The whole Hellenic and Hellenising world took part therein, sending deputies to them and imitating them; everywhere similar festivals destined for the whole Greek world sprang from the soil, and the zealous participation of the masses at large, the general interest felt in the individual competitors, the pride not merely of the victor but of his adherents and of his native land, made people almost forget what in the strict sense were the things contended for. [Sidenote: Universal interest in them.] Not merely did the Roman government allow free scope to this rivalry in gymnastic and other competitions, but the empire took part in them; the right solemnly to fetch home the victor to his native city did not in the imperial period depend on the pleasure of the burgesses concerned, but was conferred on the individual agonistic institutes by imperial charter,[186] and in this case also the yearly pension (σίτησις) assigned to the victor was charged upon the imperial exchequer, and the more important agonistic institutes were treated directly as imperial institutions. This interest in games seized all the provinces as well as the empire itself; but Greece proper was always the ideal centre of such contests and victories. Here was their home on the Alpheus; here the seat of the oldest imitations, of the Pythia, Isthmia, and Nemea, still belonging to the great times of the Hellenic name and glorified by its classic poets, and no less of a number of more recent but richly equipped similar festivals, the Euryclea, which the just-mentioned lord of Sparta had founded under Augustus, the Athenian Panathenaea, the Panhellenia, endowed by Hadrian with imperial munificence and likewise celebrated at Athens. It might be matter for wonder that the whole world of the wide empire seemed to revolve round these gymnastic festivals, but not that the Hellenes above all got intoxicated over this rare cup of enchantment, and that the life of political quiet, which their best men recommended to them, was in the most injurious way disturbed by the wreaths and the statues and the privileges of the festal victors. [Sidenote: Municipal ambition.]