Ruins of Ancient Cities (Vol. 2 of 2): With General and Particular Accounts of Their Rise, Fall, and Present ConditionBucke, Charles
History
Ruins of Ancient Cities (Vol. 2 of 2): With General and Particular Accounts of Their Rise, Fall, and Present Condition
Bucke, Charles
Cities and towns, Ancient
Sculpture united with poetry to perpetuate the fame of the champions.
Statues were erected to the victors, in the very place where they had
been crowned, and sometimes in that of their birth also, which was
commonly done at the expense of their country. Amongst the statues which
adorned Olympia, were those of several children of ten or twelve years
old, who had obtained the prize at that age in the Olympic games. They
did not only raise such monuments to the champions, but to the very
horses to whose swiftness they were indebted for the Agonistic crown:
and Pausanias mentions one, which was erected in honour of a mare,
called Aura, whose history is worth repeating. Phidolas, her rider,
having fallen off in the beginning of the race, the mare continued to
run in the same manner as if he had been upon her back. She outstripped
all the rest, and upon the sound of the trumpets, which was usual toward
the end of the race to animate the competitors, she redoubled her vigour
and courage, turned round the goal, and, as if she had been sensible of
the victory, presented herself before the judges of the games.
Nor did the entertainments finish here. There was another kind of
competition; and that, too, which does not at all depend upon the
strength, activity, and address of the body, and may be called, with
reason, the combat of the mind; wherein the orators, historians, and
poets, made trial of their capacities, and submitted their productions
to the judgment of the public.
It was a great honour, and, at the same time, a most sensible pleasure
for writers, who are generally fond of fame and applause, to have known
how to reconcile the voices in their favour of so numerous and select an
assembly as that of the Olympic games, in which were present all the
finest geniuses of Greece, and all the best judges of the excellence of
a work. This theatre was equally open to history, eloquence, and poetry.
Herodotus read his history in the Olympic games to all Greece, assembled
at them, and was heard with such applause, that the names of the nine
Muses were given to the nine books which compose his work, and the
people cried out wherever he passed, “That is he, who has written our
history, and celebrated our glorious successes against the Barbarians.”
Anciently, Olympia was surrounded by walls; it had two temples,—one
dedicated to Jupiter, and another to Juno; a senate-house, a theatre,
and many other beautiful edifices, and also an innumerable multitude of
statues.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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