Before descending along the bed of the northern tributary of the Inachus into the plain we turn aside to the precinct of Nemea. This lies in a valley of its own between those of Phlius and Cleonæ and, like them, on a stream, the Nemea, which also flows down to the Corinthian Gulf. The deep grass, fed by the overflowing waters, gave the name Nemea, “pasture-land.” The biennial Nemean games, celebrated on the high watershed at this entrance to the peninsula, were especially pan-Peloponnesian. They were instituted, according to a charming story, by Adrastus and the rest of the “Seven” on their way to Thebes, as an atonement for the death of the child Opheltes, carelessly left by his nurse on a bed of wild parsley (or celery) and slain by a dragon while she fetched water for the warriors. The solemn funereal origin of the games was kept before the mind by the dun-colored raiment worn by the umpires and emphasized by the cypress grove which in antiquity surrounded the temple. Pindar seems to reflect this feeling when he refers to the “solemn plains” in connection with Adrastus. Elsewhere he speaks of the “lovely contests of Nemea.” Where the little Opheltes died on his bed of wild parsley and the Argive champions passed by to Thebes are the lonely ruins of the Temple of Zeus. Three slender columns still stand to watch over their fallen companions, stretched upon the ground by the Earthshaker whose envy has shaken down so many temples of rivals while, by the cunning of Athena in sharing with him her precinct, he has left the great rock in Athens unmoved. Zeus, the virile god of the Achæans, is lord and master at Nemea, while Hera presides in the Argive plain as she did originally at Olympia. The cave of the Nemean lion slain by Heracles at the bidding of Eurystheus, king of Mycenæ or Tiryns, cannot be identified with certainty. Indeed, the king of beasts himself, so far as Argolis is concerned, has been now confined by the excavators within the narrow limits of a Phrygian gem. Heracles, in his search for rare fauna, flora, and other exhibits, completed six of his twelve labours in the Peloponnesus, two of them within the borders of Argolis, before he was compelled to go abroad for the fruit of the Hesperides or the three-headed hound of Hades. He had already killed a lion on Mount Cithæron and assumed its skin as his conventional uniform, and when the spoils of the Nemean lion were delivered at Mycenæ the king might well, it may be thought, have deemed it suitable to commemorate by a “totem” on the Gate of the Acropolis the subjugation of this original autochthon of Mount Treton, which dominated the two highways leading to the fortress.