Description of Greece

​From this point, my account will proceed to the explanation of both the statues and the votive offerings. But it was not pleasing to me to mix the account concerning them. For on the Acropolis in Athens, both the statues and whatever other things there are, are all alike votive offerings; but in the Altis, some are dedicated out of respect for the divine, while the statues of the victors are given to them in the category of a prize. We shall indeed make mention of the statues later; but our account will turn first to the votive offerings as we go through the most noteworthy of them.

​For to one going to the stadium along the road from the Metroüm, there is on the left, at the end of the hill of Cronius, and close to the hill itself, a stone basement and steps through it; and beside the basement stand bronze statues of Zeus. These were made from the money of a fine imposed on athletes who committed outrages against the games, and they are called Zanes by the locals.

​Six in number, they set up the first ones in the ninety-eighth Olympiad; for Eupolus, a Thessalian, bribed with money those of the boxers who came forward, Agetor an Arcadian and Prytanis of Cyzicus, and with them also Phormio, a Halicarnassian by race, who had won in the Olympiad before this one. They say that this was the first offense against the games by athletes, and Eupolus and those who accepted gifts from Eupolus were the first to be fined with money by the Eleans. Two of them indeed are the works of Cleon of Sicyon; but who made the next four, we do not know.

​Of these statues, if one passes by the third and the fourth of them, elegiac verses are written on the others. The first of the elegiac verses intends to show that it is not by money but by swiftness of feet and by strength of body that an Olympic victory is to be won; that on the second says that the statue stands both out of respect for the divine and by the piety of the Eleans, and to be a source of fear to athletes who transgress the rules; as for the fifth and sixth, for the one, the meaning of the inscription is, among other things, in praise of the Eleans and not least for the punishment of the boxers, and on the remaining one, that the statues are a lesson to all Greeks that no one should give money for an Olympic victory.

​And they say that after Eupolus, Callippus, an Athenian who competed in the pentathlon, bought off his competitors with money, and this was the hundred and twelfth Olympiad. When a fine was imposed on Callippus and his competitors by the Eleans, the Athenians sent Hypereides to persuade the Eleans to remit the fine for them; but when the Eleans refused the favor, the Athenians treated them with such insolence, neither paying the money and being excluded from the Olympic games, until the god in Delphi declared that he would not deliver oracles to them for anything before they paid the fine to the Eleans.