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 Piraeus and Ephesus and the marble islands of the AEgean 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 Isthmian Games.

The athletes wrestled.  They boxed with iron-studded leather straps over their knuckles.  They fought lions brought across the Mediterranean (the Great Sea as they called it) from Africa, and tigers carried up the Khyber Pass across Persia from India.  They flung spears, threw quoits and ran foot-races.  Amid the wild cheering of thirty thousand throats the charioteers drove their frenzied horses, lathered with foam, around the roaring stadium.

One of the most beautiful of these races has a strange hold on the imagination.  It was a relay-race.  This is how it was run.

Men bearing torches stood in a line at the starting point.  Each man belonged to a separate team.  Away in the distance stood another row of men waiting.  Each of these was the comrade of one of those men at the starting point.  Farther on still, out of sight, stood another row and then another and another.

At the word “Go” the men at the starting point leapt forward, their torches burning.  They ran at top speed towards the waiting men and then gasping for breath, each passed his torch to his comrade in the next row.  He, in turn, seizing the flaming torch, leapt forward and dashed along the course toward the next relay, who again raced on and on till at last one man dashed past the winning post with his torch burning ahead of all the others, amid the applauding cheers of the multitude.

The Greeks, who were very fond of this race, coined a proverbial phrase from it.  Translated it runs: