The First Olympics
The early Greek games were not as pristine as we like to imagine
Amid fears that terrorists will mount an attack at this summer's Athens Olympics, it's tempting to take solace in visions of the earliest games as a more innocent and civilized gathering. After all, isn't Greece, the cradle of western civilization, promoting a worldwide cease-fire during the 2004 games, just like the Olympic Truce of ancient times?
Not quite, says a group of scholars and authors who are taking a closer look at ancient texts and art and other archaeological artifacts, and puncturing cherished myths about the original games. To be sure, Greek cities generally granted travelers safe passage to and from the competitions. But many continued warring even as their athletes competed in the hallowed stadium at Olympia. Once, an army even invaded Olympia's Sacred Grove in the middle of a wrestling match, while spectators critiqued soldiers' martial skills from the sidelines.
Indeed, almost every dewy-eyed notion about the ancient games is shriveling in the light of the revisionist scholarship. The Greeks' high-minded athletics were all about agility, speed, and coordination--right? Hardly. Two of the most popular events at the ancient games were the four-horse chariot race--which often ended in gory pileups--and a ferocious, no-holds-barred brawl known as the pankration . The ancient Olympians were highborn amateurs who competed for the pure love of sport, their sole prize a crown of olive leaves? Not at all. Indeed, Greek athletes trained hard under highly paid coaches and reaped rewards ranging from tax breaks to huge cash prizes. "All the vices of our modern games," writes Tony Perrottet in his new book The Naked Olympics, "were present at their birth."
Spectators. In this post-9/11 world, attending the Olympics is not for the risk-averse. But that's not new, scholars say. In ancient times, spectators had to be not just adventurous but in robust health. While some fortunate sports fans took boats to the games, most walked to Olympia in the blistering late summer heat, over steep trails and roads snaking through the mountains of Arkadia.
Arriving travelers found few amenities. According to Perrottet, Olympia had only one inn, which was reserved for dignitaries, so spectators slept under the stars or in makeshift tents. Sports fans had to use nearby pine forests and dry riverbeds as latrines because there were no toilets until A.D. 150. The air was hazy with the smoke from thousands of cooking fires lit morning and night. And water was in short supply. Archaeologists have excavated nine wells. Still, water had to be hauled in by mules throughout the five-day extravaganza, and physicians were kept busy caring for those who had collapsed from heatstroke.
Despite the creature discomforts, the games were wildly popular, with between 40,000 and 70,000 celebrants arriving from all over the Mediterranean world. Most were men, although some had young, unmarried daughters in tow, perhaps to broaden their marriage prospects. Married women were strictly forbidden; host city Elis even had a law stating that any matron who dared attend would be thrown off a nearby cliff. Why the ban? It was surely easier for the men to carouse with their women out of the way. And carouse they did, with prostitutes of both sexes at lavish, nightly feasts. But perhaps they also weren't pleased at the prospect of their wives' drooling over the athletes who, unlike today's Olympians, competed entirely in the nude.
Some modern scholars have argued that the Greek custom of disrobing before engaging in athletics hearkened back to hunters' rituals. Others believe that it was symbolic of the democratic nature of Greek sports. "But only recently have we begun to admit that ancient athletics had an erotic dimension," comments Donald Kyle, professor of history at the University of Texas-Arlington. The Greeks not only competed in the buff; they oiled themselves beforehand until they glistened. Not surprisingly, gymnasiums, to which most freeborn Greek men belonged, were prime pickup spots, where older men chased buff, beautiful youths.
Few athletes stayed gorgeous for long, however. Boxing and the pankration were particularly brutal events. Ancient bronzes and reliefs of competitors depict facial gashes, cauliflower ears, and bloodied, broken noses. In Olympic boxing, most blows were directed to the head, and contestants wore a tough, laminated "glove" designed to protect the hand rather than face, reports Stephen Miller in his recent book Ancient Greek Athletics. Matches had no rounds or time limits--contests ended when one man couldn't continue or signaled defeat by raising a finger on one hand.
During one infamous match that had dragged on into early evening, the contestants, Damoxenos of Syracuse and Kreugas of Epidamnos, agreed that each would accept an undefended blow. Kreugas went first, delivering a punch to his opponent's head. Still standing, Damoxenos jabbed Kreugas with his fingers straight out, piercing his rib cage. Damoxenos yanked out his intestines, killing him on the spot. Damoxenos was expelled, although seemingly on a technicality: The judges deemed the disemboweling to be several blows (one for each finger) instead of the single agreed-upon blow.
