Description of Greece

From this point my account will proceed to a description of the statues and votive offerings; but I think that it would be wrong to mix up the accounts of them. For whereas on the Athenian Acropolis statues are votive offerings like everything else, in the Altis some things only are dedicated in honor of the gods, and statues are merely part of the prizes awarded to the victors. The statues I will mention later; I will turn first to the votive offerings, and go over the most noteworthy of them.

As you go to the stadium along the road from the Metroum, there is on the left at the bottom of Mount Cronius a platform of stone, right by the very mountain, with steps through it. By the platform have been set up bronze images of Zeus. These have been made from the fines inflicted on athletes who have wantonly broken the rules of the contests, and they are called Zanes (figures of Zeus) by the natives.

The first, six in number, were set up in the ninety-eighth Olympiad. For Eupolus of Thessaly bribed the boxers who entered the competition, Agenor the Arcadian and Prytanis of Cyzicus, and with them also Phormio of Halicarnassus, who had won at the preceding Festival. This is said to have been the first time that an athlete violated the rules of the games, and the first to be fined by the Eleans were Eupolus and those who accepted bribes from Eupolus. Two of these images are the work of Cleon of Sicyon; who made the next four I do not know.

Except the third and the fourth these images have elegiac inscriptions on them. The first of the inscriptions is intended to make plain that an Olympic victory is to be won, not by money, but by swiftness of foot and strength of body. The inscription on the second image declares that the image stands to the glory of the deity, through the piety of the Eleans, and to be a terror to law-breaking athletes. The purport of the inscription on the fifth image is praise of the Eleans, especially for their fining the boxers; that of the sixth and last is that the images are a warning to all the Greeks not to give bribes to obtain an Olympic victory.

Next after Eupolus they say that Callippus of Athens, who had entered for the pentathlum, bought off his fellow-competitors by bribes, and that this offence occurred at tie hundred and twelfth Festival.[*](532 B.C.) When the fine had been imposed by the Eleans on Callippus and his antagonists, the Athenians commissioned Hypereides to persuade the Eleans to remit them the fine. The Eleans refused this favour, and the Athenians were disdainful enough not to pay the money and to boycott the Olympic games, until finally the god at Delphi declared that he would deliver no oracle on any matter to the Athenians before they had paid the Eleans the fine.

So when it was paid, images, also six in number, were made in honor of Zeus; on them are inscribed elegiac verses not a whit more elegant than those relating the fine of Eupolus. The gist of the first inscription is that the images were dedicated because the god by an oracle expressed his approval of the Elean decision against the pentathletes; on the second image and likewise on the third are praises of the Eleans for their fining the competitors in the pentathlum.

The fourth purports to say that the contest at Olympia is one of merit and not of wealth; the inscription on the fifth declares the reason for dedicating the images, while that on the sixth commemorates the oracle given to the Athenians by Delphi.

The images next to those I have enumerated are two in number, and they were dedicated from a fine imposed on wrestlers. As to their names, neither I nor the guides of the Eleans knew them. On these images too are inscriptions; one says that the Rhodians paid money to Olympian Zeus for the wrongdoing of a wrestler; the other that certain men wrestled for bribes and that the image was made from the fines imposed upon them.

The rest of the information about these athletes comes from the guides of the Eleans, who say that it was at the hundred and seventy-eighth Festival that Eudelus accepted a bribe from Philostratus, and that this Philostratus was a Rhodian. This account I found was at variance with the Elean record of Olympic victories. In this record it is stated that Strato of Alexandria at the hundred and seventy-eighth Festival won on the same day the victory in the pancratium and the victory at wrestling. Alexandria on the Canopic mouth of the Nile was founded by Alexander the son of Philip, but it is said that previously there was on the site a small Egyptian town called Racotis.

Three Competitors before the time of this Strato, and three others after him, are known to have received the wild-olive for winning the pancratium and the wrestling: Caprus from Elis itself, and of the Greeks on the other side of the Aegean, Aristomenes of Rhodes and Protophanes of Magnesia on the Lethaeus, were earlier than Strato; after him came Marion his compatriot, Aristeas of Stratoniceia (anciently both land and city were called Chrysaoris), and the seventh was Nicostratus, from Gilicia on the coast, though he was in no way a Gilician except in name.