The Olympics – ancient and modern
Traffic congestion, corruption, professional athletes and spiralling costs
– despite our rose-tinted view of the ancient Olympics, they were not so
dissimilar to our modern Games =85 the Olympic tradition has never quite
lived up to its own ideals
Mary Beard
guardian.co.uk,
Friday 22 June 2012 22.55 BST
Fair play? You didn’t even get a medal if you came first in the early
Olympic competitions, just a wreath of olive leaves. Photograph: Getty
Images/The Bridgeman Art Library
The Olympic Games of AD165 ended in a horribly spectacular fashion. Just a
couple of miles from the main stadium, watched by a large crowd, an old man
called Peregrinus Proteus – an ex-Christian convert, turned loud-mouthed
pagan philosopher and religious guru – jumped on to a blazing pyre to his
death. He had been threatening to do this ever since the previous Olympics,
four years earlier. The self-immolation was modelled on the mythical death
of Heracles (one of the legendary founders of the Games) and was meant as a
gesture of protest at the corrupt wealth of the human world, as well as a
lesson to the guru’s followers in how to endure suffering.
Despite his brave words, as the days of the Olympic festival went by,
Peregrinus kept putting off the final moment. It was not until the Games
had officially finished, that he actually built the pyre and took the
plunge. But there was still a big audience left to witness his death,
because traffic congestion (too many people trying to leave the place at
once), combined with a shortage of public transport, had prevented most
people from leaving Olympia. Then as now, presumably, only the VIPs were
whisked away.
The story of Peregrinus is told in detail by an eye-witness, the ancient
satirist and essayist Lucian – who not only describes the old man’s last
moments and the scuffles that broke out around the pyre between his
supporters and detractors, but also throws in the point about the ancient
Olympic traffic problems. Lucian himself has no time for Peregrinus: “a
drivelling old fool”, bent on “notoriety”, he sneered. But the story is
not, as some have taken it, a sign of the decadence of the Olympics under
Roman rule (by AD165 Greece had been part of the Roman empire for over 300
years). Quite the contrary. It was surely because the Games were still such
a major attraction that Peregrinus chose the occasion for his histrionic
suicide; and it was because of their considerable cultural significance
that the incident was so prominently written up.
When we now think back to the ancient ancestors of the modern Olympics, we
usually prefer to bypass the Roman period, and concentrate instead on the
glory days of classical Greece. It’s easy to ignore the fact that the
ancient Games were “Roman” for almost as long as they were “Greek” – in the
sense that they were celebrated under Roman rule and sponsorship from the
middle of the second century BC until they were abolished by Christian
emperors at the end of the fourth century AD. In fact, a pedantic chorus of
protest has recently been raised at the appearance of explicitly Roman
rather than Greek gods (Mars not Ares, Minerva not Athene, and so on) on
the British coins minted to commemorate the 2012 Olympics. And this is not
so very different from the chorus of protest raised in 2000, when the
Sydney Olympic Committee put an instantly recognisable Roman Colosseum on
their Olympic medals (and on that occasion the angry voices were not
quelled by the claim that it was meant to be a “generalised” image of an
arena, rather than the Colosseum itself). Forget the story of Peregrinus:
in most modern accounts, the true ancestor of “our” Games lies in the
rose-tinted age of classical Greece, between the sixth and fourth centuries
BC, or maybe even further back (according to legend the ancient Games were
founded in 776BC, though not much has been found to justify that date).
For us, talk of these “original” Olympics usually conjures up a picture of
plucky amateur athletes, men only, of course, fiercely patriotic, nobly
competing in a very limited range of sports: running races, chariot races,
wrestling and boxing, discus and javelin throwing. There were no team games
then, let alone such oddities as synchronised swimming. Everything was done
individually, for the pure glory of winning – and for no material reward.
You didn’t even get a medal if you came first in an Olympic competition,
just a wreath of olive leaves, and if you were lucky a statue of yourself
near the stadium, or in your home town. The very luckiest might also be
celebrated in one of the “Victory Odes”, specially composed by the Greek
poet Pindar, or one of his followers, that are still read and puzzled over
2,500 years later (and I mean puzzled over: they are written in some of the
most difficult and obscure Greek to have come down to us, and the prospect
of being asked to translate one of Pindar’s Olympian Odes scares even the
brightest student of classics).
What is more, the whole contest was performed in honour of the gods.
