The first modern Olympics were held in Athens in 1896. In the 130 years since, the Olympic and Paralympic Games have become the world’s largest secular event. Australians are immensely proud of their participation in – and hosting of – modern Olympics. Impressive as this history is, it is still only a small part of a much older and longer story. The ancient Greeks staged Olympics for 1,000 years. Their Games attracted sports stars from right across the 1,000 Greek states of the Mediterranean basin. With 40,000 spectators, theirs were also the world’s largest event.
The Hellenic Republic has made the historic decision to loan Australia priceless artifacts illustrating the ancient Olympics for the 2032 Summer Olympics. Greece rarely makes such a loan. The first time that it did so was for the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games. This time, Greece is offering Australia twice as many artifacts. Of the 100 or so artifacts in the loan for 2032 there will be many more from Olympia – the site of the ancient Games for 1,000 years.
Rediscovering a religious sanctuary
The Brisbane Olympics Exhibition will tell the remarkable story of the rediscovery of this long-lost games site. In 1874, Germany signed a contract with Greece to excavate Olympia. This contract stipulated for the first time that artifacts found in foreign digs would remain in Greece. Never again would there be the desecration that Lord Elgin – the Englishman – had visited on the Parthenon.
The Germans efficiently excavated the heart of Olympia in only eight years. The ancient Olympics were held in honor of Zeus Olympios, who was the leader of the pagan gods. Fittingly, it was his temple that the Germans first excavated. Elis – the state that ran the ancient Games for 1,000 years – built it to trumpet a military victory over a local rival. The artwork on this temple that German archaeologists unearthed literally rewrote the history of western art. For example, it depicted the heroic deeds of Hercules – the mythical superman who had supposedly founded the Olympics.
The foremost artist of the later 5th century BC was Pheidias, who had built the Parthenon. Elis commissioned him to create a masterpiece for the temple’s interior. Pheidias set up a workshop at Olympia around 420 BC where he created a 12-meter-high statue of Zeus. Made entirely of gold and ivory, his statue was quite quickly counted among the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Around the temple the Germans rediscovered many other monuments trumpeting military victories. They also found hundreds of pieces of, and bases for the statues of Olympic victors who had commissioned the pieces themselves.
Zeus had an oracle at Olympia, which had for centuries given good answers to military questions. Worshippers thanked him by leaving bronze tripods or statuettes. The Germans unearthed many thousands of such thanks-offerings as well as bronze sporting equipment and Games regulations. Good examples of all these remarkable discoveries will be in the Brisbane Olympics Exhibition.
Track and field events
Sports is the main focus of what will be the most significant exhibition on the Olympics ever staged outside Greece. The ancient Games had a sprint race, which was the length of the stadium, and three other footraces. The pentathlon had the five standard events: the sprint, javelin, long jump, discus and wrestling.
Familiar as they appear, these events differed from the modern ones in interesting ways. Long jumpers at the ancient Olympics used hand weights basically in order to jump longer. Footraces there included one where runners sported the equipment of soldiers.
Combat sports
The three combat events at the ancient Games were even more warlike. They were boxing, wrestling and the pankration, which was like today’s kickboxing. Ancient Greek boxing gloves were designed like knuckledusters. They protected a boxer’s hands and, at the same time, caused gaping wounds on his opponent’s face. The statues of victorious boxers at Olympia unsurprisingly showed them with flattened noses, facial scars and cauliflower ears.
Combat events generally ended when a competitor was bashed unconscious or was otherwise forced to give up. Understandably, it was common for there to be serious injuries or even deaths at the ancient Games. This helps us to see why an Olympic competitor was thought to require the same virtues as a soldier. He too had to accept the kindunoi or dangers of contest, and always to display arete or courage.
War and peace
In the first 8 years of their dig, the Germans decided against excavating the Olympic stadium itself. This had to wait for a dark milestone in Olympia’s rediscovery: the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It is still shocking that the new German regime co-opted the ancient Games. As part of its propaganda, it invented a ritual that we take for granted today: the Olympic torch relay. This was purely a Nazi invention because there was no such relay at the ancient Games.
The German fuhrer used his own discretionary funds to pay for the Olympic stadium’s excavation. Adolf Hitler was not disappointed with what was discovered. German archaeologists unearthed many thousands of weapons and pieces of armor. The ancient Greeks often made a monument for a military victory by hammering such items onto a pole. This tropaion or trophy was set up on the battlefield.
