Note 123 — Chapter XXVIII · PAN-HELLENIC FESTIVALS — OLYMPIC, PYTHIAN, NEMEAN, AND ISTHMIAN.

Strabo, viii, p. 377; Plutarch, Arat. c. 28; Mannert. Geogr. Gr. Röm. pt. viii, p. 650. Compare the second chapter in Krause, Die Pythien, Nemeen und Isthmien, vol. ii. p. 108, seq.

That the Kleônæans continued without interruption to administer the Nemean festival down to Olympiad 80 (460 B. C.), or thereabouts, is the rational inference from Pindar, Nem. x, 42: compare Nem. iv, 17. Eusebius, indeed, states that the Argeians seized the administration for themselves in Olympiad 53, and in order to reconcile this statement with the above passage in Pindar, critics have concluded that the Argeians lost it again, and that the Kleônæans resumed it a little before Olympiad 80. I take a different view, and am disposed to reject the statement of Eusebius altogether; the more so as Pindar’s tenth Nemean ode is addressed to an Argeian citizen named Theiæus. If there had been at that time a standing dispute between Argos and Kleônæ on the subject of the administration of the Nemea, the poet would hardly have introduced the mention of the Nemean prizes gained by the ancestors of Theiæus, under the untoward designation of “prizes received from Kleônæan men.”