VII.

Let the Games Begin

What is a man but a short-lived creature? He is but the dream of a shadow.But when a ray of sunshine comes as a gift from the gods—A brilliant light settles on mortals, and a gentle life.

—PINDAR, PYTHIAN ODE NUMBER 8, FIFTH CENTURY B.C.

JUST HOW THEATRICAL were the ancient opening ceremonies on the morning of day one? It’s hard not to let our imaginations run riot, blurring Hollywood movies and the pseudoclassical kitsch of our own lavish Olympics rituals. The torch relay, for example, is so ingrained in the modern choreography that most people today assume it was a revival of a pagan tradition—unaware that it was actually concocted for Hitler’s Games in Berlin.

The Nazis knew a good propaganda symbol when they saw one. At noon on July 20, 1936, two weeks before the start of the Berlin Games, a Greek “high priestess” and fourteen girls wearing classical robes gathered in the ancient Stadium of Olympia, and used parabolic mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on a wand until it burst into flame. As a torch was kindled, a chant went up—“Oh fire, lit in an ancient and sacred place, begin your race”—followed by a ceremony where one of Pindar’s Pythian odes was sung to ancient instruments. The so-called Olympic flame was then carried by 3,075 relay runners from Greece, passed from magnesium torch to torch (each one bearing the logo of the German arms manufacturer Krupp), until it finally lit a colossal brazier in the Berlin stadium before the Führer’s approving gaze.

In fact, this ceremony never occurred at the ancient Olympics. The modern conception is a mishmash of two quite different pagan traditions that Berlin’s masterminds—in particular, Dr. Carl Diem, a leading German scholar who became head of the organizing committee—had brilliantly reworked. Olympia, like all ancient Greek and Roman sanctuaries, did have its own eternal flame, which was kept burning for Hestia, goddess of the hearth, in a building called the Prytaneion, or “Magistrate’s House.” It was used to light all the sacrificial fires at altars throughout the sanctuary. And some other ancient Greek cities did have a lampadedromia, or torch race, as part of their local festivals. At Athens, for example, young men wearing nothing but a diadem hung over their foreheads would race in relay teams from the port of Piraeus south of the city to the Acropolis, trying to keep a baton made of flaming reeds from the narthex plant alight until they reached the altar of Prometheus. It must have made a hypnotic sight from the Parthenon, watching the flames weaving like fireflies through the dark streets below. But no torch lighting, relay races, or other pyrotechnic shows ever made their appearance at the ancient Olympic Games.

The “revived” 1936 torch race perfectly fit the Nazi design for the Olympics as a showcase for the New Germany. With its aura of ancient mysticism, the rite linked Nazism to the civilized glories of classical Greece, which the Reich’s academics were arguing had been an Aryan wonderland. (They were particularly fond of the macho, warlike Spartans—Hitler was even inexplicably convinced that the peasant soup of Schleswig-Holstein was a descendant of Spartan black broth, a famously austere staple fed to the men in communal messes as they underwent their brutal training.) Hitler took considerable personal interest in the ritual, and pumped funds into its promotion: The Nazi propaganda machine covered the torch relay slavishly, broadcast radio reports from every step of the route, and filled the Games with the iconography of ancient Greek athletics. Afterward, the ceremony became permanently embedded in the popular imagination in part due to Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of the Nazi Games, Olympia, which evocatively showed a Greek runner treading the gentle beaches of the Aegean at dusk.

A torch runner from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, the 1938 film of the Nazi Olympics that helped embed the rite in the popular imagination.

Ironically, considering its repellent origins, the torch race has come to symbolize international brotherhood today, and remains a centerpiece of our own pomp-filled Olympic opening ceremonies. (The most popular part of any Games, they are perennially sold out in advance.) Even more strangely, the mock-pagan ritual is still carried out in Greece. Every four years, local teenage girls gather at the temple of Hera at Olympia dressed in faux-pagan regalia—they even use parabolic mirrors to focus the sun’s rays—while runners transmit the flame across the globe, sometimes by airplane, boat, scuba, or camel-back, to each new Olympic stadium. Every summer, the German archaeologists now working at Olympia are peeved to distraction by the hundreds of tourists asking them every day to point out the site of this “ancient” torch-lighting ceremony.

In fact, antiquity’s Games began with a pagan ritual that to modern eyes seems far more exotic.

