All this was part of the exaggerated pomp with which the festival itself in all its details was conducted; its processions, feastings, proclamations, and sacrifices, where each state vied with the others in making a show of gold and silver plate and displaying all the wealth they possessed. Ostentation was not a common fault in Greece, but it had full scope at Olympia. The two worst defects of the Greek character were also prominent there--a contempt for women which forbade any female even to be present, and an exaggerated idea of racial purity which shut out all competitors except those of undisputed Greek descent. But the spectacle must have been a splendid one, and it undoubtedly inspired some of the finest works of Greek art. The erection of a statue in the Altis was one of the honours given to victorious athletes to glorify their triumph, and if the victor was unable himself to meet the expense of setting up such a monument, the cost was often borne for him by his native city. ‘In the courts of Olympia,’ as Walter Pater says, ‘a whole population in marble and bronze gathered quickly,--a world of portraits out of which, as the purged and perfected essence, the ideal soul, of them, emerged the _Diadumenus_ and the _Discobolus_.’ Pausanias gives us a list of some of the great sculptors whose works were still standing there in his time--Hagelaidas, Pythagoras, Kalamis, Myron, Polycleitus, Lysippus, and possibly Pheidias--and these nude figures established a canon of bodily perfection which had no little influence in actual life. Poets also vied with sculptors in glorifying the Olympic victor. Simonides of Keos and Bacchylides sang his praise, and in the Epinikian Odes of Pindar we have the greatest of all memorials to the athletic spirit--‘Verse that is all of gold and wine and flowers, and is itself avowedly a flower, or “liquid nectar,” or “the sweet fruit of his soul, to men that are winners in the games.” “As when from a wealthy hand one lifting a cup, made glad within with the dew of the vine, maketh gift to a youth”: the keynote of Pindar’s verse is there.’ With a choral music unsurpassed in any language, with wealth of legend and myth, with accumulation of epithet and metaphor, Pindar bears his witness to the pride of physical perfection. And with all the grandeur of his odes it is significant that he lacks conspicuously both the Spartan virtue of simplicity and the Athenian desire for economy of effort. ‘His soul rejoiced in splendour--splendour of stately palace halls where the columns were of marble and the entablature of wrought gold; splendour of temples of the gods, where the sculptor’s waxing art had brought the very deities to dwell with man; splendour of the white-pillared cities that glittered across the Ægean and Sicilian seas; splendour of the holy Panhellenic games, of whirlwind chariots and the fiery grace of thoroughbreds, of the naked shapely limbs of the athlete, man and boy.’[B]