others coming to display their vanity and ostentation, or to distinguish themselves by their superior talents and knowledge. Here sculptors, painters, or artists exhibited specimens of their skill-there rhapsodists were to be seen reciting fragments of Homer and Hesiod; while the peristyles of the temples and all the most conspicuous places in the porticoes, walks, and groves were crowded with sophists, philosophers, poets, orators, and historians, arguing with one another, reciting their productions, and pronouncing eulogies on the Olympic games, on their respective countries, or on distinguished individuals whose favour they wished to conciliate.

In the midst of the various pursuits of this amazing congress of people, all animated by feelings of interest or of pleasure, they would suddenly suspend their avocations and amusements to participate in some pompous ceremony of that religion which, uniting them all in a common bond of alliance, sanctified and exalted their diversions, by imparting to them a character of duty and devotion. It is not sufficient to picture to ourselves the scenery, the climate, and all the varied magnificence of the spectacle we have been attempting to describe; we must imagine the moral, religious, and patriotic feelings of the assemblage, and the enthusiasm that such a union would generate, before we can form any conception of the Olympic games.

Among the benefactors of this festival, at an advanced stage of its existence, was Herod, afterward King of Judea. Seeing on his way to Rome the games neglected, or dwindling into insignificance, from the poverty of the Eleans, he displayed vast munificence as president, and provided an ample revenue for their future support and dignity. That they should derive such assistance from a Jew, to the nature and ordinances of whose religion they were so repugnant, seems a strange and anomalous circumstance. But though this and subsequent instances of equally powerful patronage might for a time protract their lingering existence, nothing could finally prevent the extinction of these celebrated games. The political decadence and impoverishment of Greece, the devastation of that country and of all Europe by the barbarians, but, above all, the extending influence of Christianity, whose votaries proclaimed open war not only against the deities but the institutions of the

pagans, at length accomplished the downfall of the Olympic festival.

So mutable are human affairs, so short is the comparative duration of the mightiest dynasties and empires, that the Olympic games, by the mere fact of their having continued in unbroken quinquennial celebration for a thousand years from the period of their revival, command a sort of reverence, and excite a feeling of involuntary sadness at the thought of their discontinuance and oblivion. Lofty and ennobling, and pleasant from the classical reminiscences they awaken, are all the associations connected with them. Kings and powerful states were often competitors at these illustrious sports, to the periodical recurrence of which the whole civilized world looked forward with an intensity of expectation that absorbed every other thought and pursuit. Public and private business was forgotten, the fiercest wars were suspended, a universal truce was proclaimed by sea and land, that all mankind might travel in safety to Olympia, and regard nothing but the paramount, the supreme object of attention-the festival. And all this has passed away like a dream which, however glorious and magnificent while it lasted, leaves not a shadow behind! That institution

which had endured for so many ages, and formed the delight of such numerous generations of mankind, is now only an empty remembrance, a subject for the antiquary and the historian. Olympia is no more: its solid temples, the colossal statue of Jupiter, the sacred grove with its myriad of statues, altars, trophies, columns, monuments of gods, kings, and heroes, in brass, marble, and iron, have crumbled into dust, and become so effectually mingled with the earth, that even the site which they embellished can be no longer recognised. Nay, the very deities themselves in whose honour these games were instituted, and who had received the homage of the Pagan world since the infancy of time, have fallen into utter oblivion, or are only remembered that they may be converted into a by-word and a laughing stock.

If there be something humiliating to human reason in the thought that it may be devoted, through such a long suc cession of centuries, to an imaginary heaven and an evanescent pageant of earth, it is at least consolatory to reflect that the same human reason, victorious over time, and death,

G

and destruction, possesses the power to embalm its own corruptions and delusions, and erect them into a beacon of imperishable reminiscences for the guidance and instruction of the latest posterity. The Olympic games, with their emblazoned glories and massive monuments, have passed away like a sun-illumined vapour, which is exhaled into the air, and leaves no trace to tell us where it hovered; but the odes of Pindar, in which he has recorded the names and exploits of the victors, are still as fresh and perfect as when they were first written. The passing stream of ages does but petrify and strengthen them against the waves of coming centuries, and they will doubtless endure till the tide of time itself shall be lost in the ocean of eternity. This is the last, indeed the only trophy that the Olympic games have left behind them, and it is one of which all mankind may be justly proud, for it affords an additional assurance, if such were necessary, that the intellectual soul is a divinity which shall survive its perishable shrine, and enjoy in another world the immortality which it can confer in this.