Before the God of Oaths

ON DAY ONE, before dawn, the throng of Olympic athletes woke up and shared a simple breakfast with their fathers and trainers—bread dipped in porridge or wine—then re-formed parade ranks, resuming the same marching order as they had on their progress from Elis the evening before. As the sanctuary was bathed in morning sunlight, the group followed a sacred procession path through Olympia, accompanied by festive music and the cheers of spectators on either side, toward the Bouleuterion, or council house—Olympics HQ, where the ten Hellanodikai, or judges, were now staying. In small groups, the athletes were then invited into the building for a melodramatic swearing-in ceremony.

Inside the dark, torch-lit central chamber, the rite was impeccably staged. Contestants found themselves face-to-face with the ring of solemn judges beneath a towering statue of Zeus Horkios, the God of Oaths—a fierce bronze figure wielding silver-plated thunderbolts in each hand. This was the image at Olympia, wrote Pausanias, “most likely to strike terror into the hearts of the wicked.” Laid out at the god’s feet were thick steaks cut from a freshly sacrificed boar—their juices dripping to the floor—and a stone tablet, which bore an inscription warning perjurers that they would be smitten to ashes for their wrongdoing. It must have been an unforgettable moment for any competitor when he was invited to step up to the stand before Zeus. There, the athletes—along with their trainers, fathers, and brothers—swore that they would use no foul play to secure victory, and that they had trained for the required ten months beforehand in the manner prescribed by the festival organizers. After all the athletes had made their vows, the judges themselves took the stand and swore they would give their decisions honestly and not reveal anything they had learned in confidence about a competitor.

One unspoken purpose of this oath was to ban magic. Long before steroids, an athlete might enhance his performance with “victory charms” or enchanted potions. The more vindictive might direct black magic toward opponents. Curses would be engraved on thin sheets of lead, rolled up, and buried in cemeteries or tossed into wells, where the dead could carry them to Hades. One such “curse tablet,” excavated in Athens, is aimed at a runner named Alkidimos: “Do not allow him to get past the starting lines . . . and if he does get past, make him veer off course and disgrace himself”; another spell dooms a wrestler named Petres the Macedonian to be caught “in the dark air of oblivion,” where his strength would be sapped. A wrestler named Eutychion receives what appears to be a cheap formula curse: “Let him be deaf, dumb, mindless, harmless and unable to fight against anyone . . .”

But the more prevalent problem in Greek sports was corruption. From the very beginning of each Games, bribery was on everyone’s minds. In fact, when the time came for athletes to approach the Stadium through their private entrance, the last thing they saw was a string of statues warning them against temptation to fix the events. The Olympic judges used the fines levied from corruption prosecutions to erect these sixteen bronze statues of Zeus—known as Zanes—which were inscribed with moral poems (reported Pausanias) “to show that you win at Olympia with the speed of your feet and the strength of your body, not with money.”

The first bribery scandal at Olympia—at least, the first that came to light—occurred in 388 B.C., when Eubulus of Thessaly paid off three boxers to throw their fights against him. Their fines financed the first six Zanes. Fifty years later, an Athenian named Kallippos paid his opponents to succumb in the pentathlon, and when this was revealed, a huge penalty was levied on Athens itself. The city refused to pay, and even boycotted the Games, until the Delphic oracle threatened to withhold any more prophecies to Athens. This paid for the second six Zanes. It seems that after these cases, corruption became a regular feature at the Games. The pious Pausanias was shocked that anyone would risk the wrath of Zeus, but even a citizen of the host city Elis had “fallen so low” in 12 B.C.—the father of a young athlete had bribed another father to have his son throw a wrestling match.

The situation appears to have become worse under the later Roman Empire. At the less honorable “prize games” elsewhere in Greece and Asia Minor, where huge sums of money were at stake, victories could be bartered like sacks of grain. According to Philostratus, trainers even turned loan shark, lending money to their own athletes for bribes, and charging hefty rates of interest against the value of the future prize. The low point came at the prestigious games in Corinth: A boxer who had promised three thousand drachmas to an opponent to throw the fight refused to pay. For the first time, the defeated athlete took the matter to official arbitration, and brazenly swore before the altar of Poseidon that he had been promised money to lose.

By comparison, the Olympic Games—the Games of Zeus—were paragons of virtue.

The Divine Sideshow

HAVING COMPLETED THEIR oaths, the athletes had the afternoon off to wander the sanctuary of Olympia. For many, standing in the holiest locale in the pagan world was a humbling moment. Despite the impiety of a few corrupt individuals, the vast majority of Greeks accepted that no man could win an olive wreath in the upcoming Games without the favor of the gods. It did not matter how naturally talented he was or how rigorously he trained; an athlete needed the deities to look benignly upon his efforts. The afternoon of day one was the ideal time to make a sacrifice at one of Olympia’s seventy-odd altars, and with the assistance of the sanctuary officials they gathered before the shrines of their chosen gods. They had plenty of choice in the Greek pantheon. There were altars to Zeus, Hercules, and the hero Pelops; Hermes, patron of runners; Poseidon, god of horses; Nike, the goddess of Victory; and a spate of lesser deities, including Opportunity, who was personified as a wing-footed boy hurrying with a pair of scales. The athletes left symbolic offerings—tiny statuettes of chariots or runners, ceremonial discuses, and silver tripods. Wealthier contestants sacrificed a goat, lamb, or pig. After the ritual slaughter, soothsayers would inspect the livers for omens, which would no doubt provide insider information for those spectators interested in placing bets.

