XV.

The Forgotten Amazons

O Sparta! I give thanks for the excellence of your wrestling school, but even more for the blessings of your Gymnasium for Virgins, where the girls may be admired quite naked as they wrestle amongst the men.

—PROPERTIUS, ROMAN POET, FIRST CENTURY B.C.

THE ANCIENT OLYMPICS were the ultimate venue for Greek male bonding. Although unmarried women were permitted to attend (Pausanias is clear on the point), and female prostitutes roamed the tent-city, testosterone levels must have been as high as in a Turkish bathhouse. Only one married woman was allowed to enter the sanctuary during the Games: a priestess of Demeter, the Greek goddess of fertility, who sat on a stone throne on the north bank of the Stadium. (The seat was found during excavations, and can still be seen at the site; the presence of the priestess may have been a tradition left over from the festival’s origins as an agrarian rite. Naturally, this was quite a coveted position amongst high society Greek women. In the second century A.D., for example, it was held by Regilla, wife of the philanthropist Herodes Atticus, who had pumped millions into renovations at Olympia.) The punishment for any other married woman who dared to “defile the Games by their presence” was to be flung to her death from a nearby cliff—although this ruling was never carried out, even in the notorious case already mentioned from 404 B.C., when a matron from Rhodes cropped her hair, put on a trainer’s tunic, and slipped into the stands to watch her son compete. Unfortunately, in her excitement at the boy’s victory, she leaped over the trainer’s barrier, catching her tunic’s fringe and exposing her deception. The judges let her off with a warning because she came from a famous sporting family—her husband and father had both been Olympic champions. Still, married women who came to the Games did not miss out entirely. There was a view of the Stadium from the south side of the river Alpheus, and it is quite possible that the camping conditions were more pleasant than on the cramped, male-dominated fields.

While women were forbidden to compete at Zeus’s Games, Greek girls (probably between twelve and eighteen) were given their own separate sporting event, which was held at Olympia and dedicated to Zeus’s consort Hera, and included footraces in which girls raced in short tunics with their right breast exposed. The sole surviving description of this extraordinary gathering, which echoed prenuptial initiation rites in other parts of Greece, is provided by Pausanias in his guidebook The Description of Greece, and the details are tantalizingly few. We know that the events were limited to three sprints between virgin girls of different ages. They ran along the same track in the Olympic Stadium as the men, but it was shortened by a sixth, to 160 meters. Historians speculate that their unusual dress, exposing one breast, evoked the Amazon women of myth: This race of female superwarriors, said to live in Asia Minor near the Black Sea, were believed to have cauterized their right breasts so as not to impede their javelin throwing.

A female runner in Amazon-style tunic, with one breast exposed. (Artist’s impression, taken from a surviving Roman copy of a fifth-century-B.C. Greek bronze statue.)

The origins of Hera’s Games are also shrouded in folk memory. Pausanias reports that the festival was instituted in darkest antiquity, by the lovely Hippodameia in thanksgiving for her wedding to the hero Pelops (who had, as we know, killed her father in the famous chariot race for her hand). Hippodameia celebrated the sports event with the assistance of sixteen matrons—and ever since, the Games of Hera had been hosted by the married women of Elis, the most honored sixteen of whom were chosen to knit a ceremonial robe to be worn by the goddess Hera’s statue in her temple at Olympia. This cadre of grandes dames also organized festivals in Elis for Dionysus, the god of adult women, and choruses for various local heroines (one of whom, Physcoa, had born the god a son).

Some elements of the festival of Hera—which appears to have been formalized around 580 B.C. in a treaty inscribed by the Elians—echoed the men’s festival. It was held at Olympia every fourth year. Victors were crowned with sacred olive wreaths and given a portion of a sacrificed cow at a final banquet. They were also allowed to erect memorials to themselves in the sanctuary, although in the form of painted portraits hung in Hera’s temple rather than statues. The champions’ parents might even have commissioned victory odes. (The poet Corinna, a contemporary of Pindar’s, may have written several; she is said to have beaten Pindar in a poetry competition in Delphi, prompting him to abuse her as “a Boeotian sow.”) But beyond these shreds of information, the festival is a mystery. We do not know at what time of year the women’s Games were held, or for how long they continued; some historians have speculated that they were actually simultaneous with the men’s Olympics.

