was worse, compelling a man to declare himself vanquished, and feel disgraced. The Athenians also, as soon as the sophists reformed education, began to rate intellectual wrestling as far superior to any bodily exercise. Thus the supremacy of Athens and Sparta over the other Greek cities in the fifth century marked, in my opinion, the real turning-point in the Greek estimate of athletics, and the fact that the great odes of Pindar sing the glories of no Spartan, and only twice, very briefly, those of Athenians, seems to indicate that even then men began to think of more serious rivalries and more exciting spectacles than the festive meetings at Olympia. In the very next generation the poets had drifted away from them, and Euripides despises rather than admires them. The historians take little notice of them. Two circumstances only tended strongly to keep them up. In the first place, musical competitions (which had always been a part of the Pythian) and poetical rivalries were added to the sports, which were also made the occasion of mercantile business, of social meetings, and not seldom of political agitation. The wise responses of the Delphic oracle were not a little indebted to the information gathered from all parts of the Hellenic world at the games, some important celebration of which, whether at Nemea, the Isthmus, or the greater meetings, occurred every year. Secondly, if the art of poetry soon devoted itself to the higher objects of tragedy, and created for itself the conflict which it celebrated, the art of sculpture became so closely connected with athletics as to give them an æsthetic importance of the highest kind all through Greek history. The ancient habit of setting up ideal statues of victors, which were made special likenesses if the subject was specially distinguished, supplied the Greeks with a series of historical monuments and a series of physical types not elsewhere to be matched, and thus perhaps the most interesting part of Pausanias’s invaluable guide-book to Greece is his collection of notes (lib. vi., 1–20) on various statues set up in this way at Olympia, of which he mentions about two hundred, though he only professes to make a selection, and though several of the finest had already been carried off by Roman emperors.