Nine Things You Didn’t Know About the Ancient Olympic Games

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Nine Things You Didn’t Know About the Ancient Olympic Games

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Sonja Anderson

Daily Correspondent

In 776 B.C.E., spectators gathered in Olympia, Greece, to watch a simple footrace. Thus began the

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, the classical sporting competition that continued for more than a millennium, attracting athletes and spectators from across the Mediterranean.

Within a few hundred years, the Olympics expanded far beyond a single running event: More sports were added, and Olympia established strict rules and regulations for the increasingly popular competition. Every four years, ancient Olympians evaluated by ten highly trained

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faced off in the mind-numbing heat of southern Greece. Like their modern counterparts, they competed in wrestling, javelin throwing, boxing and long jumping; unlike today’s athletes, they also raced to the finish line in chariots. While the ancient Games’ main focus was athleticism, they also incorporated philosophies of fairness, peace, development and education—values that permeate our own Olympic era, which began 1,500 years after the original ended in 393 C.E.

The first modern Olympic Games

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in Athens in 1896, thanks to the organizational efforts of one

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, a French baron who foresaw the value of a multinational sporting competition. “Olympism is not a system,” Coubertin

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. “It is a state of mind.” Ahead of the

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Summer Olympics, here are nine surprising facts about the famed ancient sporting competition that inspired both Coubertin and later iterations of the Games.

1. The Olympic Games weren’t exactly one of a kind.

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An artistic depiction of ancient Olympia

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Olympia wasn’t the only ancient Greek city to host an organized athletic competition. Many communities held their own games, but these contests differed in prestige. Around 150 B.C.E., about 200 “prize games” regularly took place across Greece, with Athens, Megara and Boeotia emerging as the most prominent venues. Athletes competed for money and valuable rewards like

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.

The Olympia-based Olympics were part of another class of competitions: the

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, also known as the

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or the

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. Four places—Nemea, Delphi, the Isthmus of Corinth and Olympia—took turns holding the annual contest, meaning the actual Olympics only came around every four years, as the Summer and Winter Games do today. The Sacred Games were less lucrative for victors than the prize games: Winners received glory and a crown of leaves but little else from the events’ organizers. Of the four Sacred Games, Olympia’s were unrivaled in renown. No matter how many competitions an athlete won across Greece, an

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was revered above all.

2. The Olympic truce is nothing new.

The ancient origins of the Olympics – Armand D’Angour

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At the opening ceremony of the

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Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, Juan Antonio Samaranch, then-president of the International Olympic Committee, spoke of peace. “Our message is stronger than ever,” he

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. “Please stop the fighting. Please stop the ********. Please drop your guns.” Samaranch’s words—an allusion to the ongoing

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—evoked the modern

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, then newly revived by the committee and the ******* Nations. Since 1994, the U.N. has adopted a resolution titled “Building a peaceful and better world through sport and the Olympic ideal” before each edition of the Games.

The history of the Olympic truce goes back much further than the 1990s, all the way to the Games’ invention. In the ninth century B.C.E., Iphitos, the ruler of the Greek city of Elis, grew fed up with the region’s never-ending conflicts. When he consulted the oracle of Delphi, a priestess who served as the earthly voice of the **** Apollo, she told him to begin a peaceful athletic competition. Iphitos and other Greek monarchs—one of whom he was at war with at the time—signed a truce, the

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. Contrary to popular legend, the agreement didn’t call for all conflicts in Greece to cease during the Games. Instead, it allowed athletes and other individuals involved in the event to safely travel to and from Olympia. According to

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, “There is only one known case of the truce being invoked, and then the complaint came from Athens, not Olympia.”

3. The torch relay wasn’t an ancient Olympic event.

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A lighting of the flame ceremony held in ancient Olympia in March 2020

Greg Martin / International Olympic Committee

Today, the lighting of the

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is the centerpiece of the Games’ opening ceremony. A few months prior, a ***** is lit in Olympia, and over the weeks that follow, a flame “travels” from receptacle to receptacle before finally illuminating a large torch in the Olympic stadium. While this torch-to-torch relay has emerged as an enduring symbolic and theatrical charade, the tradition didn’t originate in ancient Olympia. Instead, the Olympic flame first made such a journey in

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, when the ******* architects of the Berlin Games arranged for a flame to be lit in Olympia and transported to the ***** capital.

Broadly speaking, ***** was an important part of the ancient Olympics. During the Games, a blaze was kept

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at the altar of the goddess Hestia. Sacred flames were also lit at the temples of Zeus and Hera. While the torch relay was never actually held in ancient Olympia, sporting competitions in other cities

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the event. In Athens, participants were tasked with keeping a

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aflame while racing in relay teams from a seaport to the Acropolis.

4. Not just anyone could compete in the ancient Olympics.

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An ancient Greek statue known as the Charioteer of Delphi

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A list of ancient Olympic victors

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Women were explicitly barred from competing in the Games at Olympia, though they could

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as the owners of horses that won big at chariot races. (The

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, a separate competition specifically for women, emerged as an alternative to the Olympics but wasn’t part of the official festivities.) Technically, any free Greek male citizen

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in the Games—the first Olympic victor was reportedly a cook named

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—but they needed to have sufficient time and resources to do so.

Olympia required every athlete participating in the competition to train for

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prior to the Games. Such a commitment excluded most dreamers who needed to spend their time supporting their families. Some poor but talented athletes

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via sponsorships from wealthy men, who supported them with stipends during their training. Others received a sort of athletic scholarship from authorities. In 300 B.C.E., the coach of a boxer named Athenodorus appealed to the city of Ephesus for financial aid for his ********.

