The Cruise of the Branwen

THE OLYMPIC GAMES success of a revival that proved popular from one end of the Hellenic community to the other; but a deeper cause is to be found in the religion and art of the races most concerned in it. The dedication, through some form of public and ceremonial exhibition, of the strength and activity of the Hellenic youth to those Divine Powers which especially protected them was essentially characteristic of the earliest Hellenic folklore and religion ; and the opportunities thereby afforded to such sculptors as Myron, or such poets as Pindar, for the themes their art might rightly immortalise, were also in entire accordance with the Hellenic love of physical humanity, and with those expressions of it which have remained unequalled in the world's history, whether in marble or in literature. This is no place to give further details of what the Olympic Games in Elis meant to Hellas, in its widest sense, to a world sufficiently restricted in extent to allow inter-communication (either in language or in actual travelling) to be quite easy, yet developed enough in civilisation to have produced artistic masterpieces that no other community and no other age have ever excelled. It will be enough to say that the Olympic Games went on until Hellas was no more than a name, until the Capitol loomed larger in the world's history than the Parthenon, until Greece had passed on to her conqueror all that was not material in a supremacy that can never die. As the Olympic Games of 776 B.c. were always considered to be a "revival" of more ancient z