The disposition here adverted to is one of these mental analogies pervading the whole Hellenic nation, which Herodotus indicates.  And the common habit among all Greeks of respectfully listening to the oracle of Delphi will be found on many occasions useful in maintaining unanimity among men not accustomed to obey the same political superior.  In the numerous colonies especially, founded by mixed multitudes from distant parts of Greece, the minds of the emigrants were greatly determined toward cordial cooeperation by their knowledge that the expedition had been directed, the oecist indicated, and the spot either chosen or approved by Apollo of Delphi.  Such in most cases was the fact:  that god, according to the conception of the Greeks, “takes delight always in the foundation of new cities, and himself in person lays the first stone.”

These are the elements of union with which the historical Hellenes take their start:  community of blood, language, religious point of view, legends, sacrifices, festivals, and also (with certain allowances) of manners and character.  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.