Within historical times the great Olympic festival was always held at intervals of four, not of eight, years. Yet it too would seem to have been based on the octennial cycle. For it always fell on a full moon, at intervals of fifty and of forty-nine lunar months alternately.(260) Thus the total number of lunar months comprised in two successive Olympiads was ninety-nine, which is precisely the number of lunar months in the octennial cycle.(261) It is possible that, as K. O. Müller conjectured,(262) the Olympic games may, like the Pythian, have originally been celebrated at intervals of eight instead of four years. If that was so, analogy would lead us to infer that the festival was associated with a mythical marriage of the sun and moon. A reminiscence of such a marriage appears to survive in the legend that Endymion, the son of the first king of Elis, had fifty daughters by the Moon, and that he set his sons to run a race for the kingdom at Olympia.(263) For, as scholars have already perceived, Endymion is the sunken sun overtaken by the moon below the horizon, and his fifty daughters by her are the fifty lunar months of an Olympiad or, more strictly speaking, of every alternate Olympiad.(264) If the Olympic festival always fell, as many authorities have maintained, at the first full moon after the summer solstice,(265) the time would be eminently appropriate for a marriage of the luminaries, since both of them might then be conceived to be at the prime of their vigour. (M68) It has been ingeniously argued by Mr. A. B. Cook(266) that the Olympic victors in the chariot-race were the lineal successors of the old rulers, the living embodiments of Zeus, whose claims to the kingdom were decided by a race, as in the legend of Endymion and his sons, and who reigned for a period of four, perhaps originally of eight years, after which they had again, like Oenomaus, to stake their right to the throne on the issue of a chariot-race. Certainly the four-horse car in which they raced assimilated them to the sun-god, who was commonly supposed to drive through the sky in a similar fashion;(267) while the crown of sacred olive which decked their brows(268) likened them to the great god Zeus himself, whose glorious image at Olympia wore a similar wreath.(269) But if the olive-crowned victor in the men’s race at Olympia represented Zeus, it becomes probable that the olive-crowned victor in the girls’ race, which was held every fourth year at Olympia in honour of Hera,(270) represented in like manner the god’s wife; and that in former days the two together acted the part of the god and goddess in that sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera which is known to have been celebrated in many parts of Greece.(271) This conclusion is confirmed by the legend that the girls’ race was instituted by Hippodamia in gratitude for her marriage with Pelops;(272) for if Pelops as victor in the chariot-race represented Zeus, his bride would naturally play the part of Hera.