mostly yet to come. The colossal ivory statue of Zeus Olympus, the masterpiece of Phidias, and regarded (we are told) less as a statue than as an actual incarnation of Deity, was the work of a later generation, and the temple which was to contain it was as yet incomplete. But what earlier art could do to decorate the place with temples and statues had been done, and its natural features would have been beautiful without the aid of art. Olympia[1] was a rich and fertile valley bounded on one side by the broad stream of the Alpheus, one of the largest of Grecian rivers, its banks shaded with plane-trees, and its bosom studded with numerous islets. Between Mount Cronius (a conical height covered with pines) and the Alpheus lay the Altis, or sacred grove of Zeus; and, in a grove of olives, from which the victor's crown was cut, on a declivity of Mount Cronius, was the stadium or race-course. Two brooks run down from Cronius to join the Alpheus, and one of them, the Cladeus, formed a boundary of the Altis. Nearly every feature of the scene which modern travellers have noticed, is noticed also in Pindar,—the river, the olive-groves, Mount Cronius and its trees. The place was treeless once, he says, and Cronius a bare and snowy hill, till Heracles brought from the land of the Hyperboreans trees to crown the victors, and shade the concourse of spectators.[2] Among these groves and streams, for the five days and nights which the festival occupied, lay encamped a multitude from every tribe and colony of Greece, imposing in its mere numbers, and rendered yet more brilliant by the pres-
- ↑ Wordsworth's Greece, p. 386, &c.
- ↑ Ol. iii. 18.