Olympia was a religious sanctuary of Zeus and Hera, as much as it was a
sports ground, and the Games united the Greek world under a single
religious cultural banner. Though the warring city states of Greece were
usually doing just that – warring – every four years the “Olympic truce”
was declared to suspend conflict for the period around the competition, to
allow anyone from everywhere in the Greek world to come and take part. It
was a moment when sport and fair play trumped self-interested military
conflicts and disputes.
As with most stereotypes, there are some grains of truth here: there were
no medals and no women at the ancient Olympics; the contests were keenly
fought, man against man, ostensibly for nothing more than glory for oneself
and for one’s city; and the whole thing was done under the watchful eye of
the ancient gods. But taken altogether, as a picture of what the ancient
Games were really like, this tissue of clichés is deeply misleading. In
fact, it owes more to the preoccupations of the founders of the modern
Olympic movement – through whose sometimes frankly warped vision we now
look back to the original Games – than it does to the ancient Greeks
themselves. Men such as Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who successfully
relaunched the modern Olympics in 1896, systematically projected their own
obsessions – from their disapproval of alcohol to their rather woolly ideas
of world peace and harmony – on to the early centuries of the ancient Games
and their participants.
One particular obsession of those in charge of the modern Olympics – until
as late as the 1980s – has been the cult of the amateur. Coubertin, and
later Avery Brundage, the tyrannical president of the International Olympic
Committee between 1952 and 1972 (“Slavery Bondage”, as he was nicknamed),
sometimes cruelly policed the frontier between the amateur contestants –
who were warmly welcomed as modern Olympians – and the professional
interlopers, who were most definitely not. One of the most mean-spirited
incidents in modern Olympic history is the story of the brilliant American
athlete Jim Thorpe, who won both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the
Stockholm Olympics of 1912. He was an ordinary working man, part
native-American, and a famously down-to-earth character: on being presented
with a commemorative bust of himself by King Gustav of Sweden, he is
supposed to have replied “Thanks, king.” But there was a bitter sequel. It
later came to light that he had received some trivial payments ($25 a week)
for playing a bit of minor league baseball in the US; he was reclassified
as a professional, stripped of his medals and asked to return the bust. A
change of heart did not come until 1983, when his family was sent some
replica medals. For Thorpe it was too little, too late. He died in 1953, in
utter poverty.
For Coubertin and his like, the Olympic Games of classical Greece made
their total ban on professional athletes legitimate. The great competitors
of the fifth century BC, they would have insisted, were noble amateurs, not
vulgar money-grubbers selling their athletic prowess for cash. Well, yes
and no. The competitors at the classical Olympics were certainly not
“professionals” in the sense that we (or Coubertin or Brundage) would
understand the term. But that is largely because our own familiar divide
between “amateurs” and “professionals” did not operate in classical Greece.
To put it another way, if we approach the ancient Games armed with modern
categories of sporting competition, we do not find many “grubby
professionals”, but we don’t find much “noble amateurism” either.
For a start, the winning athletes may not have received cash prizes at
Olympia for their performances, but many of them did very nicely when they
got back home. It wasn’t just a question of honorific statues. The various
Greek cities offered all kinds of rewards to their athletics stars, from
free meals for life at the state’s expense to cash handouts and tax
exemptions. And just under the surface of the surviving evidence, there are
hints of something rather closer to a professional athletics circuit than
the founding fathers of the modern Games would have liked. According to the
ancient lists of Olympic victors, between 588 and 488BC, 11 winners in the
short sprint race (“stadion”) – that is, about a third of the total number
– came from the not particularly large, or distinguished, town of Croton,
one of the Greek settlements in southern Italy. Maybe the people of Croton
just got lucky, or maybe they lived in some fanatical athletics boot-camp.
But much more likely they were buying in top talent from other cities, who
then wore the colours of Croton. Great Britain has, of course, got form in
this area. Long before the recent convenient change of allegiance of
long-jumper Shara Proctor and the other so-called “plastic Brits”, we had
had welcomed the South African runner Zola Budd – who competed for us in
the 1984 Olympics, disastrously as it turned out.
