And poets sage, through every age,
About their temples wound
The bay; and conquerors thanked the gods,
With laurel chaplets crowned."
The Nemean festival was held every other year in a glen or plateau surrounded by the mountains of Argolis—"bleak, grey, barren hills, worn by the winter torrents into a thousand furrows" [1]—a very different scene from the groves and tufted hills of Olympia. Rivulets without number course down the hills, and fall into the river Nemea. The most prominent feature in the landscape must always have been the singular "table-mountain" now known as Mount Phouka, a huge pyramidal mass, truncated, yet still overtopping all the surrounding heights. Of this mountain, however, Pindar tells us nothing. The legends of Nemea seem to impress him more than its scenery, though he notices the glen bosomed deep in hills, and its wealth of streams and water-courses. Amid the heath and grasses of this glen had ranged, in the old heroic days, the fearful lion of Nemea, slain at last by Heracles, and furnishing him with the lion-skin which was his traditional costume. The "glen," or the "brake of the lion," is Pindar's favourite periphrasis for Nemea. Its sports were frequented, it would seem, especially by athletes from the neighbouring island of Ægina. A voyage of from one to two hours in fair weather would bring them to the port of Epidaurus, and thence by a steep ascent they climbed to the scene of the contests. Six out of the eight
- ↑ Clark's Peloponnesus, p. 65.
