there was neither a Greek nor a barbarian war anywhere, when civic commands, civic treaties of peace and alliances belonged solely to history, the advice was very reasonable to leave Marathon and Plataeae to the schoolmasters, and not to heat the heads of the Ecclesia by such grand words, but rather to content themselves with the narrow circle of the free movement still allowed to them. The world, however, belongs not to reason but to passion. The Hellenic burgess could still even now do his duty towards his fatherland; but for the true political ambition striving after what was great, for the passion of Pericles and Alcibiades, there was in this Hellas--apart perhaps from the writing-desk--nowhere any room; and in the vacant space there flourished the poisonous herbs which, wherever high effort is arrested in the bud, harden and embitter the human heart. [Sidenote: Games.] Therefore Hellas was the motherland of the degenerate, empty ambition which was perhaps the most general, and certainly among the most pernicious, of the many sore evils of the decaying ancient civilisation. Here in the first rank stood the popular festivals with their prize competitions. The Olympic rivalries well beseemed the youthful people of the Hellenes; the general gymnastic festival of the Greek tribes and towns, and the chaplet plaited from the branches of the olive for the ablest runner according to the decision of the "Hellas-judges," were the innocent and simple expression of the young nation as a collective unity. But their political development had soon carried them beyond this early dawn. Already in the days of the Athenian naval league, or at least of the monarchy of Alexander, that festival of the Hellenes was an anachronism, a childs' play continued in the age of manhood; the fact, that the possessor of that olive wreath passed at least with himself and his fellow-citizens as holder of the national primacy, had nearly as much significance, as if in England the victors in the students' boat races were to be placed on a level with Pitt and Beaconsfield. The extension of the Hellenic nation by colonising and Hellenising found, amidst its ideal unity and real disruption, its true expression in this dreamy realm of the olive-wreath; and the materialist policy of the time of the Diadochi thereupon gave itself, as was meet, but little trouble on the subject. But when the imperial period after its fashion took up the Panhellenic idea, and the Romans entered into the rights and duties of the Hellenes, then Olympia remained or became the true symbol for the Roman "All-Hellas"; at any rate the first Roman Olympic victor appears under Augustus, and in the person of no less than Augustus's stepson, the subsequent emperor Tiberius.[185] The far from pure marriage-alliance, which Allhellenism entered into with the demon of play, converted these festivals into an institution as powerful and lasting as it was injurious in general, and especially for Hellas.