download - IOA

fourth century B.C. It underwent some modification in Roman times,
but the marble seats which Pausanias and later travelers claim to have
seen probably never existed. The carved benches at the sphendone
were made out of limestone, not of white marble. The Roman rebuilding
entailed the construction of a fountain house, the walls of which were
stuccoed and painted with scenes of marine life.
The building that I have just described is still preserved almost
intact, but no one in modern times has ever seen but some small parts
of it. It lies buried under a hill, varying in depth between two meters
at the open end and nearly seven meters at the curved end. Half of this
area is a plowed field, the other half contains a flourishing grove of citrus
fruit trees. The information about the building and its dimensions given
above we obtained by digging trenches at intervals and tunnelling
through the earth underneath the fruit orchard. It would be a costly
undertaking to excavate the stadium, but it would give us an example
of a Greek racecourse in an almost perfect state of preservation. What
other information we could glean from such an excavation we cannot
foresee.
Musical, literary and oratorical competitions, which also formed
part of the Isthmian program, were probably held in the Theater. A
prominent orator by the name of Nikon, who had also served as agonothetes,
was honored with a statue in bronze erected in the pronaos of
the Temple of Poseidon. His merits are recorded in two epigrams on the
marble base that supported the statue. At a later occasion he seems to
have been awarded a gold crown for his services to the sanctuary. The
reference to the crown in the inscription has been erased for reasons
which we can only conjecture. Possibly he failed to pay down the money
for the gold that would have gone into the making of the crown.
Anotner inscription records the victory of a certain Gaius Ailios
Themison, son of Theodotos from Miletos, who had won in all no less
than 94 victories for musical competitions based on themes of Euripides,
Sophocles ane Timotheus. Themison probably considered himself
an artistic heir of his compatriot Timotheus, famous poet and musician
of some four centuries earlier. Both inscriptions are of Roman
date, probably from the end of the first or the beginning of the second
century A.D.
The badge of victory at the Isthmian Games was a wreath of pine
or celery. In the earliest time only the pine crown was used. Later,
189