown. The altar of Zeus already rivalled, if it did not eclipse, the earlier altar of Hera and the tomb of Pelops. This altar stood on a double elliptical base of stone, the lower base 125 feet, the upper 32 feet in circumference. The altar itself was built up of the ashes of the victims which were brought once every year by the seers from the Prytaneum, kneaded with water from the Alpheus and deposited on the altar. In the time of Pausanias it had reached a height of 22 feet.