All the buildings for the athletes and for the contests—the Palæstra, the Gymnasium, the Stadium, and the Hippodrome—lay outside of the sacred enclosure, while the Altis itself was reserved for the real purpose of this consecrated spot, the worship of Zeus, under all his manifold activities, and of the other gods who helped to round out and to satisfy the aspirations, the hopes, and fears of the Greek heart that was “in all things very religious.” To cover all possible oversights there was at Olympia, as by the Areopagus of St. Paul’s day, or at Phalerum, an altar to Unknown Gods. Just as the drama was a religious spectacle, so the games were conducted by the real Greek in the same spirit. The athletes went forth from the Altis to the contest, the victors reëntered it to receive the olive crown, and within it their statues and offerings were set up in the immediate presence of the gods. In the Altis the ancient Heræum, with its indications of an earlier wooden structure, carries back the thought far beyond the first Olympiad in the eighth century B. C. The new god Zeus was just emerging from the tutelage of his predecessor on the Kronos hill above. In this early age he seems hardly more than a Prince Consort by the side of Hera who, in Pindar’s sixth Olympian, is invoked as the “Maiden” or ever Zeus had led her to the bridal chamber. One of the least obtrusive ruins in the Altis marks the site near the Heræum of the great altar of Zeus or, possibly, the common shrine of Zeus and Hera. Annually the priests kneaded with water from the Alpheus the ashes of the thighs of victims offered, as in the Iliad, to the god, and plastered a layer upon this primitive altar. Only the water of the Alpheus was acceptable to the god in preparing this clay, and thus year by year was cemented the union between the visible and the unseen, the beneficent river-god of the land and the Olympian god whose dome overarched the widespread land of Hellas.