Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Pindar’s *Olympian* 10 tells how Heracles, after taking Elis and punishing Augeas, measured out a sacred precinct for his father Zeus in the plain of Pisa beside the Alpheus: he marked the Altis, founded the altar, and established the quadrennial games as first-fruits of war and thanksgiving. He set the stadium’s length by his own foot; he brought the olive from the Hyperboreans (or from the land of the far north) to shade and crown the victors—Athena or more often the nymphs aiding the transplant in related lore. The first contests were held among his army and allies; the prizes were not gold but glory and the wild olive wreath. Apollodorus briefly notes that after the Elian war Heracles celebrated the Olympian festival. Pausanias preserves Eleans’ deeper antiquities—games of the Idaean Dactyls or of Pelops before Heracles—but the Panhellenic poetic charter that dominates victory odes is Heracles’ foundation after the Augean campaign: the hero who cleaned the stables by force of rivers and then took the kingdom by force of arms becomes the civilizer who gives Greece its greatest agonistic rite. The myth binds military victory, Zeus’s cult, and athletic competition into one aetiology of Olympia.