The only reward of the victor was a crown of wild-olive leaves; but this was regarded as the dearest prize in life and the greatest honor a Greek could attain.

The wearer of the olive crown was carried home like a king, with processions and songs of triumph, and all his life afterward he was a privileged and honored person.  He had conferred everlasting distinction upon his family and his country, and his statue was erected in the Sacred Grove of Jupiter, in whose honor these festivals occurred.

Other festivals were established afterward in honor of Apollo, called the Pythian and Isthmian games, in which there were contests, not alone in gymnastics and in chariot races, but in music, poetry, and eloquence; and these prizes were also sought as the richest rewards life could bring.  The Spartans took no part in them.  But it was the Olympic games which brought together all of Greece every four years, cemented the states with a common sympathy, and kept alive the fraternal spirit.

This national festival was to them what the Christian era is to us.  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.