501 Critical Reading Questions

Critical Reading Questions
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of the old starting-sill, with the feeling that thirty centuries looked
down upon them, it would not be practical. A successful athletic con-
test cannot be held in the wilderness. It demands a crowd and suste-
nance for a crowd. The crowd is the one essential concomitant of the
athletes. But a crowd will not go where it cannot eat and sleep. To
bring to Olympia a concourse sufficient to in modern times make the
games anything like a success would demand the organization of a
first-class commissary department, and that too for a service of half a
month only. Shelter and food for such an occasion come naturally only
in connection with some city with a market. Ancient Olympia, with all
its magnificent buildings, was of course that sort of city, albeit practi-
cally a deserted city except for a few days once in four years.
The visitors at Athens next April—and it is hoped that there will be
tens of thousands of them—will doubtless feel keenly enough the
inadequacy even of a city of 130,000 inhabitants, to give them all that
they seek in the way of material comforts. The problem of seating a
large crowd of spectators did not come up before the International
Committee. But it is this problem which has found a most happy solu-
tion in Athens. The Stadium at Olympia, although excavated at each
end by the Germans, still lies in most of its course under fifteen or
twenty feet of earth. But the Stadium at Athens has always been a fit
place for a monster meeting, provided people would be contented to
sit on its sloping sides without seats. When a local Athenian commit-
tee was formed, composed of most of the citizens conspicuous for
wealth or position, and some resident foreigners, under the presidency
of Constantine, crown prince of Greece, one of the first questions
before it was this question of seating; and its attention was naturally
directed to the Stadium.
A wealthy and generous Greek of Alexandria, George Averoff, who
was known as a man always on the watch to do something for Athens,
readily took upon himself the expense of restoring the Stadium to
something like its former splendor, when it was lined with marble and
seated fifty-thousand spectators. He has already given over nine hun-
dred thousand drachmas, which, if the drachma were at par, would be
$180,000, but which now amounts to only about $100,000. There is
a sub-committee of the general committee above described, desig-
nated as the committee on the preparation of the Stadium, composed
of several practical architects, but including also the Ephor General of
Antiquities, and the directors of the foreign archaeological schools.
The presence of the archaeological element on this committee empha-
sizes the fact that the new work is to be a restoration of the old.
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