Description of Greece

​At the end of the statues which they made from the fines of athletes, at this very end is the entrance which they call Krypte; and through it both the Hellanodikai and the competitors enter into the stadium. The stadium is a mound of earth, and in it a seat is made for those who conduct the games. And opposite the Hellanodikai is an altar of white stone.

​Sitting upon this altar, a woman beholds the Olympic games, the priestess of Demeter Chamyne, receiving this honor from the Eleans, now one and now another. But they do not prevent virgins from beholding them. At the end of the stadium, where the starting-place is made for the stadium-runners, there is the tomb of Endymion according to the account of the Eleans.

​As you go out beyond the stadium, where the Hellanodikai sit, at this point is the place set apart for the courses of the horses, and the starting-place of the horses. Now the starting-place presents the shape of a ship’s prow, and its beak is turned towards the course; and where the prow is adjacent to the portico of Agnaptos, at this point it becomes wide, and a bronze dolphin is made upon a bar at the very tip of the beak.

​Each side of the starting-place presents more than four hundred feet in length, and in them apartments are built; these apartments those who enter for the race of horses obtain by lot. And before the chariots or even the single racehorses, a cord stretches in front of them instead of a starting-gate; and an altar of unburnt brick, plastered on the outside, is made at each Olympiad near about the middle of the prow, and a bronze eagle ​lies upon the altar, stretching its wings to the greatest extent. The man appointed over the course sets in motion the mechanism in the altar; and when it is set in motion, the eagle is made to leap upwards, so as to become visible to those who have come for the spectacle, and the dolphin falls to the ground.

​First, indeed, from each side the cords near the portico of Agnaptos are let go, and the horses standing by these run out first; and as they run they reach those who have drawn the lot to stand in the second rank, and then the cords in the second rank are let go; and in the same manner it happens through all the horses, until they are leveled with one another at the beak of the prow; and from this point indeed it becomes a display of the skill of the charioteers and the swiftness of the horses.

​Now, in the beginning, it was Cleoetas who devised the starting-place, and he seems to have been proud of his invention, so that he even inscribed an epigraph on the statue at Athens: “He who first invented the horse-starting-place in Olympia, Cleoetas, son of Aristocles, made me.” And they say that later Aristides also introduced some ingenuity of his own into the mechanism.