The athletes had not far to journey from their last training place in Elis. The spectators had come from various directions, some from the sea-coast, some, as do the majority of modern visitors, from Patras on the coast of Achæa. But then, as now, the direct artery from the heart of Greece was the green valley of the Alpheus. The river clamps Arcadia and Elis together. Down this valley year by year in antiquity pilgrims journeyed to see the games and to attend the great Fair; here in modern times bands of tourists still pick their way up and down over smooth roads and rocky torrent-beds and cross the ford of the swollen stream; and a projected railroad, connecting (on paper) Megalopolis and Olympia, also follows the general course of the Alpheus. The river has two main sources. Its northern branch, the Ladon, draws its water from the rugged mountains of northern Arcadia. The other branch comes flowing down from the northwest end of Taygetus, curves through the plain of Megalopolis, plunges through the ravine of Karytæna and joins the Ladon near the western border of Arcadia, and the two united make their way through Elis to the Ionian sea. Nor even there is its end. In pursuit of the fountain nymph, Arethusa, Alpheus must needs reach Sicily. To the Greeks the Mediterranean was their highway, not the “salt, estranging sea.” According to Lucian, as Alpheus enters the sea, Poseidon, brimming over with curiosity, stops him and enquires: “What’s this, Alpheus? You alone of all rivers don’t go in for dissipation, and you keep your waters fresh and free from brine as you hurry on?” (Alpheus) “It’s a love affair, Poseidon, so don’t cross-question me. You’ve been in love yourself and often too!” The sea-god on learning of the object of Alpheus’s passion expresses much approval. But Alpheus cuts him short: “I am pressed with engagements. You detain me, Poseidon, by your superfluous questions!” (Poseidon) “You’re right. Be off to your Beloved. Rise up from the water, mingle with the fountain and be ye twain one stream.” Lucian’s contemporary Pausanias is troubled with no doubts, and solemnly reaffirms the wedlock of Alpheus and Arethusa, although the more sceptical Strabo in the preceding century had naïvely argued against the credibility of the popular belief that a cup thrown into the Alpheus reappears in the fountain at Syracuse. Antigonus Carystus had stoutly maintained that “when the entrails of the victims are thrown into the Alpheus the waters of Arethusa in Sicily grow turbid.”