and their family traditions represented him as designated for it even before the institution of the Olympic festival. Among the rituals which members of their family had inaugurated in other states of Greece, was a peculiar cultus of Hermes (Mercury) at Stymphalus in Arcadia. And it was the special branch of Iamids settled at Stymphalus to maintain this worship which supplied to Archias the priests or soothsayers who assisted him in inaugurating with due rites the foundation of his colony at Syracuse.
The Sixth Olympian Ode commemorates a victory of one of these Syracusan Iamids—Agesias, the son of Archestratus, winner in the race of mule-cars. Probably Agesias occupied an important religious position at Syracuse, and his visit to Olympia would naturally bring him into connection with the original branch of his family established there to maintain the original oracle and altar. He had also, it appears, taken occasion on his visit to Greece to renew acquaintance with his kinsmen, the priests of Stymphalus, and had received from the inhabitants of that town welcome and recognition as a fellow-citizen. With a mind full of all the associations which could be suggested by such a resumption of old family ties, he had now returned to Syracuse. And in the Ode which Pindar sent to him from Thebes for performance by a chorus in Syracuse, these associations are again recalled to him; the poet recognising in the family traditions of the Iamids a theme at once adapted to gratify his patron, and to furnish himself with an admirable opportunity for displaying the choicest treasures of his genius. It is
