“Best of all is water and gold as a flaming fire in the night shineth eminent amid lordly wealth: but if of prizes in the games thou art fain, O my soul, to tell, then as for no bright star more quickening than the sun must thou search in the void firmament by day, so neither shall we find any games greater than the Olympic whereof to utter our voice.”[43] The sanctity of Olympia and its festival go back to days far earlier than the coming of the Dorians, perhaps of any Greek race; but the growth of the festival dates from the time when, after the Dorian invasion, the movements of the peoples ceased and the land became settled, and its greatness is largely due to the athletic ideal and the genius for organization which characterized that race. “It is not the least of the many debts which we owe to Heracles,” says Lysias in his _Panegyric_, “that by instituting the Olympic games he restored peace and goodwill to a land torn asunder by war and faction and wasted by pestilence.” Pausanias uses similar language of the restoration of the games by Iphitus and Lycurgus, whose action another tradition ascribes to the advice of the Delphic oracle. But though we can hardly credit the founders of the games, whoever they were, with this far-sighted Panhellenic policy at so early a date, the tradition is founded upon facts: the first Olympiad does mark the settlement of Greece, and the festival did promote the unity of Greece. Its growth, though not its origin, was due to the Dorians.
Olympia lies about ten miles from the sea on the northern bank of the Alpheus, at the point where its valley spreads out into a wide and fertile plain. In an angle formed by this river with its tributary the Cladeus, which rushes down from the mountains of Elis between steep banks formerly shaded with plane-trees, at the foot of the pine-clad hill of Cronus, stood the grove of wild olive-trees, brought there according to tradition by Heracles from the land of the Hyperboreans, the sacred grove from which the Altis took its name. The slopes of the neighbouring hills were covered with a variety of trees, and in the rich undergrowth of flowering shrubs the wild boar, deer, and other game found cover. It was to Scillus, only a few miles distant, that the veteran Xenophon retired to spend his old age in literature and sport. In old days the vegetation was far more luxuriant than now; besides the olive groves, the white poplars, from which alone the wood for the sacrifice to Zeus and Pelops might be cut, and even the palm-tree flourished there. The rich well-watered plain was covered with vines and crops, while its meadows afforded abundant pasturage for horses and for cattle.[44]