Characters
- Ajax — later Panhellenic founder in the dominant poetic line (contrast)
- Artemis — god of the sanctuary under all foundation versions
- Hippodamia — predecessor whose fall gives Pelops Pisa (background)
- Idaean Dactyls — first Olympic runners in one Elean charter
- Mother of the Gods — associated with the Dactyls’ Cretan origin (background)
- Pelops — founder of splendid games after defeating Oenomaus; hero of the Pelopion
Places
- Cretan Ida — origin of the Dactyl charter
- Elis — sanctuary whose beginnings are multiplied
- Mount Helicon — Pelops’s kingdom
- Pelopion — hero-precinct of Pelops inside the Altis
Themes
Narrative
Pausanias reports that the Eleans themselves did not begin the Olympic story with Heracles son of Zeus. One local charter gave the first race to the Idaean Dactyls (or Idaean Heracles)—companions of Rhea from Cretan Ida—who ran at Olympia and crowned the winner with wild olive; their Heracles was a Dactyl, not Amphitryon’s son. Another charter set Pelops above Heracles chronologically: Pelops held games for Zeus in splendid fashion when he became master of Pisa and Elis after Oenomaus, and the Pelopion in the Altis remained his hero-precinct, receiving blood offerings distinct from Zeus’s ash altar.
Pausanias layers these antiquities under the Panhellenic Heracles-foundation famous from Pindar: the historian of the sanctuary preserves plural beginnings. Catalogue the Dactyl and Pelops foundations as Pausanian Olympia lore, explicitly alternate to 03/137.