from time to time as to the nature and arrangements of the contests. To Pindar and to the average Greek of his day, the games in which a Thero or an Alcimedon contended were the very games in which the mythical heroes of Greece had shown their prowess, the glorious contests that Heracles founded by the tomb of Pelops.[1] Thus to engage in them was to assist in maintaining a divinely-ordered institution; it was an act of piety towards the deified founder, as well as to the hero whose tomb they graced, and the god whose presence consecrated the locality. More than this, it was to tread in the steps of divine and heroic ancestors, and to give evidence that the lofty ambitions of a glorious progenitor lived yet in the bosoms of his true-born descendants. Accordingly, all those memories and associations of religion and of antiquity, which formed, as we have seen, the very centre and substance of the highest developments of Greek Choral poetry, were gathered as it were into a focus in the Olympic festival, and reflected their splendours upon the victorious competitors in its lists. The contests of Olympia, says the Roman Horace,[2] as he recalls the sentiment of Greece on this subject, raise the victors "aloft to join the gods." And this halo of glory, reflected on the victors from the heroic past, seems to Pindar not merely to merit but to demand the noblest utterances of his muse.
"Such service divine at the poet's hand the conqueror's crownèd locks demand:
Lyre and flute and shapely lays
