The First Olympics
The early Greek games were not as pristine as we like to imagine
Much of our mythology about the original Olympics is rooted in Victorian England in the late 1800s, when formal athletic competitions were starting to spring up. According to Young, the aristocracy wanted to compete but not against working class stiffs, so with the aid of a few "obliging classical scholars," he says, they dreamed up the idea that Greek athletes were aristocrats who practiced only an hour or two a day and didn't profit from their wins. A few years later, when Baron Pierre de Coubertin and other gentlemen advocates of an Olympic revival sought to ensure that modern Olympians would be drawn from the upper classes, the fiction was again trotted out. Avery Brundage, who presided over the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972, put the finishing touches on the story, arguing that the ancient games degenerated and were finally abolished when they "lost their purity and high idealism" and became a business.
Our modern notion that the original Olympics were a force for peace is not entirely myth. In 476 B.C., Greek cities put aside their feuds long enough to repel the Persian Army, and in the wake of that victory, they agreed to allow an Olympic appeals board to settle future differences. For a brief, shining decade the agreement actually was upheld. Archaeologists have unearthed at Olympia a sheet of bronze detailing the board's verdict in two cases. But within a few years some cities had rejected the board's authority, and by 431, most Greek cities were embroiled in the Peloponnesian War.
Still, the ancients upheld the Olympic truce for more than a millennium. Moreover, the games were never canceled, points out Miller--not in 480, with the Persians on the doorstep, not during the Peloponnesian War, not even in the first century A.D. when the Roman Emperor Nero fiddled with the program to suit his fancy. By contrast, in a little over a century the modern Olympics have been canceled three times because of wars and disrupted by three major boycotts. Perhaps, writes Miller, "we need to study ancient practices more closely, after all."
Highlights of ancient times
Sometime during the 10th century B.C., a cult of Zeus was formed at Olympia, in the valley of the river Alpheus, where locals sacrificed animals to the god and hosted an agrarian festival.
At the first Olympics in 776 B.C., the sole event was a footrace of about 200 meters.
Milo of Kroton was the only wrestler to show up at the 520 B.C. games. Apparently, no one dared compete against the famed strongman, who ultimately won in at least six Olympiads.
In 420 B.C., the Olympic host city Elis forbade Spartan athletes from competing on a technicality. At the time, Sparta was at war with Athens, with which Elis had concluded a treaty.
In A.D. 67, after accepting hefty bribes, the Olympic judges awarded Roman Emperor Nero the wreath in the chariot race, even though he'd been thrown from his vehicle and did not complete the course.
Around A.D. 150, Olympia finally got running water--from an enormous marble drinking fountain shaped like an open oyster shell and fed by water from an aqueduct.
After a slow decline, the ancient games ended in A.D. 393, when Christian Roman Emperor Theodosios I forbade the use of pagan religious sites, including Olympia's Temple of Zeus.
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