Culture
Why the Ancient Olympics Still Matter
Nearly three thousand years after the first race at Olympia, the ancient Games still shape how we think about sport, peace and fame. Here is what they were really like.
Every four years, a flame is lit from the rays of the sun at Olympia in southern Greece and carried to the city hosting the Olympic Games. The torch relay was invented for the Berlin Games of 1936, but the connection it celebrates is real. The ancient Olympics were held at Olympia for more than a thousand years, and they remain one of the most remarkable institutions of the ancient world.
A festival for Zeus
According to tradition, the first Olympic Games took place in 776 BC, a date later Greeks used to count the years. At first there was only one event, the stadion, a sprint of about 192 metres, the length of the stadium. Over the following centuries the programme grew to include longer races, wrestling, boxing, the pentathlon, chariot and horse races, and the brutal pankration, a mix of boxing and wrestling in which almost anything was allowed except biting and gouging.
The Games were above all a religious festival in honour of Zeus. The high point was not a race but the sacrifice of one hundred oxen at the great altar, and athletes swore an oath before a statue of Zeus, protector of oaths, promising to compete fairly.
The sacred truce
Before each festival, heralds travelled across the Greek world announcing a sacred truce. It did not stop wars, but it guaranteed safe passage for athletes and spectators travelling to and from Olympia, and cities that broke it could be fined or banned. In 420 BC Sparta was excluded from the Games for violating the truce.
Glory, not gold
Victors received only a crown of wild olive cut from a sacred tree near the Temple of Zeus. Yet the rewards at home could be enormous: free meals for life, statues, poems written in their honour and seats of honour at the theatre. The poet Pindar wrote soaring odes for winners, and a victory brought glory to an athlete’s entire city.
Athletes competed naked, and only free Greek men could enter. Married women were barred even from watching, although unmarried girls had their own races in honour of Hera, and a woman could still win as the owner of a chariot team. The Spartan princess Cynisca did exactly that, twice, in the early fourth century BC.
The end and the revival
The Games continued under Roman rule and even attracted the emperor Nero, who entered the chariot race in AD 67 and was declared the winner despite falling out of his chariot. They ended in the late fourth century AD, traditionally in 393, as Christian emperors suppressed the old festivals. Earthquakes and floods later buried the site.
Excavations at Olympia began in the nineteenth century, and in 1896 the French educator Pierre de Coubertin launched the modern Olympics in Athens, in a restored ancient stadium of marble. The marathon, inspired by the legend of a messenger running from Marathon to Athens, was invented for those Games. Today, when athletes swear an oath at the opening ceremony and nations gather in peace, they are echoing a tradition that began beside the river Alpheios almost three thousand years ago.
