The ancient writings of the Eleans, according to Pausanias, ascribed the institution of the games to the Idaean Heracles, one of the Cretan Curetes to whom the infant Zeus was entrusted. But to Pindar and Bacchylides the games are associated with the tomb of Pelops. Pelops, as the story goes, came to Olympia as a suitor for the hand of Hippodameia, whose father Oenomaus challenged all her suitors to a chariot-race, and slew with his spear all whom he defeated. Thirteen suitors had been slain when Pelops came and, by the aid of Myrtilus, the charioteer of Oenomaus, who removed the lynch-pins from his master’s chariot wheels, slew him and won his bride and kingdom. This story, afterwards represented on the chest of Cypselus and on the pediments of the temple of Zeus, was commemorated by the earliest monuments of the Altis. Besides the tomb of Pelops himself, there was an ancient wooden pillar said to be the only remnant of the house of Oenomaus, which was struck by lightning,[47] and also the Hippodamium, apparently a funeral mound, surrounded afterwards by a wall, where the women of Elis every year offered sacrifice.
It was at the ancient tomb of Pelops, Pindar tells us, that Heracles the son of Zeus, returning from his victory over Augeas, founded the Olympian games. There “he measured a sacred grove for the Father, and having fenced round the Altis marked the bounds thereof. There he set apart the choicest of the spoil for an offering from the war and sacrificed and ordained the fifth year feast.” “In the foot-race down the straight course was Likymnius’ son Oeonus first, from Nidea had he led his host; in the wrestling was Tegea glorified by Echemus; Doryclus won the prize of boxing, a dweller in the city of Tiryns, and with the four-horse chariot Samos of Mantinea, Halirrhothius’ son; with the javelin Phrastor hit the mark; in distance Eniceus beyond all others hurled the stone with a circling sweep, and all the warrior company thundered a great applause.”[48]
The poet has glorified into a Peloponnesian festival what can have been no more than a local gathering in which the neighbouring chieftains took part, and the introduction of Heracles may have been an invention of the Eleans; for, according to Pausanias, it was Iphitus who first induced the Eleans, or, as he should have said, the Pisatans, to sacrifice to Heracles whom they had before regarded as their enemy. Yet there is probably some truth in the connexion of the games with Pelops’ grave, a tradition which we find also in Pindar’s great rival Bacchylides. But who was Pelops? Was he god, man, or hero? Like the oracle of Delphi when asked a similar question about Lycurgus, we may well doubt. Yet in spite of certain modern authorities, who see local gods in most of the heroes of legend, it is perhaps safer to accept the universal belief of the Greeks that he was a man, some chieftain who after his death was worshipped as a hero. Moreover, the tradition of his Phrygian origin is a strong argument against the view that he was a native pre-Achaean god of the Peloponnese, though it is by no means incompatible with his connexion with the Achaeans in view of the original kinship of the latter with the Phrygians. At all events Pelops is pre-Dorian, and the victors in these games, according to Pindar, are pre-Dorians.
The existence of the games in pre-Dorian times agrees entirely with the athletic character of the Achaeans in the Peloponnese as described in Homer; and if we find in the poet no mention of Olympia, his silence is easily explained by the simple, local character of the festival at this time. It will be remembered that in the funeral games of the north-western Peloponnese chariot-racing played a prominent part. The antiquity of this sport at Olympia is confirmed by the discovery of a number of very early votive offerings, many of them models of horses or chariots, found in a layer that extends below the foundations of the Heraeum. This temple was founded, it is said, by the people of Scillus some eight years after the coming of Oxylus; and even if we cannot go so far as Dr. Dörpfeld, who assigns it to the tenth or eleventh centuries, there is no doubt of its great antiquity, and that the Scilluntines were of an Arcadian, not a Dorian stock.
Before the building of the Heraeum we must picture Olympia as a sacred grove surrounded by a hedge interspersed with open spaces where stood the barrow of Pelops and sundry earth altars, such as the great altar of Zeus, or the six double altars at which the competitors offered sacrifice. Thither the country-folk resorted to inquire of the future from the ancient earth oracle, or perhaps, as at Dodona, from the rustling of the leaves. These oracles were interpreted by certain hereditary families, the Iamidae and Clytidae, who maintained their privileges even when Dorian influence had prevailed. Thither at set times the neighbouring tribes flocked to take part in the games held at the tomb of Pelops. The sanctuary and festival of Olympia were in the territory of the Pisatae, a tribal group of village communities possibly nine in number situated on either side of the Alpheus valley, and loosely bound together by the common worship of the hero Pelops.[49] They took their name from the village of Pisa, perhaps on account of its nearness to Olympia.
The Pisatae were one of many such tribal groups, or amphictyonies in the Peloponnese, in parts of which this form of life continued into the fifth century or later. Such were the groups of nine cities mentioned in the catalogue of the ships in the Iliad, the nine Arcadian cities grouped round the tomb of Aepytus, the nine Pylian cities of Nestor’s kingdom, the nine Argive cities under Diomed, the nine Lacedaemonian cities under Sparta. Such, too, were the Caucones, a wandering tribe whose hero Caucon was in later times supposed to be buried near Lepreum; such were the Epeans of Elis; while the Eleans who supplanted them retained this form of government till the founding of the city-state of Elis in the fifth century. Like all such clans these leagues were intensely aristocratic: the chieftains were regarded with superstitious reverence, and the tribal centre was often the tomb of some departed hero-chief. Of cities, properly speaking, there were none in the western Peloponnese. A few strong fortresses served as residences for powerful chieftains and as refuge for their followers in danger; but most of the people lived in unwalled villages like the Scotch Highlanders. Their wealth consisted largely in horses and cattle, which they bartered with the islanders or with Cretan or Phoenician traders who landed at Pylos or sailed up the Alpheus to Olympia. In search of pasturage they ranged in winter over the lowland plains, retiring in summer to the sheltered upland valleys. The constant pressure of newcomers kept them constantly on the move, southwards and eastwards. This shifting of the tribal centres may be traced in the places that bore the name of Pylos. Settling originally in Elean Pylos, the gateway of the netherworld, these Pylians, united by some netherworld cult, were forced to move first to Triphylian Pylos, probably the Pylos of Nestor, and at a later stage to Messenian Pylos. Of their raids and cattle-lifting, their feuds and their reprisals, we have a vivid picture in the Odyssey. Such, we may suppose, was the life of the Pisatae and their neighbours, the pre-Dorian inhabitants of Elis, Triphylia, Arcadia and Messenia. The Pisatae perhaps enjoyed a position more established than the rest, thanks to the superstitious reverence which alone saved the rich valley of Olympia from attack, but under these unsettled conditions the real development of the festival was impossible, though the prestige which it had already acquired is shown in the building of the Heraeum by the Scilluntines.
The coming of the Dorians brought order into the Peloponnese, but only after a long and bitter struggle. The settling of Oxylus and his Aetolians in Elis checked the stream of migration from the north-west, and the power of the Dorians prevented further aggression from other quarters. Meanwhile such of the earlier inhabitants as clung to their independence were driven into the mountains of Arcadia and Achaea, or into Messenia. In the south-west the civilization, of which we have a glorified picture in Nestor’s kingdom, lasted perhaps till the final conquest of the country by the Spartans; in the mountains the inhabitants developed into a race of hardy mountaineers and shepherds, fond of sport and war, clinging tenaciously to their ancient customs and manner of government, but playing no part in the history of Greece save as mercenaries in the pay of more progressive states.
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