The Coed Gymnasium

WE CAN IMAGINE the frustration of some Greek women, since outside of Olympia they were allowed a more prominent role in the sporting culture. The teenage girls of Cyrene, for example, competed with the boys in footraces, and on the island of Chios they also wrestled. And the participation of women in Greek athletics appears to have increased in the Roman era, when women’s events were added to most municipal festivals, and even infiltrated the sacred games of Corinth, Delphi, and Nemea. In a monument inscription from A.D. 45, a proud father boasts about his three daughters—named Tryphora, Hedla, and Dionysia—who won a string of footraces at Delphi and Corinth. But Olympia remained conservative to the end, maintaining its ban on female athletes and married women spectators. For twelve hundred years, the single loophole by which women could compete was, as we know, by entering the equestrian events as owners. (The feisty Spartan princess Cynisca had been the first to do so, and she set up a memorial to herself, crowing: “I place my effigy here / And proudly proclaim / That of all Greek women / I first bore the Olympic crown.”) In the latter centuries of the Games, the restriction on married women spectators must have exasperated Roman women traveling in Greece, since they were allowed to sit with men back home in the arena of the Circus Maximus; at the gladiatorial fights in the Colosseum, female spectators were given a separate tier.

There was only one place in antiquity where girls received full physical education: Sparta. From its earliest days, this militaristic city in the central Peloponnesus wanted its women healthy. Along with their brothers, girls were taken from the family home at age seven and inducted into a grueling regime aimed at physical perfection. They were taught all the key Greek sports, including the javelin, discus, and wrestling, so that (one Greek author noted) “they were freed from all delicacy and effeminacy.” They worked out at the gymnasium alongside boys, oiled down and naked, and wrestled with one another in municipal competitions. Spartan girls were even given some education in the arts and letters. They became as notorious around Greece for their muscular physiques as for their directness (the women of Sparta would exhort their husbands and sons before battles to return “with your shield or on it”).

Their brazenness shocked the misogynistic Greeks. The “democratic” Athenians, for example, kept their girls cloistered away at home as securely as if they were captives of Islamic purdah, without even basic education; only radical thinkers like Plato would suggest that women might have an active role in society. Even when Spartan girls weren’t running naked in the fields, Athenian moralists gasped, they wore short tunics without undergarments. They were nicknamed phainomerides, “thigh flashers,” by the poet Ibycus in the sixth century B.C., and the scandalous epithet stuck. (The thigh was a euphemism for the female pudenda). They were reputed to be shamelessly promiscuous—after all, wasn’t the most famous Spartan woman in literature the faithless runaway, Helen of Troy? As a character in a Euripides play rails to a Spartan of their unruly adolescent girls: “Why, they desert their homes and go out with young men with their thighs bared and their robes undone, and they hold races and wrestling contests with them! I would not stand for it! Is it any wonder that you Spartans do not raise chaste women?”

This hardly meant that Sparta was a proto-feminist paradise. The sole purpose of their training was to create physically fit mothers who would breed a superrace of powerful male soldiers. The purpose of their athletic training was, according to one observer, so that their progeny would take “a strong beginning in strong bodies.” Women were given no alternatives by the “Controllers of the Women”—six shadowy officials whose task it was to ensure that the family production line was not interrupted by deviant females who might shirk their social duties. The nude exercises were contrived as a form of erotic advertisement to attract husbands, and any girl who tried to escape marriage was severely punished. It was all part of a ruthless eugenic system the Nazis would one day admire: When a Spartan baby was born, it was brought before a council—all male—and the physically inferior tossed down a ravine.

BUT BEFORE WE judge the Greeks too harshly, it should be remembered that even in the modern Olympics, women’s equality has been a long time coming. The reviver of the Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, opposed having any women’s events at all. They were not included in the 1896 Athens events; in 1900, women competed only in tennis; in 1904, tennis was dropped and replaced by archery. It was not until the 1928 Games at Amsterdam that women’s track-and-field events appeared. Women’s long-distance races were not permanently introduced until 1960 at Rome—and a women’s marathon not until 1984 at Los Angeles.