TOP STORY: SPORTS, DEITY AND THE STATE: Ancient Olympics an imperfect homage to human perfection

c. 1996 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The race had been won and the radiant runner, at the peak of his power and prowess, sprinted into the sacred space before an ancient altar of Zeus to claim his prize _ not gold, but a crown of olive branches freshly gathered from a holy grove believed to […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The race had been won and the radiant runner, at the peak of his power and prowess, sprinted into the sacred space before an ancient altar of Zeus to claim his prize _ not gold, but a crown of olive branches freshly gathered from a holy grove believed to be the garden of the gods.

Legend has it that this Greek, known as Koroibos, was the original hero of the first Olympic games held in 776 B.C., the beginning of a tradition of athleticism and piety that endured for 1,000 years. Now, a century after the ancient games were revived, this homage to human perfection, deity and the state once again dominates the days of summer.


The modern take on the ancient Olympic games is that they represented a time when the warring Greek city-states put down their arms to engage in friendly competition, a time when the highest ideals of peace, brotherhood and fair play prevailed.

But as the aura of the original Olympic spirit hovers over the hype and glory in Atlanta, a new generation of classical scholars is challenging those romantic notions and shedding new light on how the first Olympic athletes lived and loved, worshiped and trained, competed _ and sometimes cheated.

Much of what people today believe about the Olympics is basically myth, according to Donald G. Kyle, professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Writing in the current edition of Archaeology, the bimonthly publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, Kyle says that by studying everything from figures of athletes painted on urns to epic poetry, scholars of ancient Greece are revising their ideas about the games.

They are finding that ancient athletes once believed to be strictly amateur were probably not much different from the high-paid hired guns of today’s U.S. Olympic basketball”dream team.” Olympic customs long believed to be rooted in ancient practices are now seen as much more recent in origin. And while the Olympic truce may have ensured safe passage for athletes and spectators traveling to the games, wars did not cease. In 364 B.C., for instance, soldiers from the city-state of Arcadia, invaded the sanctuary of Zeus as the games were being played.

One of the more enduring fantasies is the idea that the games opened with a sacred fire kindled by rays of the sun on the heights of Mount Olympus and carried to the stadium to light the Olympic torch.”That torch business is utter nonsense,”says classical scholar David C. Young, of the University of Florida at Gainesville.

Credit for the torch-lighting ceremony goes not to ancient Greece, but to Adolf Hitler’s Olympic planners, who introduced the practice as a way to spice up opening ceremonies at the 1936 Berlin games, says Young, author of”The Modern Olympics: A Struggle for Revival,”soon to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press.


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Equally bogus, he says, are the five interlocking rings many believe to be an ancient Greek symbol. The rings were devised as a logo in 1913, and decades later were engraved on a crude piece of stone as a prop for a Nazi propaganda film, he says. American authors discovered the phony artifact and mistakenly claimed it was real.

Young also puts the lie to a myth that presents Greek athletes as clean-living competitors. An inscription at the temple at Delphi that scholars once translated as a warning that alcohol was banned from the games is now translated,”Wine cannot be taken out of the stadium.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

But that’s not all. Here, in capsule format, are some other scholarly revelations that shed new light on the lives of the ancient Olympians.

Giving the gods their due

Almost every ancient culture engaged in athletics for exercise, entertainment and military training, but according to Hugh M. Lee, a professor of classics at the University of Maryland, the late-summer games first held at the Temple of Zeus at the foot of Mount Olympus made sport a sacred event.

The springtime harvest of winter wheat had been completed, Lee explains, and it was time to give thanks to the gods.”You don’t want to overestimate the religious aspect of the games,”says Lee, who likens the Olympics’ pairing of sport, worship and festival to”a barbecue with a footrace.” An animal _ boar, sheep or cow _ was slaughtered by religious authorities and athletes swore oaths over the sacrifice to abide by the rules of the game. Then the offering was divided _ bones and fat were burned, their smoke drifting upwards as an offering to the sky, where it was believed Zeus resided. The meat was consumed by the people.”It wasn’t quite like going to church _ it was more like holding the final four on Easter Sunday with bishops and cardinals in attendance,”explains Lee.”Religious festivals provided the occasion for a social gathering. In the ancient world, any break from work was a holiday, a holy day, the ancient equivalent of our weekends.”

