Eleven days before the festival, the Hellanodikai caused to be proclaimed by heralds throughout all the cities of Hellas the truce, sacred to Olympian Zeus, which was to last a month. It was this truce that made the Olympia possible as a Panhellenic institution. During the month that followed the proclamations of the heralds, all wars between Hellenic states were held in abeyance, and travellers were allowed to journey through them unmolested. The awful name of Zeus coupled with the decrees of rulers made this truce effective.
During the eleven days pilgrims from all over Hellas were approaching Olympia. Some of the scenes may be imagined. In the language of Professor Percy Gardner: “From all the shores of the Mediterranean and the Euxine seas the Greek colonies sent deputations to represent them at the games, to bear offerings to the temple, and to perform sacrifices on their behalf. And the Greeks readily took a tinge from the land wherein they dwelt. There were dwellers on the northern shore of the Black Sea, to whom continual intercourse and frequent intermarriage with their Scythian neighbors gave almost the aspect of nomads; and colonists from Massilia, who in dress and blood were half Gauls. There were people from Cyrene, with the hot blood and dark complexions of Africa, and oriental Ionians, with trailing robes and effeminate airs. There were rude pirates from Acarnania, and delicate sensualists from Cyprus.”
To give a detailed account of the competitions at each of the great festivals would involve much unnecessary repetition. That held at Olympia, therefore, may be taken as the type and the ideal of the others. But even at Olympia, the celebrations of which have been most widely written of both by ancient and modern scholars, it is not always easy to determine the exact order of the various contests.
There is hardly a doubt that at the Olympic festival as well as at the others the foot-races were the initial competitions. Plato says that at his time when a contest took place the herald first called on the σταδιοδρόμος to do his part. The reason for beginning with the foot-race was probably an historical one; as has been said, it was originally the sole competition at the Olympic celebration. According to the old Eleian priest legends, the Idaian Herakles, one of the Cretan Kouretes, came to Elis in the reign of Kronos, in the golden age, and arranged a foot-race in which the victor was crowned with wild olive. The legends further state that the place thus honored by the priest of Olympian Zeus was afterward called Olympia, and that in time the celebration was repeated at intervals of four years. Of course the foregoing is a tale invented to explain the priority of the foot-race as well as the founding of the festival. Another legend recounts that at one of these subsequent celebrations Endymion, son of Æthlios, offered the kingdom of Klymenos, whom he had conquered, as a prize to that one of his sons who should be first in the foot-race. Such are some of the myths that helped to sanction and endear an inviolable Olympic custom. It is noteworthy in this connection that in the Odyssey the Phæacians had opened their games with the foot-race.