It was the spirit of independence which had given life to those great athletic meetings where the free citizens of free states contended not for personal glory so much as for the honour of their states. These states were no longer free, and all the pomp and splendour lavished on the festivals by their imperial patrons could not recall to life the spirit that had fled.
Quintilian aptly contrasts the bulging muscles, “tori,” of such athletes with the “lacertus” of soldiers.
A third-century inscription from Epidaurus, Dittenb. _Syll._ 2nd Ed., 689, records that three athletes, a stadiodromos, a pentathlete, and a pankratiast, were fined 1000 staters each διὰ τὸ φθείρειν τοὺς ἀγῶνας. The next inscription, 690, records a similar fine on certain actors.
Roberts and Gardner, _Greek Epigraphy_, ii. p. 145.
Roberts and Gardner, _Greek Epigraphy_, ii. 61, p. 162 ( = _I.G._ ii. 444); cp. _I.G._ ii. 445, 446. Mommsen, _Feste der Stadt Athens_, pp. 278 ff.
Ditt. _Syll._ 2nd Ed., 522, 523, 524, 672, 673, 674.
Krause, _Olymp._ p. 215. Diodorus and Ulpian assign the founding of these games to Archelaus, another account assigns it to Philip II.
_Ol. Ins._ 276, 277. Another such courier was Deinosthenes of Sparta, who won the foot-race in Ol. 116, and set up beside his statue a pillar giving the distance from Olympia to Sparta as 630 stades, and from Sparta to the next pillar (at Amyclae) as 30 stades. Paus. vi. 16, 8; _Ol. Ins._ 171.
Alexandrian victories in 272, 256, 240, 228, 212 B.C. _Vide_ Förster, _op. cit._
This victory was commemorated by the founding of a new festival, the Soteria, which is mentioned in various athletic inscriptions of the period.
Fränckel, _Antiq. Pergam._ viii. 1, pp. 8, 10.
Little weight can be attached to such a statement. The list may well have been transferred to the gymnasium when it was built. A similar list was set up by the father of Paraballon whose victory in the diaulos is placed by Hyde between Ol. 91-101, when the gymnasium certainly did not exist.
_B.C.H._, 1899, pp. 565 ff. The inscription is dated by the archonship of Dion, 258 B.C.
Of the statues seen by Pausanias none can be much later than 150 B.C. (_vide_ Hyde, _Olymp. Statues_). The Olympic inscriptions show that the custom was revived at the close of the first century B.C. _Ins._ 213, 219, 224, 225, etc.