Sometime around 400 BC Hippias of Elis assembled the first cumulative list of victors in the Olympic Games. In the centuries that followed the victor list was regularly updated and widely circulated. The enduring popularity of Olympic victor lists, which the Greeks called Olympionikai, was due to the fact that, by the fourth century BC, numbered Olympiads and the names of Olympic stadion victors became a standard means of identifying individual years. (The stadion, a footrace over a distance of roughly 200 meters, was the signature event of the ancient Olympics.) The Olympic victor list thus became a basic chronological referent that was used by Greeks across much of the Mediterranean basin.