Characters
- Artemis — infant in local birth/rearing claims; god of the Altis
- Cronus — recipient of summit sacrifice; name-giver of the hill
- Idaean Dactyls — Rhea’s agents in the linked foundation lore
- Mother of the Gods — mother whose Dactyl-servants race at Olympia
- Pisa — maintain the equinoctial sacrifice and local stories
Places
- Elis — Zeus’s precinct below the hill
- Hill of Cronus (Cronius) at Olympia — cult height
- Mycenae — rival/dominant birth landscape (contrast)
Themes
Narrative
Beside the Altis at Olympia rises the hill of Cronus (Cronius). Pausanias records sacrifices to Cronus on its summit at the spring equinox, and he notes Elean stories that tied Rhea and the infant Zeus to this landscape: when the Idaean Dactyls ran the first race, they did so as Rhea’s servants, and local piety could speak as if Zeus’s birth or rearing touched Olympia no less than Crete. The hill thus anchors a western Greek counter-claim—or at least a complementary cult topography—against the dominant Cretan birth-cave tradition.
Catalogue Cronus’s hill and the Eleian Zeus-birth/rearing localization as Pausanian sacred geography, not as a denial of Crete but as Olympia’s own mythic ground.