Of the hymns in honour of mortals victorious in the games we still have some of the greatest representatives in the Pythian odes of Bacchylides and Pindar. Pindar may well boast that his song of triumph was a splendour in the Pythian crown of Hiero of Syracuse; that he would come to him over the deep sea, a light shining farther than any heavenly star. For only through a victory at some one of the four great festivals of Greece was even a tyrant sure of any Panhellenic honour. The centrifugal forces of Greek life found an antidote in these expressions of common ideals. It has, indeed, been often said that the only other antidote lay in the political organization of Delphi itself. But this political unity was limited, and, if Delphi focused Greek interests in any way that even Olympia could not, the reason must be sought in facts that lay beneath a particular form of government. In the lofty Stadium men from cities whose disparate and jealous memorials lay below united in self-forgetful applause of all the victors. Here the traveller may pause to grasp, amid the chaos of swift impressions, a picture of the Delphic life. In it religion and politics, art and amusement coalesced into a stream of almost illimitable influence. From month to month without cessation pilgrims sought the oracle. The store of information about public and private matters thus brought to the oracular seat gave to the priests a knowledge of political conditions which they could easily transmute into an apparently supernatural wisdom and a unique power in public life. Hand in hand with this political power went an ethical sovereignty due to the essential religiousness of the Greeks. And lastly, the more continuous influx of visitors, over against an infrequent and congested festival, may easily have rendered the artistic influence of Delphi more insistent than that of Olympia. Xerxes was better acquainted with what was worthy of note at Delphi than even with what he had left in his own house, for many of those about him were continually describing the treasures. Often the seed of such descriptions, or of actual sight, must have fallen on richer soil than an Oriental despot’s imagination. Who knows what village smithy in Thessaly or Arcadia was stimulated to a finer output by the iron stand made by Glaucus of Chios to hold the big silver bowl sent to Delphi by Crœsus’s father? Indeed, the wonderful animals and plants wrought in relief for the first time upon welded iron may have inspired many a designer in Athens and Corinth. And many a young sculptor must have taken home from his Pythian pilgrimage a knowledge of Phidias and Praxiteles and Lysippus.