That the unclassical reader may form some idea of the mode in which this illustrious poet celebrated the victors, we subjoin the shortest, though by no means the best, of his odes, as an appropriate termination to this brief account of the Olympic games. It must be recollected that these poems were recited or sung by a chorus, to the accompaniment of musical instruments, dancing, and action. The first stanza, called strophe, was sung while they danced round the altars of the gods; in the second, called antistrophe, the dance was inverted. The lesser stanza was named the epode, in which they sang standing still.

THE TWELFTH OLYMPIC ODE.

Inscribed to Ergoteles, the son of Philanor of Himera, who, in the seventy-seventh Olympiad (472 years B. C.), gained the prize in the footrace called Dolichos, or the long course.

STROPHE.

Daughter of Eleutherian Jove,
To thee my supplication I prefer!
For potent Himera my suit I move;
Protectress Fortune, hear!

Thy deity along the pathless main

In her wild course the rapid vessel guides,
Rules the fierce conflict on the embattled plain,
And in deliberating states presides.

Toss'd by thy uncertain gale,
On the seas of error sail

Human hopes, now mounting high,
On the swelling surge of joy;
Now, with unaffected wo,
Sinking to the depths below.

ANTISTROPHE.

For such presage of things to come, None yet on mortals have the gods bestow'd;. Nor of futurity's impervious gloom

Can wisdom pierce the cloud.

Oft our most sanguine views th' event deceives,
And veils in sudden grief the smiling ray:
Oft, when with wo the mournful bosom heaves,
Caught in a storm of anguish and dismay,
Pass some fleeting moments by-
All at once the tempests fly,
Instant shifts the clouded scene,
Heav'n renews its smiles serene,
And on joy's untroubled tides
Smooth to port the vessel glides.

EPODE.

Son of Philanor, in the secret shade, Thus had thy speed, unknown to fame, decay'd; Thus, like the crested bird of Mars, at home, Engaged in foul domestic jars,

And wasted with intestine wars,

Inglorious hadst thou spent thy vig'rous bloom; Had not sedition's civil broils

Expell'd thee from thy native Crete,

And driv'n thee with more glorious toils.
Th' Olympic crown in Pisa's plain to meet.
With olive now, with Pythian laurels grac'd,
And the dark chaplets of the Isthmian pine,
In Himera's adopted city plac'd,

To all, Ergoteles, thy honours shine,
And raise her lustre by imparting thine.

CHAPTER VII.

Games of the Ancient Romans.

"Sacra recognosces Annalibus eruta priscis ;
Et quo sit merito quæque notata dies.
Invenies illic et festa domestica vobis,

Sæpe tibi pater est, sæpe legendus avus."

Ovid. Fast. lib. i. v. 7.

DURING the republic it was the practice of the Roman magistrates and rulers to court the suffrages of the citizens by the frequent exhibition of shows; it was the interest of the emperors to pacify and keep in subjection, by the same means, a people avowedly desiring nothing but bread and the public spectacles. The wealth of a conquered world enabled the imperial despots to gratify this propensity on the most magnificent scale; and their subjects, therefore, had probably in exchange for their loss of liberty a greater share of festivals, exhibitions, and holydays than any nation that ever existed. Truly they had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. They wanted, indeed, the regular Sabbath of the Hebrews, but that deficiency had been supplied even from the times of Numa, by the division of their year, as noted upon the calendar, into days termed fasti and nefasti, in which the destination of each, either to labour or to the performance of religious sacrifices and solemnities, was permanently appointed. Additions to this list were constantly made by the pontiffs, in whose custody was deposited the sacred calendar, and who derived an important authority from the power thus vested in them; since by declaring a day to be lucky or unlucky they became, in some sort, the directors of public affairs and arbiters of the Roman destiny. Such was the superstition of the people, and so strictly was the observance of these pontifical decrees enjoined, that, besides a considerable fine, an expiatory sacrifice was imposed upon those who even through inattention had worked upon a holyday. To do so designedly and contumaciously was an irremissible offence.