But no Roman patronage could galvanize into real life the dying spirit of freedom. Professionalism grew apace. Christianity, established in the eastern empire, extinguished the fire on the ancient altar of Zeus. The fitful return to polytheism under Julian the Apostate only served to show its decadence, and in 393 A. D. the emperor Theodosius finally suppressed the Olympic games. When the “truce” of the Olympic god no longer interposed a defence, the Altis itself became a Byzantine fortress and the monuments were partially destroyed to build its walls. Amongst the ruins of the Palæstra and the Workshop of Phidias can be seen the remains of a Byzantine church. Earthquakes in the sixth century threw down the Zeus temple, and in this and the following century the Cladeus and the Alpheus, the only gods who still retained their power, united in preserving under deep layers of earth the mutilated monuments for a kindlier age to uncover and to honour. After this destruction and burial, for more than one thousand years the summer moons waxed and waned above the desolated valley disturbed only by the hoof-beats of the horses ridden by the vassal bands of the Dukes of the Morea. Here, as elsewhere in Greece, temples robbed of their acolytes and statues, no longer symbols of a living religion, forgot the incense of a happy past and could look forward to no festal renascence. Sterling, in his “Dædalus,” pictures these orphaned children of Olympus in a loneliness only less pathetic than their irksome imprisonment within unsympathetic Museum walls:— “Statues, bend your heads in sorrow, Ye that glance ’mid ruins old, That know not a past nor expect a morrow, On many a moonlit Grecian wold.” In 1875 the German government subsidized the systematic excavations that restored to the modern world some of its most valued treasures and laid bare the greater part of the ruined Altis, the adjacent buildings and the entrance to the Stadium.