For their part, spectators could wander the site enjoying a relaxed, carnival atmosphere. The most popular diversion on the afternoon of day one was the contest for heralds and trumpeters, to choose a team to announce the victors. It took place in the lavishly decorated Echo Colonnade, which was known for its unusual acoustics: Every noise would be echoed seven times, so horn blasts and voices rang up and down the marble floors. The most successful herald in Olympic history was Herodoros of Megara, who won the trumpet contest in ten successive festivals from 328 B.C. Herodoros’ lungs were put to good use: In between Olympiads, he famously helped his home city win a war against Argos by blowing on two trumpets simultaneously in battle.

Other spectators went to watch the athletes at their final pre-Games exercises. This was the perfect opportunity to see celebrities up close. Greek muscle men in particular were not shy with their fans, and took the opportunity to entertain the adoring crowds with vaudevillian stunts. At the Olympics of 520 B.C., the famous Milo of Croton came dressed as Hercules with a lion’s skin and club. He carried a young bull around the Stadium on his shoulders, then afterward devoured it single-handedly for dinner. Milo’s party tricks included challenging men to budge his little finger, standing on a discus as weaklings tried to push him off, and guzzling ten pints of wine in a single draught. He would also wrap a cord around his forehead and hold his breath until it was snapped by the bulging veins. In later years, hulking poseurs would challenge each other to weight-lifting contests before the Games began. Archaeologists have found a sandstone block at Olympia that was inscribed with the words “Bybon son of Pholos tossed this over his head with one hand” (it weighs 315 pounds/143.5 kilograms, so this may have been an exaggeration). A 900-pound/480-kilogram block was found on the Aegean island of Santorini, with the words “Eumastas, son of Critobulus, lifted me from the ground.”

But many Greeks, on that first afternoon, opted for more intellectual entertainment.

The Literary Marathon

OLYMPIA WAS UNIQUE among Greek festivals for not including any cultural competitions. (At Apollo’s games in Delphi, for example, there were a number of artistic contests, including poetry, prose, song, dance, sculpture, and oratory competitions.) But this did not mean the arts were absent from Olympia. Its forty-thousand-plus spectators included the cream of Greek high society, so the Games represented a major marketing opportunity. Creative types converged here in droves, producing an offstage artistic frenzy—and the relaxed after-lunch ambiance of day one guaranteed a large and receptive audience.

The first to fully grasp Olympia’s PR potential had been Herodotus, the revered “Father of History” who around 440 B.C. wanted to promote his newly written account of the Persian Wars. Why go on an epic book tour around Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor, he pondered, when one could get the same exposure overnight at Olympia? As Lucian recounts it, Herodotus waited until all the notables had arrived at the festival—this appears from the sources to have been the afternoon of day one—then, “behaving less like a spectator than an athletic contestant,” he went inside the crowded Temple of Zeus and began to read his work aloud. It was a smash hit. The audience was mesmerized. As Lucian relates, “It was not long until he was better known than the Olympic victors. There was not a man in Greece who hadn’t heard the name of Herodotus, either because they had been at Olympia, or were told about him by returning spectators.”

A tradition was begun—appearing at Olympia, preferably on the first day for maximum impact, became the literary “short-cut to fame.” In Herodotus’ audience was a young aspiring wordsmith named Thucydides who, according to legend, was moved to tears, and would later write his majestic history of the Peloponnesian Wars (and naturally debut it at Olympia). Other writers soon followed suit. Inspired poets took to the temple steps in snow-white tunics and sang their works while strumming a lyre with an ivory pluck. Some were hailed with cries of Euge!—“Bravo!” Others were mocked. Greek audiences were discerning, and were not distracted by displays of wealth. The tyrant Dionysius of Sicily had his verse read by the finest professional actors, but it was so bad that the crowd looted his tent. When the emperor Nero performed his epic poem about the fall of Troy at the Olympic Games, one wit complained, it provoked “whole Iliads of woe.”

