The
interval of four years between the games was called an Olympiad. And time
in Greece was measured from the First Olympiad, which occurred, according
to our reckoning, B.C. 776-772.

With such a stimulus for effort, every young Greek was straining every
nerve and every muscle to win the olive wreath. He was training his body
to the finest perfection for the one prize, and his powers of intellect
and his genius for the others. This goes far to account for the physical
beauty and the supreme excellence which made this race like their own
progenitors of the Heroic Age, more like a race of gods than of men.

But they were great in other things besides athletics and accomplishments.
The shores of Asia Minor and of the Mediterranean were soon fringed with
rich Greek colonies. Every place they touched blossomed into beauty, with
temples and houses adorned with sculpture and painting. One of their
cities on the coast of Italy was called Sybaris, and it has given us the
word "sybarite," which means a person who abandons himself to luxury.

We may form some idea of these Greek cities from Pompeii, which was still
existing on the coast of Italy at the time of the Christian era, and which
has been preserved in its bed of ashes as if to show to a later age
refinements of luxury, so far exceeding its own.

While during five hundred years Greece had been thus developing, its
separate and discordant states were held firmly together by just three
things: They all had the same religion and sacred rites, they were all
striving for the same prizes at the Olympic Games, and all alike revered
their poet Homer. The "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were, in fact, the Greek
Bible. It was the final appeal in matters of religion, and it was the
history of their divine origin and ancestry. Boys studied it in school,
and men never ceased to study it--many Athenians being able to recite both
poems from beginning to end.

At the time the Greeks were thus becoming a great nation, there was in
Asia an old and powerful empire called Persia. Some of the Greek colonies
in Asia Minor were accused by the great King Darius of inciting his own
people in Asia Minor to revolt. And he sent an army, which punished and
subdued the offending Greeks. King Darius then decided that he would
invade Greece itself. He thought he could easily master that little scrap
of territory, and capture its straggling colonies along the Mediterranean
coast, and thus extend his own d