What the Greeks Did for the Olympics

In What the Greeks Did for Us, Tony Spawforth says ‘the modern Olympics are the most globally high-profile manifestation of ‘what the Greeks did for us’. Learn more about the history and legacy of the Olympics in this free extract from his book, What The Greeks Did for Us, out now in paperback. This is part of our Olympics History blog series.


The modern Olympics are the most globally high-profile manifestation of ‘what the Greeks did for us’. If you are one of the millions who have watched the modern games either in person or on screens, you will have been reminded by the opening ceremony of the link to ancient Greece. This ceremony includes the parade of competing athletes from all over the world. But the national team that heads this parade is (nearly) always that of modern Greece. Then there is the solemn ritual involving an athlete, a torch and a cauldron. I remember a 2018 visit to the archaeological site of Olympia in south-western Greece coinciding with the sight of a group of young Greek women, all in sandals and white ‘Grecian’ garb. They were rehearsing something in what was once the heart of this ancient Greek religious sanctuary dedicated to Olympian Zeus, king of the Greek gods. As for the intended meaning of this ritual, according to the International Olympic Committee, the organising body of the modern Olympics since their inception:

From its lighting in Ancient Olympia, Greece, the Olympic flame connects the Olympic Games with every previous edition of the Games and its heritage back millennia to the historic Olympic Games of Ancient Greece.

Lighting the olympic flame in a dress rehearsal in Greece, using the sun’s energy. Waerfelu, CC BY 3.0

In ancient times, the Olympic Games were the most famous and the most glorious of the hundreds of Greek athletic festivals which Greek communities organised on a recurring basis. They were celebrated at Olympia for at least eleven centuries, not to mention the many imitation Olympics which sprang up across the ancient Mediterranean. The Olympics invaded the writings of the ancient Greeks for another reason, too. This is how a Greek historian, writing in the first century bc, dated the year in which the Spartans fought the Persians at Thermopylae (480 bc):

Calliades was archon in Athens, and the Romans made Spurius Cassius and Proculus Verginius Tricostus consuls, and the Eleans celebrated the seventy-fifth Olympiad, that in which Astylus of Syracuse won the men’s short foot race.

A popular Greek way of measuring time was by counting the successive celebrations of the Olympic Games, starting from the first meeting. This first meeting marked the first year of the first of the four-year intervals between each ancient meeting. The Greeks called each interval an Olympiad. They identified each ‘Olympiad’ not only by a number, but also by the name of a particular champion – the victor in the defining event of the ancient games, the men’s sprint. So it was that, in more ways than one, the renown of the ancient Olympics made its presence felt in the ancient writings still circulating, or being rediscovered, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In 1572, in the Rose Theatre, Elizabethan London’s theatre-goers first heard the following lines, which Shakespeare’s latest play gave to Henry VI’s brother George, duke of Clarence, referring to troops loyal to the king:

And if we thrive, promise them such rewards As victors wear at the Olympian games. London’s theatres at this time accommodated up to three thousand people.

Not just their ‘betters’, but the general public, or at least the middling classes, were theatre mad. Still, did Shakespeare expect everyone in his audience to follow the reference to the ancient Olympics? Or was he flattering the educated elite in the best seats? It’s hard to say. But two centuries or more later, in the early nineteenth century, awareness of the ancient games was quite widespread. This was an era when bodily fitness, and sport as a means of attaining it, became an increasing preoccupation of the western world.

Other countries at the time also developed a physical culture – gymnastics in Germany, for instance; or, in the USA, college sports and the ‘national pastime’ of baseball. In England itself, this athletic spirit was not confined to independent schools and the better off. In an otherwise unremarkable market town in western England, a road sign welcoming visitors today announces a local son as ‘Contributor to the rebirth of the Olympic Games’. In 1850, this enthusiastic doctor and philanthropist staged local ‘Olympic Games’ as a way of encouraging the townsfolk to take exercise – the town’s name was Much Wenlock. The Olympic tag reflected the general admiration for ancient Greece of the time, but not much more. The ancient Olympics did not include a wheel-barrow race, like Much Wenlock’s. Even so, the doctor, one Richard Brookes, has rightly been seen as ‘ahead of his times’.