But no less damaging to the idea of the ancient world’s pure amateurism is
the fact that some of the most prestigious wreaths of victory went not to
the athletes themselves but to men whom we would call “sponsors”. The
grandest event of the Games was the chariot race, but the official winner
was not the man who actually did the dangerous work, standing in the
chariot and controlling the horses, but the king, princeling or plutocrat
who had funded him and paid for the training, at no doubt vast expense –
not unlike the Queen’s winners in modern horse-racing. In fact, this was
the only Olympic event at which a woman could claim victory – as one
Spartan princess did in the fourth century BC. So far as we know, she did
not get a victory ode (though she did get a statue at Olympia). But some of
Pindar’s best-known Olympian poems were written to celebrate not athletes
at all, but these rich grandees who had for the most part shown no sporting
prowess whatsoever, just a deep pocket.
The other main myth about the ancient Olympics that Coubertin and his
colleagues promoted was their contribution to world peace and understanding
(or at least, back in the classical period, Greek peace and understanding).
This centred on the so-called “Olympic truce”, which has increasingly been
turned into the model for our own ideal of a gathering of all nations,
friend or foe, under the Olympic banner (an ideal challenged several times
over the last few decades, and under strain again this year with the
question of what to do about Syria). Ancient Greek politics may not have
been quite as messy or confused as the modern version of Messrs Samaras and
Tsipras, but the conflicts of antiquity tended to be waged more in the
style of the Arab spring than of the smoke-filled rooms of Brussels and
Strasbourg. In fact, the ancient Games were by no means consistently marked
by an atmosphere of national or international harmony.
There are, it is true, some ancient references to a cessation of
hostilities to ensure that competitors and their trainers could reach the
Games safely, and in one of the temples at Olympia you could still see, in
the second century AD, a supposedly very early document – almost certainly
a later forgery – that referred to the origins of this “truce”. But how it
was enforced, and by whom, is anyone’s guess. It was a nice symbol, but
athletes travelling across enemy territory to get to Olympia wouldn’t, I
imagine, have got very far by appealing to the “truce” if they were
confronted by a squadron of hostile soldiers. On one occasion, in the
fourth century BC, there was actually a full-scale battle in Olympia itself
during the Games. A force from the nearby town of Elis (which traditionally
ran the ancient Olympics, and no doubt profited from them) invaded the
site, right in the middle of the pentathlon, to get control back from the
rival town of Pisa, which had temporarily taken them over. And the truce
certainly didn’t prevent people exploiting the Games for violent power
struggles back in their own cities. In the 630s BC, there was a coup in
Athens against one of the leading families while they were away competing
in the Olympics (though it was brutally quashed when the competitors
returned home).
In general, the real-life experience of competing in – or, for that matter,
just watching – the ancient Olympics was a far cry from anything that
Coubertin had in mind. The modern Olympics are (officially at least)
committed to the ideal of fair play. However much rivalry there is about
national positions in the medal table, participation is still supposed to
be more important than winning. That is nothing like the ancient Games,
where winning was everything, where there were no prizes for runners up (no
equivalent of silver and bronze medals, that is), and no such thing as
honourable losers. Contestants fought viciously, and cheated. When one
Athenian contestant in the fourth century BC was caught red-handed
attempting to bribe his rivals in the pentathlon, a fine was imposed. The
Athenian authorities thought this so unreasonable that they threatened to
boycott the Games in future – though they were forced to give in when the
Delphic oracle refused to give them any more oracles until they coughed up
the money. The point was that for the ancients the only thing that mattered
was coming first, using any method you could get away with. Pindar even
hints (writing of another set of Games held at Delphi) that the losers
sloped off home in secret, for fear of the taunts and abuse they were
likely to receive from their disappointed supporters or contemptuous rivals.
So, if the ancient Olympics were a rough and sometimes brutal experience
for the competitors (deaths in the boxing and wrestling contests were not
uncommon), they were a decidedly uncomfortable one for the spectators too.
The Games seem to have attracted crowds of visitors, but there were hardly
any decent facilities for them: it was blisteringly hot, with little shade;
there was no accommodation for the ordinary visitor (beyond a no doubt
squalid and overcrowded campsite); and the sanitation must have been
rudimentary, at best, given the inadequate water supply to the site, which
could not even guarantee enough clean drinking water to go round.
