Be all that as it may, Alpheus mingling his waters with the Sicilian fountain is typical of the stream of competitors who were constantly returning from the Olympic games to Magna Græcia. Of Pindar’s fourteen Olympic odes nine were written for Sicilian or Italian victors. In general one of the most noteworthy facts in the history of the games is the widespread distribution of the clientèle. The competitors and visitors converging from Greece; the innumerable votive offerings here dedicated; the common motives of religion here illustrated in art and literature generated a centripetal national spirit that could retard though not destroy the centrifugal individualism of the Greeks. The only fact more conspicuous than the wide territory represented is the longevity of the Olympic celebrations. The Great Games were continued both under Macedonian rule and even for long years after the Hellenic world, east and west, subjugated, dismembered, and rearranged like parti-colored bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, had fallen into place in the imperial pattern of the great Roman mosaic. The splendid Philippeum at Olympia was witness to the eagerness with which Philip and Alexander made good their legitimate claim to Hellenic blood. Roman emperors, like Tiberius and Nero, by their very presence, however arrogant, gave one more sign of the Greeks’ intellectual suzerainty over their captors. Although Elis, even in October after the long hot summer, presents a contrast to the burnt plains and hills about Athens, yet the traveller will be best rewarded if he comes to Olympia by the end of February or early in March. If he comes from Patras and will penetrate a little inland from the railroad near the river Stimana, the ancient Larisos, he will find himself in the midst of beautiful woodland scenery. The whole country, with its fine oak trees, reminded the traveller Mure of “the wilder parts of Windsor Park.” Even at the little stations are seen shepherds in their shaggy coats, with conversation-beads and staffs and flocks of sheep. At Olympia itself the new green of the trees and grass, the pink of the almond blossoms on the banks of the Alpheus, and all the awakening of the early spring help to dissipate the melancholy that is wont to invade the mind in a lonely site amidst ruins which record some by-gone efflorescence of human activity. This Olympian plain, through which the Alpheus sweeps down to the sea between fields and vineyards, offered ample room for the vast throngs of visitors. There was no city accommodation. They must encamp in the open as they do to-day at many a modern festival. But the smiling valley was a fit place to worship Zeus, the god of the open sky. Xenophon, who lived on his estate just beyond the hills which bound the plain to the south, tells in the “Anabasis” how the returning Greeks, when they sighted the Euxine sea from the mountain ridge, held impromptu games and races on an impossible slope