16 EARLY GREEK GAMES AND PRIZES. 
the Eleans, but they lost the control of Olympia in the next Olym- 
piad. In Ol. 28 Elis, during a war with Dyme, allowed the Pisatans 
to celebrate the games. Six Olympiads later the king of Pisa came to 
Olympia with an army and took charge. ‘The story leaves the Pisatans_ 
in control from about Olympiads 30 to 51, but some time between 
Ols.48 and 52 the Eleans defeated Pisa and destroyed it, and henceforth 
controlled the games. Such a story was manifestly a contrivance by 
the later priests of Elis to justify their control of the games through a 
prior claim. It is contradicted by all the evidence.! The antiquity 
of Olympia is known to us from the results of excavations and from its 
religious history. ‘The latest excavations on the site have disclosed the 
remains of six prehistoric buildings with apsidal endings, below the 
geometric stratum, upon the site of what used to be considered the 
remnants of the great altar of Zeus.”, Such an inference is borne out 
by many primitive features in the religious history of the sanctuary. 
The altar of Kronos on the hill to the north of the Altis was earlier 
than that of Zeus; an earth altar antedated that of Zeus, while a sur- 
vival of the earlier worship of the powers of the underworld is seen in 
the custom, lasting through later centuries, of allowing only one woman, 
the priestess of Demeter Chamyne, to witness the games. We also 
know that the worship of the Pelasgian Hera antedated that of the 
Hellenic Zeus; her temple, the Heraion, is the most ancient of which 
the foundations still stand, a temple built of stone, wood, and sun-dried 
bricks, whose origin is to be referred to the tenth, if not to the eleventh, 
century B.C.’ We have already remarked that the worship of the hero 
Pelops preceded that of the god Zeus.‘ All such indications attest the 
high antiquity of Olympia. ‘That it is not mentioned in Homer, while 
Delphi and Dodona are, only proves that in the poet’s time it was still 
merely a local shrine. Not until the beginning of the sixth century B.C. 
did it attain the distinction, which it retained ever afterwards, of being 
the foremost national festival of Hellas.® 
The periodical celebration of the three other national festivals 
was not dated—except in legend—before the early years of the sixth 
century B.C., though local festivals must have existed also on these 
sites long before.® ‘The old music festival at Delphi, which finally was 
1Especially by Xenophon, Hell., III, 2.31; VII, 4.28. Pausanias omits all evidence of the 
part played by Kleosthenes in the truce. See Gardiner, pp. 44 f. 
2See Doerpfeld, 4. M., XX XIII, 1908, pp. 185 f. 
3Recently E. N. Gardiner has argued that the worship of Zeus came directly from Dodona to 
Olympia before it had reached Crete and that Cretan elements in the cult first appear at Olympia 
in the VIII century B. C. He believes that the worship of Hera reached Olympia from Argos 
later than that of Zeus, toward the end of the VIII century B. C., when he supposes the Heraion 
was built as a joint temple to both deities: B. S. 4., XXII, 1916-18, pp. 85-86. 
4On his cult see P., V, 13.2, and scholion on Pindar, Ol. I, 146 and 149, Boeckh, p. 43. After 
being reduced tothe rank of hero, Pelops still kept his own precinct in the Altis throughout antiquity. 
’On the history of Olympia, see Gardiner, pp. 38 f. 
®For the legends connected with the origin of the three, see Krause, Die Pythien, Nemeen und 
Isthmien, and the various articles in Dar.-Sagl. 
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