an invention and gift of the gods to give men a respite from the weightier cares of life, bestowed—as Plato says—by gods in pity for the toil-worn human race. They were drawn together by men of culture, and established by cities by public agreement on public grounds, to delight and entrance those who attended them." Their founders, adds the same author in another place, "making communities to cease from their wars and their mutual differences, drew them together as it were into a single community, the common country of all, there to meet and sacrifice and revel, forgetting all the troubles of the past."[1]
Precisely similar is the language of Isocrates. "The founders of the Panegyreis are justly praised for bequeathing to us such a custom. They provided that we should meet together, contracting truces and laying aside our enmities: that we should join in prayers and sacrifices, and thus recall the memory of our common descent, and for the future feel more kindly one towards another; that we should revive old friendships and form new ones; and that neither the general public nor the qualified champions should find their time wasted; but that these gatherings of the Greeks should enable the latter to display their gifts, and the former to gaze upon them as they contend; while neither should lack interest in the occasion, but each have cause for pride,—the spectators in seeing the athletes toiling on their account, the athletes in reflecting that it is themselves that all have come to see."[2]
