Plympia usually called the Olympic games, the greatest of the national festivals of the Greeks. It was celebrated in Elis, the name given to a small plain to the west of Pisa, which was bounded on the north and north-east by the mountains Cronius and Olympus, on the south by the river Alpheus, and on the west by the Cladeus, which flows into the Alpheus. Otympia does not appear to have been a town, but rather a collection of temples and public buildings, the description of which does not come within the plan of this work. The origin of the Olympic Games is buried in obscurity. The legends of the Elean priests attributed the institution of the festival to the Idaean Heracles, and referred it to the time of Cronos. According to their account, Rhea committed her newborn Zeus to the Idaean Dactyli, also called Caretes, of whom five brothers, Heracles, Paeonaeus, Epimedes, lasius, and Idas, came from Ida in Crete, to Olympia, where a temple had been erected to Cronos by the men of the golden age; and Heracles the eldest conquered his brothers in a foot-race, and was crowned with the wild olive-tree. Heracles hereupon established a contest, which was to be celebrated every five years, because he and his brothers were five in number. Fifty years after Deucalion's flood they said that Clymenus, the son of Cardis, a descendant of the Idaean Heracles, came from Crete, and celebrated the festival; but that Endymion, the son of Aethlius, deprived Clymenus of the sovereignty, and offered the kingdom as a prize to his sons in the foot-race ; that a generation after Endymion the festival was celebrated by Pelops to the honour of the Olympian Zeus; that when the sons of Pelops were scattered through Pelopon-' nesus, Amythaon, the son of Cretheus and a relation of Endymion, celebrated it; that to him succeeded Pelias and Neleus in conjunction, then Augeas, and at last Heracles, the son of Amphitryon, after the taking of Elis. Afterwards Oxy-lus is mentioned as presiding o