Crossing the area of ruins again, they left the sacred precincts by a tunnelled way and entered the Stadium where the Games had been held. From the first Olympiad in 776 b.c.—which had afterwards been taken by the Greeks of classical times as the starting date of their history—the Games had been held there every fifth year, with very few breaks, right up to the fifth century a.d. For over a thousand years the most perfectly-formed young men from all over the country, proudly displaying the beauty of their naked bodies, had competed there in running, jumping, wrestling, throwing the javelin and the discus, and in other sports. The victors of the contests won not only honour and life-long security from want for themselves, but also renown for the cities which had bred them.
Yet the Games brought to Greece a benefit far exceeding the pleasure and excitement of following a great athletic contest. When their date was announced, any wars that were being waged in the country automatically ceased. Kings and Democracies alike declared a truce for the period of the Olympiad. Not only that, but every State sent its great men as Ambassadors to the Games, with valuable gifts to be laid in the Treasuries of the gods. ITien, meeting to witness the Games provided the perfect opportunity for discussing terms of peace in an atmosphere of goodwill; so many a bitter conflict between States was temporarily stopped by an Olympiad and was never resumed after it, to the relief and benefit of their peoples.
It was next day, after they had enjoyed a swim and were sitting sunning themselves on the sand beside their pool, that Stephanie asked:
'About your book, Robbie. Will there be much more of it than the parts you have already written and those you have told me about?'
'No,' he replied after a moment. 'Not much more. The only long piece would be about Odysseus and his return from the Trojan War, and I'm in two minds whether to include that or leave it out.'
'Why?'
'Well, owing to Poseidon's having a grudge against him, he was ten years on the way, and his adventures nearly all have to do with overcoming giants and monsters; so, apart from tricks he played to get away from people who were trying to hold him up, it would read rather like a repetition of the deeds of Perseus and Hercules. Also, unlike the Iliad, which tells of the siege of Troy, the Odyssey seems to have very little in it based on real history.'
'Oh, come!' Stephanie laughed. 'Surely that applies also to lots of other matters you have written about. For instance, the war of the gods and giants in which they heaved mountains at one another.'
'But that was historical; or, at least, a race memory of an historical event. So was the account of Phaethon's terrible end.'
'He had something to do with the sun, hadn't he?'
'Yes. He was the son of Apollo by Glymene. When he grew up, she told him that his father was a god and he became so bumptious about it that all his school friends said he was only boasting. That made him so wild that he went to his father and demanded to be publicly recognized. As he had grown up into a real maiden's dream, Apollo felt quite proud of him and promised him any proof he liked to ask.
To show his friends what a fine fellow he was, Phaethon asked to be allowed for one day to drive the Chariot of the Sun. Apollo was frightfully against letting him, but he had sworn by the Styx to grant his son's wish; and as that oath was to the gods like having sworn on the Bible, he couldn't refuse.
The chariot was drawn by a team of tremendously powerful steeds and, in spite of Apollo's advice about how to hang on to them and prevent them from charging into one of the constellations, a stripling like Phaethon hadn't got a hope. In no time at all, he lost control and the chariot was zigzagging all over the heavens. It came swooping down over the earth, drying up rivers and burning up forests with its heat as it passed. Whole cities went up in flames and vast tracts of fertile land were scorched into barren desert. Great rifts appeared in the land, the earth trembled and the volcanoes erupted. It was on that day, so it is said, that what remained of the negro races were burnt black.
'Naturally, everyone who had escaped death from heat-stroke sent up frantic prayers to Zeus to do something about it, and that woke the old boy from his noonday nap. Whatever one may think about his morals, he was a good man in an emergency. He grabbed one of his thunderbolts and heaved it at Phaethon. That not only settled the young man's hash but freed the horses from his futile jerking on their reins; so they galloped back to their stalls beneath the eastern horizon and on earth it became night at midday.'
Stephanie smiled, but shook her head. 'How can you possibly say that has anything to do with history?'
'But it has,' Robbie insisted. 'It has been scientifically proved that all the other planets revolve with their axes at ninety degrees to the sun. Earth is the only exception and our axis is tilted to an angle of twenty-three degrees. The only possible explanation for that is that at one time a big comet came so near that it threw the earth off balance. And it is easy to imagine the sort of thing that would have happened while the comet was passing. Its pull would have brought about tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Whole peoples would have been annihilated, the courses of rivers would have changed and the sun would have appeared to have gone haywire in the sky. Here and there groups of people would have survived, of course, just as in remote places some people would survive an all-out atomic war. Those who did handed down their memories of the cataclysm, and gradually the powers of Nature came to be attributed to the gods; so the accounts took the form of Phaethon's losing control of the chariot of the sun, and the Immortals waging a ten-year war in which whole mountains were thrown about.'
'Yes, I see,' murmured Stephanie. 'There certainly seems something to that.'
'The Deluge is another example,' Robbie told her. 'At the time of the Flood there was not just one Noah but several. They lived in different countries, some as far apart as Babylonia and Mexico; but all of them, by forethought or luck, managed to save their families and some of their domestic animals, and their descendants re-populated their parts of the world.
'The Greek Noah was named Deucalion. He was one of the first race of men created by Prometheus, who tipped him off that the Flood was coming and told him to build an Ark. He did, and shut himself up in it with his wife, Pyrrha, a daughter of Pandora. They floated round for nine days and nights, then the Ark beached itself on Mount Parnassus. When the water had gone down a bit, they hiked it to Delphi and begged the gods to create another human race. As usual, the reply that they got was pretty obscure. They were told to veil their heads and cast behind them the bones of their first ancestor. That foxed them for a bit, but they worked it out that Gaea, the Earth-Mother, was the beginning of all things; so they went about throwing stones over their shoulders, and the stones turned into men and women.
'Of course, no one takes the stone-throwing part of the story literally, but that's not to say that Deucalion and Pyrrha were not real people who lived at the time of the Flood. No one who has read Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough can doubt that the Flood happened, because there are memories of it in the folklore of scores of different races on both sides of the Atlantic. It wasn't world-wide, but it affected the whole of Central America, Western Europe and the Mediterranean countries, and such a terrific cataclysm can only be accounted for by the same great comet, or perhaps another one, having nearly collided with the Earth.'
For a few minutes they sat silent, then Stephanie picked up a small stone and threw it so that it made a loud plop in the pool. Robbie had been looking at her as she raised her arm, and her right breast was forced outward by the action. She was wearing only a bikini. It was of white satin and showed up her golden skin to perfection. For the hundredth time his eyes drank in her loveliness, and he toyed with the thought of attempting to take the role that Zeus had so often played with beautiful mortal maidens in this sunny land of Greece.