CHAPTER XVIII OLYMPIA “What time the mid-month moon in golden car flamed back her light and lit the eye of Evening full, pure judgment of Great Games did Heracles ordain and fifth year’s festival beside Alphēus and his holy banks.” PINDAR. Whatever may be the final decision of archæologists, it was natural for Pausanias to identify the reclining figures in the east gable of the Zeus temple at Olympia as the Alpheus and Cladeus. The right angle made by the junction of these rivers is in a fertile plain where the Altis, the sacred enclosure of Olympia, lies at the foot of the Kronos hill. The Alpheus river is inseparably connected in Greek literature with the Great Games. For more than one thousand summers successively the full moon looked down upon the myriads of visitors who came from inland or from island homes, from Tenedos in the East, or from Sicily in the West. By the Alpheus they encamped and sank into dreamless sleep after their journeyings or, it may be, one or another, himself a competitor or an anxious relative, would be roused up by nightmares and outriders of grim Taraxippus, the Horse Frightener, whose ghost long held in mortmain the critical turning point in the Hippodrome. When the contests were ended, the same moon would silver the weather-beaten columns of the old Heræum or light up with its benignant splendour the new and stately shafts of the Zeus temple, the gray-green sacred olive tree, the great wings of the hovering Victory, the Parian marbles and the burnished bronzes, or still more beautiful, the naked ivory of the athletes’ limbs. And then, crowning all, the epinician hymn, newborn from Pindar’s brain, rose up on the wings of victorious music to the very summit of the Kronos hill. [Illustration: OLYMPIA Kronos Hill. The ruins of the Altis ]