aracter. The analogy of manners and character between the
rude inhabitants of the Arcadian Cynaetha and the polite Athens, was,
indeed, accompanied with wide differences; yet if we compare the two
with foreign contemporaries, we shall find certain negative
characteristics of much importance common to both. In no city of
historical Greece did there prevail either human sacrifices or
deliberate mutilation, such as cutting off the nose, ears, hands, feet,
etc.; or castration; or selling of children into slavery; or polygamy;
or the feeling of unlimited obedience toward one man: all customs which
might be pointed out as existing among the contemporary Carthaginians,
Egyptians, Persians, Thracians, etc. The habit of running, wrestling,
boxing, etc., in gymnastic contests, with the body perfectly naked, was
common to all Greeks, having been first adopted as a Lacedaemonian
fashion in the fourteenth Olympiad: Thucydides and Herodotus remark that
it was not only not practised, but even regarded as unseemly, among
non-Hellenes. Of such customs, indeed, at once common to all the Greeks,
and peculiar to them as distinguished from others, we cannot specify a
great number, but we may see enough to convince ourselves that there did
really exist, in spite of local differences, a general Hellenic
sentiment and character, which counted among the cementing causes of a
union apparently so little assured.

During the two centuries succeeding B.C. 776, the festival of the
Olympic Zeus in the Pisatid gradually passed from a local to a national
character, and acquired an attractive force capable of bringing together
into temporary union the dispersed fragments of Hellas, from Marseilles
to Trebizond. In this important function it did not long stand alone.
During the sixth century B.C., three other festivals, at first local,
became successively nationalized--the Pythia near Delphi, the Isthmia
near Corinth, the Nemea near Cleone, between Sicyon and Argos.

In regard to the Pythian festival, we find a short notice of the
particular incidents and individuals by whom its reconstitution and
enlargement were brought about--a notice the more interesting inasmuch
as these very incidents are themselves a manifestation of something like
pan-Hellenic patriotism, standing almost alone in an age which presents
little else in operation except distinct city interests. At the time
when the Homeric Hymn to the Delphinian Apollo was composed (probably in
the