The Isthmian Games

The games began over a grave

Ino sprang into the sea carrying her dead son Melicertes, and sailors afterwards knew mother and child by other names: she was Leucothea and the boy was Palaemon. A dolphin brought his body ashore on the Isthmus of Corinth, the narrow neck of land that carries the sanctuary of Poseidon. Sisyphus found him lying there, gave him burial on the Isthmus and established the games in his honour. Two ancient accounts tell it that way. The traveller Pausanias, who described Greece as he walked it, adds something he saw for himself. The pine still grew by the shore at the time of his visit, and an altar of Melicertes stood beside it, at the place where the boy was said to have been brought ashore by the dolphin.

Theseus and the god of the sea

Plutarch, the ancient biographer, gives the place a second founder. In his life of Theseus, the Athenian hero sets a boundary pillar on the Isthmus and then appoints games there for Poseidon, god of the sea, in emulation of the Olympian games that the hero Heracles had appointed for Zeus at Olympia. Plutarch leaves the older rite standing. The games already instituted at the place in honour of Melicertes, he says, were celebrated at night and had the form of a religious rite rather than of a public spectacle. Plutarch also records the terms Theseus is said to have fixed with the Corinthians. Athenian visitors to the festival would be given a place of honour as large as could be covered by the sail of the state galley that had brought them, stretched to its full extent.

Sciron, Sinis and the pine bender

Plutarch keeps two further versions, and each names a different dead man. Some say the Isthmian games were instituted in memory of Sciron, a kinsman of Theseus, and that Theseus founded them to make expiation for killing him. Others say it was Sinis rather than Sciron who stood in that relation, and that the games were held in his honour instead. Sinis belonged to the same ground. He was called Pityocamptes, the Pine Bender, and he overpowered travellers at the Isthmus and tied them to trees he had bent downward, until Theseus killed him in the same way.

The prize was a crown of pine

Pausanias explains the prizes of two festivals from two dead boys. At the Isthmus the pine became the prize, and at Nemea celery, and he refers both crowns to the sufferings of Palaemon and of Archemorus, the dead boy of Nemea. In that explanation the crown commemorates a death. The pine also belonged to the Isthmus in the plainest way, as the tree the shore carried beside the altar of Melicertes, and the tree Sinis used on travellers. Pausanias saw pine trees growing in a row inside the sanctuary enclosure.

What Pausanias saw at the sanctuary

Pausanias walked the sanctuary and listed what was worth seeing: a theatre and a race-course of white marble. Inside the enclosure he found portrait statues of athletes who had won victories at the Isthmian games, set along one side. On the left stood a temple of Palaemon, holding images of Poseidon, Leucothea and Palaemon himself. The temple had what Pausanias calls a Holy of Holies, its innermost room, reached by an underground descent, and there, he was told, Palaemon lay concealed. Whoever swore falsely there, Corinthian or stranger alike, could by no means escape from his oath.

A quarrel that kept Elis away

Pausanias records a quarrel that kept one people away from the festival. Heracles was at war with Augeas, king of Elis, and the sons of Actor were the Elean champions. When the Corinthians proclaimed the Isthmian truce, the brothers travelled to the gathering as envoys, and Heracles ambushed and killed them at Cleonae. Moline, an Elean woman, set herself to find the killer. Once she had, the Eleans demanded satisfaction from the Argives, because Heracles then had his home at Tiryns, in Argive country. When the Argives refused, the Eleans pressed the Corinthians to shut the Argive people out of the Isthmian games altogether. That failed too, and Moline, an Elean woman, then laid curses on her own countrymen should they ever refuse to boycott the festival. Pausanias says the curses were respected right down to his own day, and that no athlete of Elis was in the habit of competing at the Isthmus.

What excavation has established

A large temple to Poseidon was built at Isthmia around 700 BC. Around 480 BC fire destroyed it, and a new and larger temple was put up about 465 BC, with the games continuing through both. Isthmia was one of the four great Panhellenic sanctuaries, open to Greeks from every city, and from the sixth century BC athletes came there to compete in games held every two years. The museum inside the archaeological site of the sanctuary of Poseidon holds what has been found there, together with material from the sanctuary of Palaimon, the Hellenistic settlement at Rachi and the ancient port of Cenchreae.

The festival outlasted the city

In 196 BC the crowd was assembled in the stadium to watch the games when a herald came forward, called for silence with a trumpet and read out a declaration. Named peoples were free, without garrison or tribute, and in full enjoyment of the laws of their own countries: the Corinthians, the Phocians, the Locrians, the Euboeans, the Magnesians, the Thessalians and others with them. The ancient historian Polybius describes the scene. Fifty years later the host city was gone. Corinth was laid waste by the Roman general Mummius in 146 BC, and Pausanias says the Isthmian games were not interrupted even then. So long as the city lay deserted the celebration was entrusted to the Sicyonians, and when it was rebuilt the honour was restored to its inhabitants.