During these six years a space in the form of a square, measuring 1,000 feet on each side, was stripped of the accumulated deposit of twelve centuries; the average depth of this covering was estimated to be over sixteen feet.
Archæologically, this excavation involved expert care and much labor. Neither the care nor the labor was withheld. The result may best be described in the language of an eminent professor of classical archæology:--
“The result of these excavations, carried on there at great cost and with supreme disinterestedness by the German people, has been to enable the traveller at Olympia not only to study the scene of the greatest of Greek athletic festivals, but to trace the celebration from hour to hour and from point to point. He not only sees the hill of Cronion, where the spectators crowded, wades through Olympic dust, and feels the sun of Olympia beat on his head, but he can wander on the threshold of the temple of Zeus, pass from building to building in the sacred enclosure of the Altis, and stand at the starting-point of the runners in the Stadium. Taking the guidebook of the old Greek traveller Pausanias in our hand, we can follow in his steps, and out of broken pillars, truncated pedestals and the foundations of demolished buildings, we can conjure forth the beautiful Olympia of old, with its glorious temples, its rows of altars, its statues of gods and godlike men who conquered in the games, its treasuries full of the noblest works of art and the richest spoils of war. And we can people the solitude with the combatants and with the spectators, a crowd filled with the enthusiasm of the place and with delight in manly contests; a crowd over whom emotions swept as rapidly as chariots through the hippodrome, and who were ever breaking out into wild cries of delight, or loud shouts of scorn and derision. We can see the bestowal of the crowns of wild olive, and can hear the heralds recite the names of those who have been victorious.”
Here, then, in the summer time was held the great athletic festival in honor of Olympian Zeus. At the beginning of authentic history it was already a venerable institution. We have already learned that early in the sixth century the other three Panhellenic festivals were modeled upon it. Many myths very early sprang into existence to explain its origin. Pindar, it is well known, in one of his Olympian odes makes the Dorian Herakles the founder. Of course, the myths do not agree, and if they did would establish nothing directly; indirectly, however, they show that at the time of their first promulgation the festival had attained so approved a system, so wide a celebrity, and so great a prestige as to need accounting for and to be compatible with an exalted origin. And as a matter of fact, system, celebrity and prestige do not fall to the lot of an institution in the period of a single generation.