Years later, in his old age, this bewhiskered Victorian was visited in Much Wenlock by a French sports enthusiast and great admirer of Victorian Britain’s sporting culture. Brookes staged a performance of his local games specially for this visitor, the ‘single-minded Frenchman’ mentioned above. He was a driven aristocrat, a young man still in his twenties, called Pierre de Coubertin. This encounter in 1889 was significant. Much Wenlock ‘undoubtedly influenced Coubertin and impelled him towards his vision of revived Olympic Games’. Coubertin’s initial ambition had been to use sport to improve the fitness of the French male, as a remedy for national defeat at the hands of Germany in the Franco-Prussian War. Following his visit to Much Wenlock, he developed the idea of an international movement themed around the ancient Olympic Games.

Pierre de Coubertin, co-founder of the International Olympic Committee. Bain News Service, Public domain

Coubertin was an organisational genius and arch-‘schmoozer’. This was as well. As is so often the case with a big new idea, people did not easily fall into line with what he wanted to achieve. An initial success was his organising an international meeting of movers and shakers in the world of sport. Out of this congress in Paris came the choice of Athens for the first modern Olympics, and the principle of rotating host cities. Coubertin did not want the new games to be captured by the Greeks, even if their king, at the closing banquet of the first games, expressed his wish that Greece would become their permanent seat. As much to the point of this book, the congress also committed to sport in the modern sense. Its members did not contemplate reviving the ancient Olympic programme of events. The brandishing of the Olympic name was, as much as anything, a way of legitimising a novelty. It did not signal an antiquarian revival, even if it did help to embed many a Greek term in the vocabulary of modern sport, such as stadium, athlete, pentathlon, hippodrome and so on.

One obvious departure from antiquity was that women – ever since the second Olympiad – have been eligible to compete in the modern games, and the range of sports in which they can do so has steadily expanded ever since. The position at ancient Olympia was different:

On the way to Olympia . . . there is a precipitous mountain with high rocks . . . This is where the laws . . . hurl down any woman detected entering the Olympic assembly . . . though they say that no one has ever been caught with the single exception of Callipatira . . .

Her husband died before her, so she completely disguised herself as a trainer and took her son to Olympia to fight; but when Pisirodus won, Callipatira leapt over the fence where they shut in the trainers, and as she leapt over she showed herself. They detected she was a woman, but let her off scot-free out of respect for her father and her brothers and her son all of whom were Olympic winners. If married women were not admitted to conservative Olympia even as spectators, this may have had something to do with the need to protect their modesty from the nudity of the male athletes.

If the ancient Greeks excluded women from the glittering prizes of their sports culture, this is not to say that ancient Greek athletics did not support the ideology of modern Olympism in other ways:

But of Theron let your voices ring, For his victorious four-in-hand. He is courteous and kind to guests, The bulwark of Acragas; In him his famous fathers Flower, and the city stands.

This poem in Ancient Greek – the original would have been sung – was a commission by a champion to celebrate his victory in the four-horse chariot race at Olympia in the early 400s bc. If you pause over the wording, you start to get the message. This competitor – his name was Theron – was a blue-blood (‘famous fathers’). He was well bred and a legendary – and assuredly rich – host. His excellence made him a mainstay (‘bulwark’) of his city (Acragas in Greek Sicily). Ancient writings like these helped to shape an influential view in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century that contestants in the ancient games were mainly ‘gentlemen amateurs’, as with the Oxford don who penned the following in a book published in 1910:

The victors whom the poet praised were princes and nobles, who competed for pure love of sport, and for whom athletics were in no sense a profession nor even the chief occupation of their lives.

