THE RELAY-RACE


The shining blue waters of two wonderful gulfs were busy with fishing
boats and little ships. The vessels came under their square sails and
were driven by galley-slaves with great oars.

A Greek boy standing, two thousand years ago, on the wonderful
mountain of the Acro-Corinth that leaps suddenly from the plain above
Corinth to a pinnacle over a thousand feet high, could see the boats
come sailing from the east, where they hailed from the Piræus and
Ephesus and the marble islands of the Ægean Sea. Turning round he
could watch them also coming from the West up the Gulf of Corinth
from the harbours of the Gulf and even from the Adriatic Sea and
Brundusium.

In between the two gulfs lay the Isthmus of Corinth to which the men
on the ships were sailing and rowing.

The people were all in holiday dress for the great athletic sports
were to be held on that day and the next,--the sports that drew, in
those ancient days, over thirty thousand Greeks from all the country
round; from the towns on the shores of the two gulfs and from the
mountain-lands of Greece,--from Parnassus and Helicon and Delphi,
from Athens and the villages on the slopes of Hymettus and even from
Sparta.

These sports, which were some of the finest ever held in the whole
world, were called--because they were held on this isthmus--the