Two followup questions -- one of them somewhat tangential: A few different sites indicate that that the main historical source for the "free meal" practice is a fifth century inscription. For example, the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology summarizes it as follows: "From an Athenian inscription of the 5th century BC, we learn that Athenian Olympic victors received a free meal in the City Hall every day for the rest of their lives."

So my two questions are as follows: Firstly, is there evidence of this practice from any other cities, or was this an exclusively Athenian practice? And, secondly, if one wishes to locate and read the actual inscription which is being used as the primary source in this case, how would one go about searching for such an inscription? Cursory googling was insufficient, and I'm curious as to whether there are, say, publicly-accessible, searchable databases containing these sorts of inscriptions. Thanks for any perspective.