Description of Greece

Sitting under this ox a little boy was playing with his head bent towards the ground. Suddenly lifting his head he broke it against the bronze, and died a few days later from the wound. So the Eleans were purposing to remove the ox from out the Altis as being guilty of bloodshed. But the god at Delphi gave an oracle that they were to let the offering stay where it was, after performing upon it the purificatory rites that are customary among the Greeks for unintentional shedding of blood.

Under the plane trees in the Altis, just about in the center of the enclosure, there is a bronze trophy, with an inscription upon the shield of the trophy, to the effect that the Eleans raised it as a sign that they had beaten the Lacedaemonians. It was in this battle that the warrior lost his life who was found lying in his armour when the roof of the Heraeum was being repaired in my time.

The offering of the Mendeans in Thrace came very near to beguiling me into the belief that it was a representation of a competitor in the pentathlum. It stands by the side of Anauchidas of Elis, and it holds ancient jumping-weights. An elegiac couplet is written on its thigh:—

1. To Zeus, king of the gods, as first-fruits was I placed here
2. By the Mendeans, who reduced Sipte by might of hand.

After my description of the votive offerings I must now go on to mention the statues of racehorses and those of men, whether athletes or ordinary folk. Not all the Olympic victors have had their statues erected; some, in fact, who have distinguished themselves, either at the games or by other exploits, have had no statue.

These I am forced to omit by the nature of my work, which is not a list of athletes who have won Olympic victories, but an account of statues and of votive offerings generally. I shall not even record all those whose statues have been set up, as I know how many have before now won the crown of wild olive not by strength but by the chance of the lot.[*](A competitor might be lucky, or unlucky, in the antagonists with whom he was paired for the various heats. He might even draw a bye, and so start fresher than his opponent.) Those only will be mentioned who themselves gained some distinction, or whose statues happened to be better made than others.

On the right of the temple of Hera is the statue of a wrestler, Symmachus the son of Aeschylus. He was an Elean by birth. Beside him is Neolaidas, son of Proxenus, from Pheneus in Arcadia, who won a victory in the boys' boxing-match. Next comes Archedamus, son of Xenius, another Elean by birth, who like Symmachus overthrew wrestlers in the contest for boys. The statues of the athletes mentioned above were made by Alypus of Sicyon, pupil of Naucydes of Argos.

The inscription on Cleogenes the son of Silenus declares that he was a native, and that he won a prize with a riding-horse from his own private stable. Hard by Cleogenes are set up Deinolochus, son of Pyrrhus, and Troilus, son of Alcinous. These also were both Eleans by birth, though their victories were not the same. Troilus, at the time that he was umpire, succeeded in winning victories in the chariot-races, one for a chariot drawn by a full-grown pair and another for a chariot drawn by foals. The date of his victories was the hundred and second Festival[*](372 B.C.).

After this the Eleans passed a law that in future no umpire was to compete in the chariot-races. The statue of Troilus was made by Lysippus. The mother of Deinolochus had a dream, in which she thought that the son she clasped in her bosom had a crown on his head. For this reason Deinolochus was trained to compete in the games and outran the boys. The artist was Cleon of Sicyon.

As for Cynisca, daughter of Archidamus, her ancestry and Olympic victories, I have given an account thereof in my history of the Lacedaemonian kings.[*](See Paus. 3.8.) By the side of the statue of Troilus at Olympia has been made a basement of stone, whereon are a chariot and horses, a charioteer, and a statue of Cynisca herself, made by Apelles; there are also inscriptions relating to Cynisca.

Next to her also have been erected statues of Lacedaemonians. They gained victories in chariot-races. Anaxander was the first of his family to be proclaimed victor with a chariot, but the inscription on him declares that previously his paternal grandfather received the crown for the pentathlum. Anaxander is represented in an attitude of prayer to the god, while Polycles, who gained the surname of Polychalcus, likewise won a victory with a four-horse chariot, and his statue holds a ribbon in the right hand.

Beside him are two children; one holds a wheel and the other is asking for the ribbon. Polycles, as the inscription on him says, also won the chariot-race at Pytho, the Isthmus and Nemea.

The statue of a pancratiast was made by Lysippus. The athlete was the first to win the pancratium not only from Stratus itself but from the whole of Acarnania, and his name was Xenarces the son of Philandrides. Now after the Persian invasion the Lacedaemonians became keener breeders of horses than any other Greeks. For beside those I have already mentioned, the following horse-breeders from Sparta have their statues set up after that of the Acarnanian athlete Xenarces,[*](Xenarces has already appeared in the first sentence of this chapter as the name of the Acarnanian. The repetition of the name within a few lines suggests that in the first sentence the word Χενάρκης has displaced some other name, now lost to us.) Lycinus, Arcesilaus, and Lichas his son.

Xenarces succeeded in winning other victories, at Delphi, at Argos and at Corinth. Lycinus brought foals to Olympia, and when one of them was disqualified, entered his foals for the race for full-grown horses, winning with them. He also dedicated two statues at Olympia, works of Myron[*](Myron flourished about 460 B.C., and the race for foals was not introduced till 384 B.C. Hence, either the Greek text must be emended, or some other Myron, and not the earlier sculptor of that name, must be referred to here.) the Athenian. As for Arcesilaus and his son Lichas, the father won two Olympic victories; his son, because in his time the Lacedaemonians were excluded from the games, entered his chariot in the name of the Theban people, and with his own hands bound the victorious charioteer with a ribbon. For this offence he was scourged by the umpires,

and on account of this Lichas the Lacedaemonians invaded Elis in the reign of King Agis, when a battle took place within the Altis. When the war was over Lichas set up the statue in this place, but the Elean records of Olympic victors give as the name of the victor, not Lichas, but the Theban people.

Near Lichas stands an Elean diviner, Thrasybulus, son of Aeneas of the Iamid family, who divined for the Mantineans in their struggle against the Lacedaemonians under Agis, son of Eudamidas, their king. I shall have more to say about this in my account of the Arcadians.[*](See Paus. 8.10.5.) On the statue of Thrasybulus is a spotted lizard crawling towards his right shoulder, and by his side lies a dog, obviously a sacrificial victim, cut open and with his liver exposed.

Divination by kids, lambs or calves has, we all know, been established among men from ancient times, and the Cyprians have even discovered how to practise the art by means of pigs; but no peoples are wont to make any use of dogs in divining. So Thrasybulus apparently established a method of divination peculiar to himself, by means of the entrails of dogs. The diviners called Iamidae are descended from Iamus, who, Pindar says in an ode,[*](Pind. O. 6.43 foll.) was a son of Apollo and received the gift of divination from him.

By the statue of Thrasybulus stands Timosthenes of Elis, winner of the foot-race for boys, and Antipater of Miletus, son of Cleinopater, conqueror of the boy boxers. Men of Syracuse, who were bringing a sacrifice from Dionysius to Olympia, tried to bribe the father of Antipater to have his son proclaimed as a Syracusan. But Antipater, thinking naught of the tyrant's gifts, proclaimed himself a Milesian and wrote upon his statue that he was of Milesian descent and the first Ionian to dedicate his statue at Olympia.

The artist who made this statue was Polycleitus, while that of Timosthenes was made by Eutychides of Sicyon, a pupil of Lysippus. This Eutychides made for the Syrians on the Orontes an image of Fortune, which is highly valued by the natives.