Our information about the arrangements of the chariot-racing at Olympia is very imperfect. We do not distinctly know how the seven chariots of Alkibiadês ran,—in how many races,—for all the seven could not, in my judgment, have run in one and the same race. There must have been many other chariots to run, belonging to other competitors: and it seems difficult to believe that ever a greater number than ten can have run in the same race, since the course involved going _twelve_ times round the goal (Pindar, Ol. iii, 33; vi, 75). Ten competing chariots run in the race described by Sophoklês (Electr. 708), and if we could venture to construe strictly the expression of the poet,—~δέκατον ἐκπληρῶν~ ὄχον,—it would seem that ten was the extreme number permitted to run. Even so great a number as ten was replete with danger to the persons engaged, as may be seen by reading the description in Sophoklês (compare Demosth. Ἐρωτ. Λογ. p. 1410), who refers indeed to a Pythian and not an Olympic solemnity: but the main circumstances must have been common to both; and we know that the twelve turns (δωδεκάγναμπτον δωδεκάδρομον) _were_ common to both (Pindar, Pyth. v, 31). Alkibiadês was not the only person who gained a chariot victory at this 90th Olympiad, 420 B.C. Lichas the Lacedæmonian also gained one (Thucyd. v, 50), though the chariot was obliged to be entered in another name, since the Lacedæmonians were interdicted from attendance. Dr. Thirlwall (Hist. of Greece, vol. iii, ch. xxiv, p. 316) says: “We are not aware that the Olympiad, in which these chariot-victories of Alkibiadês were gained, can be distinctly fixed. But it was probably Olymp. 89, B.C. 424.” In my judgment, both Olymp. 88 (B.C. 428) and Olymp. 89 (B.C. 424) are excluded from the possible supposition, by the fact that the general war was raging at both periods. To suppose that in the midst of the summer of these two fighting years, there was an Olympic truce for a month, allowing Athens and her allies to send thither their solemn legations, their chariots for competition, and their numerous individual visitors, appears to me contrary to all probability. The Olympic month of B.C. 424, would occur just about the time when Brasidas was at the Isthmus levying troops for his intended expedition to Thrace, and when he rescued Megara from the Athenian attack. This would not be a very quiet time for the peaceable Athenian visitors, with the costly display of gold and silver plate and the ostentatious theôry, to pass by, on its way to Olympia. During the time when the Spartans occupied Dekeleia, the solemn processions of communicants at the Eleusinian mysteries could never march along the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis. Xen. Hell. i, 4, 20.