So great was the reward, so enthusiastic the reception accorded the champions in the athletic games of Olympia, that they call forth a protest from the sensitive Vitruvius, who seems to feel that the honors conferred upon them should have been reserved for the literary lights of the time. “The ancestors of the Greeks,” he complains, “held the celebrated wrestlers who were victors in the Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean games in such esteem that, decorated with the palm and crown, they were not only publicly thanked, but were also, in their triumphant return to their respective homes, borne to their cities and countries in four-horse chariots, and were allowed pensions for life from the public revenue. When I consider these circumstances, I cannot help thinking it strange that similar honors, or even greater, are not decreed to those authors who are of lasting service to mankind. Such certainly ought to be the case; for the wrestler, by training, merely hardens his own body for the conflict; a writer, however, not only cultivates his own mind, but affords every one else the same opportunity, by laying down precepts for acquiring knowledge and exciting the talents of his reader.” So attractive was this spot on the banks of the Alpheus in Ellis, in natural charm, as well as in the purposes for which it was visited, that it is here, as nowhere else in Greece, with the possible exception of the Acropolis at Athens, the Grecian architects lavished their best skill and best illustrated their appreciation of the fact, that the effect of fine buildings is greatly augmented by grouping them gracefully together in one place, producing, as it were, an architectural picture. “Many objects,” says Pausanias, “may a man see in Greece, and many things may he hear that are worthy of admiration, but above them all the doings at Eleusis and the sights at Olympia have somewhat in them of a soul divine.” The worship of Zeus was an old worship in Olympia, so that when Libon was entrusted with authority to erect a new temple to that deity, out of the spoils taken in subjugating the Pisans and other neighboring cities which had revolted from the Eleans, he gave free reign to his art, and produced a Doric temple which rivalled that in Athens, though not as large. Pausanias informs us that the Olympian temple was two hundred and thirty feet long, ninety-five feet wide and sixty-eight feet high; that it was surrounded by marble columns and covered with marble cut in the form of tiles. The front and rear pediments were adorned with sculpture, as well as the metopes of the frieze. The interior was of two orders of columns supporting lofty galleries, through which there was a passage to the throne of Jove “glittering with gold and gems.”