But the Germans had discovered that Greek states also set up duplicate military trophies in the Olympic stadium itself. Peace is a cherished ideal of the modern Olympics. By showcasing such weapons, the Brisbane Olympics Exhibition will clarify how the ancient Games were more closely linked to war.
Chariot racing
The ancient Olympics also differed from ours in having races with chariots, horses and mule-carts. The agon or contest for four-horse chariots, was the veritable Formula One racing of ancient Greece. It was the sport of choice of Greek tyrants, Macedonian kings and, in time, Roman emperors. Because the chariots were usually driven by hired professionals, victory in this agon had nothing to do with the courage of team owners.
In the 390s BC, a Spartan king wanted to make this criticism by getting his sister to enter a chariot team of four horses. Agesilaus reasoned that if she, as a mere woman, won, everyone would see how worthless this agon was. His sister’s team did win, but Kyniska had other ideas. She commissioned statues of herself and her team, setting them up at Olympia. The poem that she had inscribed on their common base defiantly boasted that she was the first-ever female Olympic victor.
Sportswomen
I am insisting that the Brisbane Olympics Exhibition includes this absolutely beautiful statuette of a Greek sportswoman. It was left as a thanks-offering for Zeus at his other oracle at Dodona. Greek men generally thought that women lacked the virtues that sports and war required. There was a male anxiety too that women might well have extramarital affairs if they were allowed to work out in public. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that women were barred from competing in person at the ancient Games or from practicing sport more generally.
Nevertheless, there was one state where they were allowed to be sportswomen – Sparta. It is from there that this statuette originally came. But this did not mean that Spartan men were protofeminists. Rather they thought that sports ensured that their wives would bear strong males for the Spartan army.
Sports beyond the Olympics
Sports in ancient Greece was also much more than the Olympic Games every four years. Often overlooked is that these Games were part of an international circuit of four international sports festivals. The three other games in this circuit took place at Corinth, Nemea and Delphi. The citizens of every Greek state swelled with national pride when a fellow citizen won at such Panhellenic games. This explains why they always gave such a victor their highest civic honors. These were free front-row tickets at local games and free meals – both for life.
The 1,000 states of the classical Greek world also staged their own local sports festivals. We know of at least 200 such local games. The greatest of them was the Great Panathenaea – the sporting festival for Athena that the Athenians staged every four years. The Great Panathenaea had unique warlike events. For example, the apobates required an Athenian soldier to jump on and off a chariot. In the anthippasia, Athenian cavalry-units charged each other.
Olympic sports were also a standard part of male schooling across the Greek world. The Brisbane Olympics Exhibition could attract – it is estimated – 750,000 visitors. The 100-plus artifacts in this blockbuster will be used to educate them all about this wider sporting world.
Roman Olympia
Rome’s conquest of Greece was good and bad for the ancient Olympics. In 69 AD, Nero, the infamous Roman emperor, insisted on entering a 10-horse team into the four-horse chariot race. Driving the team himself, he came dead last after repeatedly falling out of his chariot. Elis’ games-umpires prudently proclaimed him the victor anyway. A century later, the Romans improved the Olympic water-supply by building a fountain for the Nymphs. So that the Greeks would not mix up their Roman emperors, this fountain featured the statues of recent ones.
The ancient Greeks worshipped Zeus at Olympia for more than a millennium. But his worship there ended abruptly in 393 AD when Theodosius I, who was a zealous Christian emperor, outlawed all remaining pagan rites. This end was reflected in the still-standing workshop of Pheidias, which, during the 420s AD, was converted into a church. This was where the world-famous statue of Zeus Olympios, the leading god of pagan Greece, had been fashioned nearly a thousand years earlier.
Within a few centuries, even the Christians had abandoned Olympia because of devastating earthquakes and local floods. The former games-venue would remain buried under several meters of alluvial silt for more than 1,000 years. What the Germans began rediscovering there in the 1870s would quickly become the main impetus for the incredible revival of the Olympic Games in modern times.
David M. Pritchard teaches Olympic history at the University of Queensland in Australia. He worked on the cultural program of the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games and is the author of “Sport, Democracy and War in Classical Athens.” He is now working with the Hellenic Republic as well as Australian stakeholders on the Brisbane Olympics Exhibition. These are excerpts from the public lecture he is giving at this year’s Brisbane Greek Festival.