It was a man’s world

Women athletes play a major role in modern Olympic competition. But if an adult woman were to have entered the stadium at Olympia where the athletic competitions were held, she would have been executed on the spot.


Women discovered at the men’s game were to be hurled to their deaths from the cliff adjacent to the stadium, Thomas F. Scanlon, professor of classics at the University of California at Riverside, writes in Archaeology magazine.

There’s no evidence any woman actually met such a fate, Scanlon writes, although he notes that Greek literature cites the case of the pardoning of one high-born woman, Kallipateira, who disguised herself as a trainer to watch her son compete. To prevent such subterfuge from happening again, trainers were required to enter the stadium naked.

But Greek girls did have a chance to participate in athletic competitions.

The first Olympic games were believed to be established by the mythical King Pelops after he defeated a rival in a chariot race and won Hippodameia as his wife. While Pelops’ festival honored Zeus, separate footraces were held for girls honoring Zeus’ wife, Hera.

And in other Greek cities, such as Sparta and Attica, girls were allowed to compete in games honoring Dionysius, the god of wine, and Artemis, goddess of wild animals and maidens.

Sexual ethics

Except for chariot racers, who were clothed for protection, nakedness was the norm for Olympic competition. And while ancient explanations of the practice had to do with safety (stories abound of a runner who was killed when his loincloth slipped, he tripped and was trampled), present-day scholars generally consider the nudity a symbol of ritual purity, a remnant of hunter’s rituals or a proclamation of sexual abstinence.

Only recently have scholars begun to acknowledge the erotic dimension of athletic competition in ancient Greece.”The Greeks were bisexual, not strictly homosexual,”says the University of Maryland’s Lee.”Homosexuality was tolerated at a certain point in life, as was man-to-man bonding. And after you got to the age of 30, you were expected to get married and have a family.”That’s not to say homosexual partnerships didn’t happen,”he says, pointing to images painted on vases that show older men in affectionate embraces with younger men.”In fact, there are many references in Greek art and literature not only to discreet homosexual behavior, but also to the problem of lechers hanging around gymnasiums. There were specific hours in which the doors of the gymnasium had to be locked to keep the sexual predators out.”


Prizes and professionalism”There is a similarity of spirit between the ancient games and the modern games,”says the University of Florida’s Young, an expert on the Greek poet Pindar. While Pindar, regarded as one of the most difficult of ancient authors, was known to have written hymns, dirges and drinking songs, most of his surviving work were celebrations of athletic competitions.

Young’s readings of Pindar lead him to believe that the Greeks had an athletic system not dissimilar from our own. Though historians such as Herodotus tell of Olympic athletes rewarded with glory alone, a consensus is emerging among Young and other scholars that the concept of amateur athletics simply did not exist in the Greek imagination. The prizes at Olympia might be symbolic, but once they arrived home, the athletes were showered with wealth, wine and favors.”Athletes made a lot of money,”says Young, noting that Pindar compares the life of a successful athlete to one of a successful politician.”People kept track of sports statistics, just as they do today. Athletes reaped in glory, fame and money.” They also were known to cheat.

Kyle cites numerous literary references to foul play on the field, unseemly wagering at the finish line, and tablets inscribed with curses designed to put a hex on rivals.

As a result, Olympic judges developed a variety of punishments for rule-breakers, which ranged from beatings to heavy fines. And by the 4th century, B.C., the road to the Olympic stadium was lined with bronze statues of Zeus, known as”zanes,”that were paid for by fines levied on athletes found guilty of lying, cheating and taking bribes.

MJP END CONNELL

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