Although the modern reader is apt to think of the chariot-races in connection with Sicilian tyrants, they were, as we have seen from Sophocles, an integral part of Greek life. Herodotus, in the midst of his account of the battle of Marathon, calmly suspends hostilities while he tells how Cimon, father of Miltiades, won three successive Olympic victories with the same mares and, as fitting climax, adds that the mares were buried on the stately avenue of Athenian tombs, facing the grave of Cimon himself. If Herodotus really read this at Olympia the incident would not have seemed to his audience an intrusive digression. In addition to the four-horse and two-horse chariot-races there was the race with mules—no mean animals in Greece and the Orient. Pindar repeatedly celebrates them in his Olympian odes. There was also the single race-horse ridden by a jockey. One horse from Syracuse, Pherenicus (“Victor”), was celebrated in song both by Pindar and Bacchylides. Pindar tells how he “ran the course, his body by the goad unurged” and brought victory to Hieron. Bacchylides, reminding us that the horse-races opened the events of the day, exclaims:— “The Dawn, who touches earth with gold, saw Pherenicus, wind-swift sorrel steed, victorious beside Alpheus eddying wide, and saw him, too, victorious at Pytho the divine. And I lay hand on earth and swear: Not yet has dust-cloud raised by horses in the lead e’er touched him in the race-course as he hastened to the goal. “Now sing of Zeus, the Kronos son, Olympian ruler of the gods and of unwearièd Alpheus. Sing of mighty Pelops and of Pisa too, where famèd Pherenicus won with hurrying feet the victory and came back to the ramparts firm of Syracuse and brought to Hieron the (olive) leaf of fortune fair.” Pausanias tells of a Corinthian race-horse, Aura (“Breeze”), perhaps one of the famous “Koppa”[38] breed, sired by Pegasus. The jockey was thrown at the beginning of the race, but the mare continued without breaking form, rounded the turning stake, quickened her pace at the sound of the trumpet, reached the umpires first, knew that she had won, and stopped. The owner of the riderless horse was proclaimed victor. Footnote 38: The old letters Koppa (ϙ) and Sampi (ϡ) were used to brand the haunches of blooded horses. The letter ϙ, used as an abbreviation for Korinthos, when obsolete in many parts of Greece, was retained in the Corinthian alphabet. It had been carried to Italy by the early Greek colonists and so passed into our alphabet as the letter Q. Young Phidippides in the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes had plunged his father into debt by his race-track operations and had in his stables a racer of this Koppa breed bought with money borrowed from the usurer Pasias.