Philosophers quickly seized the potential: soon every soapbox orator in Greece was converging to add his voice to the chorus. In an early show of antisports snobbery, Diogenes said that it was his social duty to speak to athletics fans: “Just as a good doctor rushes to help in places full of the sick, so it was necessary for a wise man to go where idiots proliferate.” His fellow Cynic philosophers, who reviled all the trappings of civilization, became a fixture at the Games. Antiquity’s hippies, they wore their hair unkempt, dressed in rags, mooched meals, and railed against every Greek sacred cow. But the heroes of Greek philosophy also put in appearances, and geniuses like Aristotle even had their statues raised at Olympia alongside those of athletes. The PR potential of the Olympic Games was so established by the first century A.D. that the pagan holy man Apollonius of Tyana even sent his own advance guard to whip up interest. Thousands attended his sermons on wisdom and temperance, but Apollonius resented sharing the limelight with hack writers. Exasperated by the drivel, he cornered one “literary puppy” who intended to recite an epic poem about Zeus. When the youngster read his own poems on gout and deafness, Apollonius sarcastically noted that he should write one on something really interesting, like influenza. He then chewed the youngster out for even attempting to depict Zeus: “You are embarking on a subject that transcends the power of mortals!”

ANCIENT PAINTERS TOO attended the Olympics, to show off new work and burnish their reputations, taking advantage of the opening-day crowds. It seems many were natural showmen. Around 420 B.C., the egomaniacal Zeuxis of Heraclea appeared, wearing a loud checkered tunic with his name embroidered ostentatiously in gilt letters. He presented his best paintings to royal visitors, explaining that they were priceless masterpieces so he could not take money for them. He was joined by dozens of lesser lights who turned the colonnades into impromptu galleries, where aficionados could inspect new works that invariably represented mythological themes or athletics. The great Parrhasius of Ephesus, a Falstaffian figure who sang as he painted, was most famous for “The Runner,” an image so realistic that viewers expected sweat to drip from the picture (sadly, it does not survive—nor, indeed, does any Greek easel painting, apart from a scrap of blue found in Delphi). For emerging artists, a visit could pay high dividends. In the fifth century B.C., an Olympic judge liked one young painter’s work so much that he gave him his beautiful daughter in marriage. And for spectators, having one’s portrait commissioned was a quick souvenir. A papyrus from A.D. 362 shows a portraitist’s fee to be one sack of wheat and two amphorae of wine.

The Beefcake Gallery

AMONG THE BODY worshipers of ancient Greece, sculptors had the most kudos. Sport was one of the great motors of Western art, and Olympia was the Greeks’ permanent national gallery: Every victor had the right to a life-sized statue placed here, so the fields between temples became an increasingly crowded sea of glistening torsos (they were invariably made of bronze—only the Roman copies that survive today were marble). Prattling tour guides would do the rounds of the Old Masters of the seventh and early sixth century B.C., whose statues were rather stiff and formal. After 500 B.C., thanks to the work of artists like Polykleitus and Lysippus, a suggestion of movement began to bring the inert figures to life, and this eventually led to the illustrious classical achievements of artists like Myron with his “Discus Thrower” around 470 B.C. Almost all of these later sculptures were re-creations of an ideal male form—the Apolline figure made manifest, capturing youthful strength, harmony, good looks, and sublime inner beauty (great artists would devise their own kanon regulating the best proportion of limbs for statues). Only after winning three times at Olympia did an athlete have the right to erect a more realistic “portrait statue” of himself, showing his actual face and form.

Some Olympic statues were thought to possess magical properties. The figure of Pulydamas, for example, could supposedly cure fevers (which must have come in handy in Olympia’s unhygienic conditions). The statue of Theagenes of Thasos was even more powerful. According to a bizarre account from Pausanias, it had once fallen and crushed a man to death; the victim, a former opponent of the champion, happened to be whipping the image when the accident happened. The statue was actually placed on trial for murder by Elian officials, and sentenced to be thrown into the sea. When the fields around Olympia bore no fruit for several seasons, the Delphic oracle ordered that the statue should be fished up from the sea again, returned to its place, and worshiped as sacred.

AND SO WE can imagine ancient Olympians strolling amongst these frozen figures on that balmy first evening of the Games, reading moonlit inscriptions from centuries past.

Sostratus, son of Sosistratus. Thou didst glorify

thy native Sicyon by winning very many

and very glorious crowns . . .

Eurhythmus, a Locrian, son of Astycles, was

thrice victorious at Olympia, and he set up

this statue for mortals to behold.

You are looking at the glorious form of

harmides, an Elian boxer, in memorial

to an Olympic victory.

In the coming days, the athletes hoped, they too might achieve immortality.