The establishment of games at Olympia was assigned by the poets to mythical ages, and not only is there a book of the Iliad devoted to funeral games, but in Pindar’s eleventh Olympic Ode this particular establishment is made coeval with the labors of Herakles. Whether such evidence is indeed conclusive may fairly be doubted. The twenty-third book of the Iliad, which shows traces of being a later portion of the poem, describes contests widely differing from those at Olympia, and the mythical founders enumerated by Pausanias (v. 7) are so various and inconsistent that we can see how obscure the question appeared to Greek archæologists, even did we not find at the end of the enumeration the following significant hint:—“But after Oxylus—for Oxylus, too, established the contest—after his reign it fell out of use till the Olympiad of Iphitus,” that is to say, till the first Ol., which is dated 776 B. C., Oxylus being the companion of the Herakleidæ, who obtained Elis for his portion. Pausanias adds that when Iphitus renewed the contest, men had forgotten the old arrangements, and only _gradually came to remember them_, and whenever they recollected any special competition they added it to the games. This is the excellent man’s theory to account for the gradual addition of long races, of wrestling, discus throwing, boxing, and chariot racing, to the original sprint race of about 200 yards, which was at first the only known competition. [Illustration: Kronion Hill, Olympia] The facts seem to me rather to point to the late growth of games in Greece, which may possibly have begun as a local feast at Olympia in the eighth century, but which only rose to importance during the reign of the despots throughout Greece, when the aristocrats were prevented from murdering one another, and compelled to adopt more peaceful pursuits.(120) It was in the end of the seventh and opening of the sixth centuries that the Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games show by their successive establishments the rapid spread of the fashion, and a vast number of local contests diffused through every district in Greece the taste and the training for such competitions.(121) These games lasted all through classical Greek history—the Olympian even down to later times, for they were not abolished till nearly 1200 years (Ol. 294) had elapsed since their alleged foundation. But the day of their real greatness was gone long before. Cicero indignantly repudiates the report that he had gone to see such games, just as a pious earl, within our memory, repudiated the report that he had attended the prize-fight between Sayers and Heenan. The good generals of earlier centuries, such as Alexander the Great and Philopœmen, set their faces against athletics as bad training for soldiers. Nay, even earlier, the Spartans, though they could contend with success in the _pentathlon_, when they choose, did not countenance the fiercer competitions, as engendering bad feeling between rivals, and, what