Zeus : a study in ancient religion - Warburg Institute

ApoUon and Artemis 467
Iphitos, make not the fruit of an apple the prize of thy contest
But on the victor's head set a fruitful wi-eath of wild olive,
Even the tree now girt with the fine-spun webs of a spider.
The king, on returning to Olympia, found that one among the
many wild-ohves in the precinct was wrapped in spiders' webs.
So he walled it round and wreathed the victors from its branches.
The first to gain the wreath was Daikles the Messenian, who won
the foot-race in the seventh Olympiad (752 B.C.)\ The spiders'
webs, since they portended rain^, marked out one tree as specially
fertile. But the point to notice is that in this old priestly narrative
there were many wild-olives growing in the precinct. The tree was
an indigenous product, no importation from a foreign land, least of
all from the far north.
Nevertheless the belief that Herakles had introduced a tree from
the north to Olj^mpia is supported by both ritual and myth. Only,
the tree in question was not the wild-olive but the white-poplar.
Pausanias* says
' The Eleans are wont to use logs of white-poplar, and of no other tree, for
their sacrifices to Zeus. They honour the white-poplar thus, I imagine, simply
because Herakles brought it to Hellas from the Thesprotian land. It struck me,
too, that Herakles himself, when he offered sacrifice to Zeus at Olympia, burnt
the thigh-pieces of the victims on logs of white-poplar. Herakles found the
white-poplar growing beside the Acheron, the river in Thesprotia ;
and on this
account—they say—the tree is called by Homer acherois*. It would seem, then,
that of old, as at the present day, different rivers suited different plants and
trees. Thus tamarisks are most numerous and flourishing on the banks of the
1 Cp. Dion. Hal. attt. Ront. i. 71 AaiVX^s MecTj/'ioj, Euseb. chron. i (i. 195, 4 and
196, 4 Schoene) vii. Darkles Mesenius, in stadio : ['EJ^Soyitij. AiokX'^s Metnjj'ios, ar6.hiov.
- Plin. nat. hist. 11. 84 iidem sereno non texunt, nubilo teximt, ideoque multa aranea
imbrium signa sunt. Gruppe Gr. Myth. Rd. p. 1216 n. i cp. Paus. 2. 25. 10 ^ort Ik opos ,
inrkp T^s Ariffcrris rb 'Apaxva.iov,...pwixoi Si elciv iv airu! Aids re Kal"¥lpas- derjaav dfjifSpov
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