where men and horses tumbled amidst the jeers of the spectators. The plain of the Alpheus was perfectly adapted both for the games and all that the festival implied. It is easy to see how contests would become popular here before they were instituted on the narrow ledges of Parnassus at Delphi. For the Greeks of the classical period the mythical founding of the games in prehistoric times threw back the first contests into a conveniently dim perspective. In this penumbra of Greek mythology like-named replicas of gods, heroes, or mortals now blend together, now assert their independence. The Cretan Heracles is said to have brought the infant Zeus from Mount Ida to the Kronos hill in the Golden Age and to have first instituted the games. Then again it is the national hero Heracles, himself Zeus-descended, who cleanses the stables of King Augeas in Elis with the help of the Alpheus and the Cladeus river-gods, and thereupon founds the games. To the reverent Greek his mythology was not an entertaining treasury of mere fairy tales. The stories of two contests were selected with intent as the theme for the sculptures most prominent of all in the sacred enclosure. In the east gable of the Zeus temple was represented Hippodameia, the daughter of Œnomaus. Her father has already in his swift chariot overtaken and slain many suitors who had failed to outspeed him while contending for his daughter’s hand. At the side of Hippodameia stands Pelops just starting to win, by the favour of Zeus and the treachery of Œnomaus’s charioteer, a prehistoric Olympic victory. In the west gable was the contest between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. The latter are represented as invading the festival at the marriage of another Hippodameia to Pirithous, whose friend and ally of old was the hero, Theseus of Athens. The brute Centaurs presumably symbolize the barbaric power of the Persians, whose defeat by Athens and her allies was here fittingly celebrated as another Olympic victory. This may be taken as the official expression, at the supreme moment of Greek history, of one of the wider meanings of the games. The first view of the excavations at Olympia is disappointing and bewildering to the amateur visitor, and a mere topographical survey hopelessly confounds history. Even a superficial appreciation of the ruins presupposes a more special preparation than is necessary, for example, at Pompeii. At Olympia, although it, too, was overwhelmed, being destroyed by earthquakes and buried in soft earth by the loyal river-gods, the imagination must concern itself with various epochs: the prehistoric; the period from the first Olympiad to the Persian wars; the age of Pericles; the following century; the Macedonian period; and, finally, that of the Greek world under Roman sway.