The value of athletics and their political importance had been realised by Solon. Besides making rules for the conduct of gymnasia he offered a public reward of 500 drachmae to each Olympian victor, 100 to each Isthmian victor, and so on to the victors in other games. This measure is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt on the part of Solon to check the extravagant rewards lavished on athletes. Such a view is utterly false. There is no evidence that athletes did receive extravagant rewards in Solon’s time: and 500 drachmae, though perhaps a trivial sum to the professional athletes of a later and degenerate age, was then a considerable amount.[85] Rather we may see in this measure an attempt to encourage athletics among the people, and perhaps to counteract the growing love of chariot-racing among the aristocracy. It is tempting to ascribe to Solon’s influence and policy the founding of the Panathenaea, or rather the remodelling of the old Athenaea, under this name. This event is assigned to the year 566 B.C., about the time when Athens, by the efforts of Solon and Peisistratus, finally made herself mistress of Salamis, and thus, by securing the control of the bay of Eleusis, was at last enabled to develop, unchecked, her maritime and commercial policy. The founding of the Panathenaea is attributed to Peisistratus, who certainly encouraged athletics and developed the festival; but, if the date 566 B.C. is correct, the festival was founded six years before he became tyrant, and while he was still the trusted friend of Solon, and, owing to his success in war, the hero of the people. The name Panathenaea seems significant, both of that unity of the Athenian people, which Solon tried with somewhat chequered success to promote, and also of that dream of expansion which Athens, freed from the rivalry of Megara, was now beginning to cherish. At the same time we can see in the name why the Panathenaea could never become truly Panhellenic. Olympia, Delphi, Nemea were fitted to become Panhellenic by virtue of the political insignificance of the states that controlled them; even the Isthmia, though held under the presidency of Corinth, was by its name dissociated from that power, and Corinth herself was in her own way a Panhellenic centre where politics were as yet subordinate to commerce. In such places the national desire for unity found a natural expression. But the Panathenaic festival was in the first place the festival of the union of Attica in the worship of Athene, and the only unity which it could offer to the rest of Greece was unity beneath the Aegis of Athene. Thus, while at the Panhellenic festivals all events were open to the whole of Greece, at Athens, besides such open events, we find others confined to her own citizens.