Olympia, above all, appealed to the antiquarian spirit of the age. It is chiefly to the traveller and antiquarian Pausanias, who visited Elis in 173 A.D., that we owe our knowledge of the festival. The mass of details which he gathered from the official guides of Olympia is sure evidence of the interest which the festival aroused. Phlegon of Tralles, like Aristotle in Macedonian times, revised and edited the Olympic register, making it the chronological basis of his history from 776 B.C. to 137 A.D. One C. Asinius Quadratus carried his zeal for Olympia to such lengths as to place the founding of Rome in the year of the first Olympiad, for which act of flattery he received from the Eleans a monument, “because he had honoured Olympia both in word and deed.”[274] Others, not content with a chronology that dated back only to Coroebus, invented a new Olympic era 800 years earlier. On an inscribed diskos dedicated by Publius Asclepiades, a pentathlete of Corinth, the date is given according to the two chronologies, Ol. 255 and Ol. 456! and also by the name of the Alytarch for the year, “Flavius Scribonianus, kinsman of senators and consulars.” Archaism took a more practical shape in the minute observance of ceremonies and customs. In the inscription of Claudius Rufus, mentioned in a previous chapter, he is commended especially for having diligently practised in the sight of the Hellanodicae, “in accordance with the ancestral custom of the games.” Our knowledge of the usages of the festival is chiefly derived from authors of this period. We have already seen how these usages were reproduced in the new festivals.
No state preserved so large a measure of independence under Roman rule as Sparta. In A.D. 214, when Caracalla appeared in Greece as a second Alexander to lead a new war against the East, he appealed to Sparta for assistance; and Sparta, as a free federate state, sent two regiments of volunteers bearing the time-honoured names of the Laconian regiment, and the regiment of Pitane, as her contribution to what an inscription styles “the most fortunate alliance against the Persians.” The excavations conducted by the British School of Athens have shed a flood of light upon the history and condition of Sparta at this period.[275] We see her as a flourishing provincial town with her Roman fortifications, theatre, baths, and suburban villas. But though changed in outward appearance, Sparta clung only the more tenaciously to the traditions and customs which she derived from Lycurgus. The love of archaism characteristic of this period showed itself in an exaggerated revival of the Lycurgean discipline. Sparta, for centuries, had taken little part in the athletic history of Greece. The one object of her physical education was to produce endurance, and the supreme test of this endurance was the so-called “Contest of Endurance” by means of successive scourgings which took place upon the altar of Artemis. The altar itself has been discovered standing on the site of earlier altars, where from time immemorial this ancient ceremony had taken place. The interest attaching to the contest in Roman times is shown by the numerous references in contemporary writers; and still more by the fact that towards the close of the second century A.D., a large theatre, surrounding the altar, was built for the convenience of spectators. An inscription discovered in the Artemisium records the victory of a boy in this contest. Greek writers represent the contest as a humane substitute for human sacrifice; but Professor Bosanquet[276] has shown that there is good reason for thinking that Greek tradition mistook the meaning of the ceremony, which originated in an ancient ritual practice of whipping away boys who tried to steal cheeses from the altar; and that the “Contest of Endurance” was a brutal exaggeration of the old practice, due to the late and artificial revival of the Lycurgean discipline. It certainly justifies, in part, the contemptuous tone in which Philostratus speaks of Spartan athletics.