body sent to ask questions of the oracle
of Apollo at Delphi, and there really were answers to them, though no one
can tell by what power. And at certain times there were great festivals
at certain shrines. One was at Olympia, in Elis, where there was a great
festival every five years. It was said that Hercules, when a little boy,
had here won a foot-race with his brothers, and when the Heracleids
returned to Sparta they founded a feast, with games for all the Greeks to
contend in. There were chariot races, horse races, foot races, boxing
and wrestling matches, throwing weights, playing with quoits, singing and
reciting of poems. The winner was rewarded with a wreath of bay, of
pine, of parsley, or the like, and he wore such an one as his badge of
honour for the rest of his life. Nothing was thought more of than being
first in the Olympic games, and the Greeks even came to make them their
measure of time, saying that any event happened in such and such a year
of such an Olympiad. The first Olympiad they counted from was the year
776 B.C., that is, before the coming of our blessed Lord. There were
other games every three years, which Theseus was said to have instituted,
on the isthmus of Corinth, called the Isthmean Games, and others in two
different places, and no honour was more highly esteemed than success in
these.

There were also councils held of persons chosen from each tribe, called
Amphictyons, for arranging their affairs, both religious and worldly, and
one great Amphictyonic council, which met near Delphi, to discuss the
affairs of all Greece. In truth, all the great nations who long ago
parted in Asia have had somewhat the same arrangement. A family grew
first into a clan, then into a tribe, then into a nation, and the nation
that settled in one country formed fresh family divisions of clans,
tribes, and families. At first the father of a family would take council
with the sons, the head of a clan with the fathers of families, the chief
of a tribe with the heads of clans, and as these heads of clans grew into
little kings, the ablest of them would lead the nation in time of war, as
Agamemnon did the chiefs against Troy. However, the Greeks seem for the
most part, between the heroic and historical ages, to have dropped the
king or chief of each state, and only to have managed them by various
councils of the chief heads of families, who were called _aristoi_, the
best, while those who were not usuall