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II
THE RELIGIOUS ASPECTS
A study of Greek athletics leads inevitably to religion and the cult
history of the place. In mythology the first contestants at Isthmia
were the gods, Helios and Poseidon, who disputed about possession
of the land. They chose a human arbitrator, Briarios, the son of Poseidon.
He gave the Isthmus to his father and awarded Acrocorinth to
Helios. In a later exchange of property the mountain came into the
possession of Aphrodite. The myth seems to have originated from the
very topography of the land. To the east of the Isthmian Sanctuary
lies the Saronic Gulf, the element in which Poseidon was undisputed
ruler, and directly toward the west rises the isolated hill of Acrocorinth,
the natural abode for the sun god.
Nowhere on the Greek peninsula is Poseidon more legitimately at
home than on the Corinthian Isthmus. This narrow strip of land, which
joins the Peloponnesos to the mainland, is washed by the waves of the
Corinthian Giulf on the west side and by the Saronic Gulf on the east.
But Poseidon was not only the god of the sea; he was also the lord of
the subterranean powers that cause the earth to tremble, and no part
of Greece is so frequently visited by earthquakes as the Isthmus of
Corinth.
We do not know how early the cult of Poseidon found a foothold
on the Isthmus. On the site of the later sanctuary only a few scattered
pottery sherds have been found earlier than the eighth century B.C.
There are many Bronze Age sites in the Corinthia but none very close
to the Isthmian Sanctuary. The only extensive remains in the vicinity
of that period are some scanty ruins of a trans-Isthmian fortification
going back to the thirteenth century B.C. The masonry is of the type
which the ancients ascribed to the Cyclops, whose ancestry was traced
to Poseidon, and somewhere within the sanctuary Pausanias saw a
shrine with an altar on which sacrifces to the Cyclops were made. We
do not know exactly where this altar was located; perhaps it is to be
identified with a terrace in the northeast corner of the temenos,the en-
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