5. The ancient version of the Olympic Village had a less hedonistic reputation than the modern one.

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The Palaestra at Olympia, an ancient site devoted to athletic training

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The last phase of preparation for an Olympian was a mandatory monthlong stay in

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, a militaristic city that hosted athletes for an intense

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. Athletes’ private coaches sat quietly on the sidelines while

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and judges ordered around the would-be competitors. This boot camp-like setup cleansed the group of unworthy athletes before the Games began. It also allowed participants to size each other up. If a man arrived and found himself unfit to compete with the counterparts he found there, he could drop out without shame.

Today, Olympic athletes only live together during the Games themselves, in a purpose-built

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that has a

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for ******* promiscuity and fun. Comparatively, Elis was rather tame. But it wasn’t entirely devoid of sensuality: Residents of the all-male boot camp either indulged by having **** with each other or slept with “flattened leaden plates over their loins, hoping that the chill and weight of the metal would dampen their nocturnal desires,” writes Tony Perrottet in

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.

6. The marathon wasn’t an ancient Olympic event.

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The stadion in ancient Nemea

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The 26.2-mile footrace included in the Games today—and held frequently around the world—has been part of the modern Olympics since the competition’s revival in

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, albeit with slightly varied lengths over time. But no such race was run in ancient Olympia. In fact, the longest footrace completed by ancient Olympians was the

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, which might have topped out at three miles. Still, the marathon does have mythical origins in ancient Greece. According to legend,

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, an ancient Greek courier, ran 26 miles from a battlefield in Marathon to Athens to announce Greece’s military victory over the Persians—then ***** on the spot. Running is also the oldest Olympic event. The very first Games, in 776 B.C.E., consisted of a single contest: the

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, a one-lap sprint just over a tenth of a mile long.

7. Ancient Olympians received no medals, but their victories weren’t materially worthless.

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A palaestra scene, circa 520 to 510 B.C.E.

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First-place victors in the Sacred Games at Olympia, Nemea, Delphi and the Isthmus of Corinth

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of olive, parsley, laurel and pine, respectively. (The ancients didn’t acknowledge second or third place.) But these official prizes weren’t their only winnings: As Olympians do today, ancient athletes traveled from far and wide to compete in the Olympic Games. Victors’ home cities were immensely proud of them and showered them with additional rewards upon their return.

Athens, for example, furnished local winners of Olympic events with between 50 and 100 amphorae (tall ceramic jars) of olive oil. Other

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included parades, lifetime seats at amphitheaters, pensions, government positions, meals and more. An accomplished athlete who racked up wealth from both prize games and Olympic victories could live a luxurious life indeed.

8. Ancient Olympians performed *****.

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Athletes competing in the hoplitodromos, an ancient foot race held at the Olympics

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The ancient Greeks were quite accustomed to

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, including at sporting competitions. The practice especially suited the Olympics, Perrottet writes, as it “stripped away social rank,” leaving the competitors to be represented solely by their physical prowess. Greek writers also noted clothing’s potential to inhibit athletic ability: Apparently, a runner once tripped on his fallen loincloth during a race.

Today, historians

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athletes’ true motivation for competing *****. According to Perrottet, they might have simply wanted to show off their bodies, which they liberally coated in oil, to their peers,

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and adoring fans.

Athletes weren’t the only ones who needed to be bare at the Olympics. Once, a

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snuck into the stadium, disguised as a trainer so she could watch her son compete. (

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couldn’t attend as spectators, though maidens were permitted to watch the events.) After that, all trainers were required to be as undressed as the athletes so an unwelcome woman could be clearly spotted.

9. The ancient Games weren’t crushed by Christianity, but by the economy.

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A fanciful depiction of the Phidian statue of Zeus in Olympia, with the Olympic Games taking place in the foreground

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The ancient Olympics were held in honor of Zeus, king of the Greek gods. By the mid-second century B.C.E., the Roman Empire had

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of Greece, including Olympia. The Games continued, popular but diminishing in honor and glory.

In the early 300s, Rome

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as its official religion. Later that century, Theodosius I issued a series of decrees banning pagan religion, rituals and festivals. While some observers blame the emperor’s edicts for the end of the Olympic Games, historians

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that the measures didn’t explicitly mention Olympia’s competition.

While newly Christianized Roman ideals might have influenced the Games’ collapse, the competition’s real downfall was

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. According to historian

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, Olympia’s Games were

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by civic funds. But by the fourth century, this money was being diverted elsewhere, meaning it was up to wealthy individuals to sponsor the event. Eventually, organizers reached a point where they couldn’t afford to continue. After more than a thousand years, the ancient Olympics fizzled out, and Greece’s athletic scene came to resemble something more like a bunch of local recreational sports teams than a few big, sacred, semiannual competitions.

The ancient Games may have met a petering end, but it’s difficult to exaggerate their importance to the Greeks,

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, a historian at Dartmouth College. In fact, the Games were so important that the Greeks even risked their country’s safety for them. When Persians invaded in 480 B.C.E., “a lot of the Greek city states agreed that they would put together an allied army, but they had a very hard time getting one together because so many people wanted to go to the Olympics,” Christesen says. “So, they actually had to delay putting the army together to defend the country against the Persians.”

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Filed Under:

Ancient Civilizations,

Ancient Greece,

Christianity,

********* History,

Games and Competition,

Olympics,

Roman Empire,

Sports,

Summer Olympics,

Winter Olympics

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#Didnt #Ancient #Olympic #Games

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