But this is where the Romans come in. The likes of Coubertin lamented the
Roman influence on the Games; they deplored the growth of a professional
(and lower) class of competitor, as well as the malign influence of the
Roman emperors themselves (who were occasionally known to take part in
events and were supposed to have had the competition rigged so that they
could win). For the spectators, though, it was the sponsorship of the Roman
period – some of it devoted to “improving” the facilities for visitors
–
that made the Olympic Games a much more comfortable and congenial
attraction to visit. True, as Lucian attests in his story of Peregrinus,
the Romans did not solve the problems of traffic congestion, but they
installed vastly improved bathing facilities, and one rich sponsor laid on,
for the first time, a reasonable supply of drinking water. Herodes Atticus,
a Roman senator who was Athenian by birth, built a whole new conduit to
carry water from the nearby hills, leading into a large fountain in the
middle of the site. Predictably, perhaps, some curmudgeons thought this was
spoiling the Olympic spirit. According to Lucian, Peregrinus in some of the
speeches he made on a previous visit to the Games, denounced Herodes
Atticus. In a typically ancient misogynist vein, he accused Herodes of
turning the visitors into women, when it would be better for them to face
thirst (and the possible diseases that came with it) like men. For most
visitors, though, an efficient Roman fountain must have been a blessed
relief.
For much of the period of Roman rule, Roman grandees and their friends
bankrolled the Olympic enterprise (which seems to have eaten money in the
ancient world, too, even without any ridiculously expensive opening
ceremonies or security operations). Nero, who has had a bad press for,
among other things, shifting the date of the Games so that he could
conveniently compete himself, subsidised new facilities for athletes, and
King Herod (the infamous one) is known to have come to the financial rescue
of the Olympics in 12BC. In some ways the character of the Games continued
with little change. Roman princes safely entered the chariot-racing
competitions, just as the princes of the Greek world had half a millennium
earlier. Great athletes may well have outstripped the achievements of their
predecessors. In AD69, for example, a man called Polites from modern Turkey
won the prize for two sprint races and the long distance – a considerable
achievement given the different musculature required. Apparently it was the
first time it had been done in almost a millennium of Olympic competitions.
And there was the same disdain for losers. One poem of the Roman period
pillories a hopeless contestant in the race in which everyone ran dressed
in armour. He was so slow that he was still going when night fell, and got
locked in the stadium overnight – the joke was that caretaker had mistaken
him for a statue.
But in other respects the Romans worked towards an Olympics that is much
more like our own than the earlier “true Greek” version. Whatever his other
faults, Nero tried to introduce some “cultural” contests into the Games.
The Olympics had always been (unlike other Greek athletic festivals)
resolutely brawny, with no music or poetry competitions. Nero didn’t
succeed in injecting much culture for very long (it soon reverted to just
athletics) but, knowingly or not, the 19th-century inventors of the modern
Olympics took over his cultural aims. It’s easy to forget that in the first
half of the 20th century, Olympic medals were offered for town planning,
painting, sculpture, painting and so on (they have long since entered the
ranks of “dead” Olympic sports, along with tug of war and running deer
shooting). Coubertin himself, under a pseudonym, won the 1912 gold medal
for poetry with his “Ode to Sport”. It was truly dreadful: “Sport thou art
Boldness! / Sport thou art Honour! / Sport thou art Fertility!” =85
The most lasting contribution of the Romans, though, was to make the
Olympics, as we now think of them, truly international. That was, in a way,
a byproduct of the Roman empire and the (more or less compulsory)
internationalism that came with it. But if the classical Greek Olympics had
been rigidly restricted to Greeks only, Roman power opened up the
competition to most of the then known world. It is a nice symbol of this
that the last named victor at Olympia in 385AD, the prizewinner in the
boxing contest, was a Persian from Armenia called Varazdates.
But there is a sting in the tail of this Greek vs Roman story of the
Olympic Games. For it was not only the hopelessly confused Baron de
Coubertin who lionised the Greek achievement in the Olympic Games; nor was
he the first to do so. At the same time as the Romans were ploughing money
into the Olympics and making it effectively an international Roman
celebration, authors of the Roman period were already inventing the
romantic image of the great old Greek days of Olympic competition. Writing
in the second century AD, Pausanias – a Greek born under the Roman empire –
devoted two volumes of his 10-volume guide to the noteworthy sites of
Greece to the monuments of Olympia. He sees the place almost entirely
through classical Greek spectacles. He is the source of most of our stories
about the notable Olympic achievements and heroes of centuries earlier. He
doesn’t even mention Herodes Atticus’ splendid and useful Roman fountain,
which he must have seen as he walked round the sanctuary. Even Peregrinus,
when he was speechifying near Olympia in 165AD, about to throw himself on
the pyre, was comparing himself to the great tragic heroes of “classical
Greece”, centuries earlier. The Games have been a nostalgic show for longer
than we can imagine. It has probably always seemed that they were better in
the past.