The Olympics craze, old-school style

As the 2004 Athens Games wind down, I wanted to share a few more notes on the ancient Greek games, from Tony Perrottet's recent book, The Naked Olympics.

"Greeks loved to compete over everything – drama, pottery, oratory, poetry reading, sculpture. Travelers held eating races in inns, doctors would vie over their surgery skills and thesis presentations. The first beauty pageants were Greek, for both males and females, as were the first kissing competitions (held in Megara, but for boys only). It was inevitable that Greeks would test one another in their most beloved pastimes. Any excuse was good enough to hold a sports meet. The Greeks held races and athletics at weddings and funerals. They took wagonloads of athletic equipment with them on military campaigns. And they competed at the myriad religious festivals that punctuated the annual calendar in this era before weekends. The Olympics were born from one of these cult occasions."

"To the barbarian, Solon's explanations of the Greek gym culture oscillate between the baffling and the downright comical. But when Anacharsis learns about the Olympic Games, the idea that multitudes of Greeks gather to simply watch athletics seems the most incredible fact of all. "I feel sorry for the athletes, but even more for the spectators. You tell me the most important people in Greece love to watch sport. But how can they waste their time on such frivolity? It can't be that they actually enjoy seeing this sort of thing -- people being hit and beaten up, dashed to the ground and being beaten to a pulp! In my country, if one citizen strikes another, he faces criminal charges, even if there are only a couple of witnesses -- let alone the thousands that gather at your vast Olympic Games." And athletes who endure this public degradation, he scoffs questioningly, are considered "equal to the gods"? The guide Solon, sounding a little exasperated, says that Anacharsis will change his mind when he goes to the great Games himself. When he immerses himself in the atmosphere, joins the cheering crowd, sees the athletes' strength and skill, he "won't be able to stop applauding.""

"[The Olympic Games were] an obsession that mystified other ancient people. ‘What sort of men have you brought us to fight?’ a Persian general asked King Xerxes at the height of the invasion of Greece in 480 B.C. He had just learned that, while only a handful of Spartan soldiers were bravely defending Greece at the pass of Thermopylae, tens of thousands of able-bodied men were actually away at the Olympic Games, watching a wrestling final. When the general learned that the only prize was an olive wreath, he did not hide his contempt."

"What sort of men had made it to the fields of Elis? The ancient Greeks kept no statistics, but we can put together a profile of Olympic contenders from victory lists, inscriptions, and literary sources. They came, we know, from every corner of the Greek world—representing themselves first as individuals, and placing less emphasis on their homeland than do modern athletes. They also came from a wide cross-section of society. Like basketball in American ghettoes and soccer in British slums, athletics was one of the great motors of social mobility in ancient Greece: the son of a dirt-poor fishmonger might, in certain circumstances, be plucked from obscurity and reach celestial heights of fame. In 416 B.C., the snobbish young aristocrat Alcibiades famously complained that the Games were being flooded by lower-class riffraff. But the underlying democratic process of Greek athletics had been present ever since the Olympics' birth. The first recorded victor in the Games of 776 B.C.—which had only a single event, the 200-yard sprint—was a cook named Coroibos. For the next two centuries, aristocrats largely dominated the Games—they were the only ones who had the leisure time to train, and the spare cash to visit Olympia—but the chroniclers still record victories by goatherds and farm boys. By the classical era (c. 480—320 B.C.), the massive popularity of the Olympics had widened the social net: Greek cities, to promote their own prestige, voted stipends to athletes who showed promise, or even paid for a young man's personal trainer and travel expenses to reach the festival. Private patrons set up bursaries, and athletic guilds began to develop a system of scholarships; there is evidence that athletes were paid per diems of several drachmas a day during their monthlong training session at Elis, to help defray the cost of competing at the Olympics. In fact, few other high-ranking Greek sportsmen shared Alcibiades' disdain for poor athletes. The scions of wealthy families continued to fill the Olympic rosters, despite the possibility that they could find themselves grappling with the son of an olive merchant rather than a fellow member of the "gilded youth.""

"The Cynic Diogenes, who traded repartee with Alexander the Great himself, was one of the most outrageous naysayers, and, in the fourth century B.C., he brought his attacks to the sports field itself. His best-documented demonstrations occurred at the Corinth games, when he grabbed a victory wreath from the prize table and put it on his own head, claiming that he was victor in the contest of life, and that spiritual rather than physical effort was more worthy of rewards. "Are those pot-bellied bullies good for anything?" he asked a gathering crowd. "I think athletes should be used as sacrificial victims. They have less soul than swine. Who is the truly noble man? Surely it is the one who confronts life's hardships, and wrestles with them day and night—not, like some goat, for a bit of celery or olive or pine, but for the sake of happiness and honor throughout his whole life." Later, when he saw a sprinting champion being carried from the Stadium, Diogenes acidly noted that the rabbit and the antelope were the fastest of animals, but also the most cowardly. He later ran off with another victory wreath and put it on the head of a horse that had been kicking another horse, proclaiming it the victor in the pankration contest. Finally, Diogenes made reference to Hercules, the patron of athletes, who had cleaned the filthy Augean stables as one of the Twelve Labors—then Diogenes squatted on the ground and emptied his bowels, suggesting that competitors clean it up."