Olympia

Certain · the excavated sanctuary

In Elis by the Alpheus, the quadrennial games in honor of Zeus were the one calendar all Greeks shared — dates reckoned by Olympiads — and the sacred truce their one reliable peace. Pheidias’s chryselephantine Zeus sat among the wonders of the world. The philosophers loved the image: life, said Pythagoras, is like the festival crowd, where some come to compete, some to sell, and the best to look on — theoria.