The pankration , the most popular of the contact sports at Olympia, was a vicious mix of wrestling, boxing, and street fighting in which punches, kicks to the groin, shoulder and ankle dislocations, and chokeholds all were allowed. Only biting and eye gouging were forbidden. One famed pankratiast at the 364 B.C. Olympics, who specialized in breaking his opponents' fingers, earned the nickname "Mr. Digits."
The dramatic and often-lethal four-horse chariot race must have had much the same lure for the ancients as stock car racing has for spectators today. Forty teams with brightly painted chariots crowded the track, known as the hippodrome. The race consisted of 12 laps around the course--and two turning posts, the loci of innumerable spills and collisions. A passage by Sophocles paints a lurid picture of one crash: "As the crowd saw the driver somersault, there rose a wail of pity for the youth, as he was bounced onto the ground, then flung head over heels into the sky. When his companions caught the runaway team and freed the blood-stained corpse from his rig, he was disfigured and marred past the recognition of his best friend."
Paid amateurs. The idea that the ancient Olympics took place under amateur rules is "nonsense," according to David Young, a professor of classics at the University of Florida and author of A Brief History of the Olympic Games. First of all, victors profited royally from their wins. Many cities gave them free meals and front-row seats at local sporting events for the rest of their lives. They were also presented with oxen, generous pensions, huge cash prizes, and even slaves. By the early sixth century B.C., Athens awarded victors 500 drachmas--the equivalent of $700,000 today. The money was a form of insurance as well as a reward for a job well done: Athletes usually competed for their native cities, but some accepted money to switch allegiances--not unlike free agency today. Astylos of Kroton, for instance, won in 480 for Syracuse after winning in 488 and 484 for Kroton.
The original Olympians also were professionals in the sense that they trained and competed virtually full time. Entrants in the very earliest games may well have honed their abilities in the margins of their regular working lives. One early winner was said to be a cook, another a goatherd. But by the classical period, roughly 470 to 350 B.C., top athletes were shuttling among major, pan-Hellenic games at Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea, in addition to Olympia, as well as myriad less-prestigious sporting events, known as "money games."
Moreover, the ancients were just as serious about training regimes as professional athletes are today. In the late fifth century B.C., for instance, meat diets were thought to enhance performance. Celebrated wrestler Milo of Kroton reputedly once ate 40 pounds of meat and bread at a sitting. And like modern Olympians, the ancients pushed themselves to the point of injury. Decrying this "extreme" conditioning, the physician Galen wrote: "Perhaps someone will say that they have a blessing in the pleasure of their bodies. But how can [that be] if during their athletic years they are in constant pain and suffering not only because of their exercises but also because of their forced feedings? And when they reach the age of retirement, their bodies are essentially if not completely crippled."
Also like today, cities competed for the winningest coaches. The Greek historian Herodotus describes the peripatetic career of Demokedes, a trainer from Kroton, who was lured away to Aigina for a salary equivalent to 12 times that of a skilled worker. A year later, he took a job in Athens for almost double that, and the following year a position on the island of Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor, for more still. (There, his luck ran out, at least temporarily. Samos was conquered by the Persian King Darius, who was so pleased to learn that the famed trainer was in residence that he wouldn't let him leave. Eventually, Demokedes escaped, however, and made his way to Kroton, which took him back in.)
Hostilities. There is no ancient equivalent of the horror of 1972 Olympics in Munich, where 11 Israeli athletes were killed after being taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists. The Greeks certainly were brutal enough in their ways of vengeance and war to undertake such an act. But they admired athletes as paragons of human physical excellence, so they didn't target them in their endless feuds.
Still, much like today, cities fought over control of the games--and the money, prestige, and political power that went along with hosting them, according to David Romano, an adjunct professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Around 365 B.C., for instance, the Arkadians took Olympia by force, and in 364, they hosted the games. The wrestling portion of pentathlon was in progress when the Elean Army marched in to take back Olympia. A pitched battle ensued in the Sacred Grove, where, according to ancient author Diodorus, spectators cheered on soldiers fighting hand to hand. The Arkadians won, but before the next Olympiad, they gave in to pressure from their allies to return Olympia to Elis, which forever after refused to recognize wins from the 364 games.
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.
This story appears in the August 9, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.