With honour meet. And Pisa bids me sing,
Whence immortal lays for mortals spring,
When, in the rites ordained of Heracles,
The Ætolian arbiter with sentence fair
Garlands with olive grey the victor's hair."[1]
The judge, the competitor, and the poet who celebrates his victory, each (be it noticed) is discharging a sacred duty: the rites are "ordained of Heracles;" hence the obligation to fulfil them, and hence the glory which they reflect upon the victor.
But it was not in their religious aspect alone that the great games influenced so powerfully the imagination of every cultivated Greek. He saw in them also the chief and almost the only concrete embodiment of an idea, which in the age of Pindar more than ever before was growing and gaining ground in Greece,—the sentiment of Pan-hellenic unity, the conception of an absolute and even physical distinction between Greek and Barbarian. The period of Pindar's youth and early manhood coincides precisely with the successive invasions of Greece by Persia, which more than any other event in their history taught the scattered clans of Greeks to regard themselves as a single nation. Now the right of competition in the four great games was the privilege of every Greek, and of Greeks alone. Not all the ordinances of Greek religion were withheld from foreigners. Lydians like Crœsus, Italians, Phrygians, are all described as consulting the great national oracle of the Greeks at Delphi; but not the Great King himself could enter a chariot for the prize of Olympia or Delphi.
- ↑ Ol. iii. 6.