This was a view of ancient Greek athletics which went down particularly well in Victorian England. Here the upper classes of the later nineteenth century, products of the private schools, enthusiastically embraced a cult of sporting amateurism. They sought to distance themselves from the burgeoning world of professional sport that involved prize money and other financial incentives, a world marked by more social diversity than they cared for. These gentlemanly attitudes are still enshrined in Anglicisms such as ‘playing the game’ or ‘it’s not cricket’. Nowadays, this amateur ideal – rather damningly – is understood as ‘a legitimating ideology that excluded the lower social orders from the play of the leisure class’. Good old British class snobbery, in other words, as enshrined in this comment by the so-called ‘father’ of cross-country running, the British athlete Walter Rye, born in 1843:

‘men who are “gentlemen of position or education” . . . should not mix with the rougher and uneducated lot, or have them in their clubs’.

Coubertin himself did not particularly care about this fixation on amateurism among a certain social type, especially in England but elsewhere, too, including the USA. However, he humoured it because he needed to garner support from influential members of the leisured class for the enactment of his Olympic vision. So it was that his International Olympic Committee built amateurism into its rules of eligibility. In the twentieth century, its Rule 26 defined an amateur as ‘one who participates and always has participated in sport as an avocation without material gain of any kind’. Only in more recent times, from the 1980s, did pressures of various kinds render this rule more or less redundant in practice. Among experts today, the rosy ideal of the Victorians about amateurism in ancient Greek athletics no longer holds true. To compete at the highest level, by the 400s bc – the glory days of classical Greece – Greeks took for granted that the would-be athlete needed to undergo sustained training. As just seen, trainers were a conspicuous presence among the spectators at ancient Olympia. True, the prize at Olympia was symbolic – a wreath of olive twigs and leaves.

Kotinos, the prize for the winner at the Ancient Olympic Games. FocalPoint, CC BY-SA 4.0

But other athletic meets in the Greek world offered prize money or materially valuable prizes, such as jars of olive oil or bronze cauldrons and their stands. Finally, with contestants from all over the Greek world attending the Olympics, victorious sportsmen returned home to enormous acclaim. There they reaped both tangible (such as free dinners or front-row seats in the theatre) and intangible benefits, such as a store of credit in the bank of political favours on which they could, and did, draw when in need. As for social class, this is trickier, owing to lack of evidence. Certainly, ‘posh boys’ were always a presence in ancient Greek athletics, from early on until very late. In researching my PhD on the Spartans under the Roman empire, I was struck by how often members of the local elite had won renown as sportsmen. Examples included two champion runners, father and son, of whom the son was ‘twice an Olympic winner in the ad 220s’. The family’s grand connections included a Roman senator, making them big cheeses indeed in the provincial town that Sparta had become by that time. On the other hand, as early as the 500s bc, we hear of Olympians like a certain Glaucus, a hammer-fisted boxer who hailed from Euboea, modern Evvia, the Greek island devastated by wildfires in 2021:

. . . they say he began as an agricultural labourer; when the ploughshare fell out of the plough he stuck it in again using his hand for a hammer.

The Palaestra at Olympia, a place devoted to the training of wrestlers and other athletes. Bgabel at wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 3.0

Demylus [his father] happened to see what the boy had done, so he took him along to Olympia to box. Glaucus had no experience as a boxer and his opponents hurt him, and when he was boxing with the last one, people thought he was too badly hurt to carry on:

and then they say his father shouted out to him ‘Come on son, the one for the plough’, and he hit his opponent a harder punch and suddenly found he had won.

From this distance in time, it is well-nigh impossible to decide whether the case of an Olympian from a fairly lowly social background like Glaucus making it to the top was relatively common or rather unusual. Perhaps suffice to repeat that Athenians in the fifth century bc took it for granted that, to succeed in sport at Olympic level, would-be athletes needed sustained training. This in turn was bound to favour well-to-do families. Only they had the means to hire a trainer, and only they produced sons who had access to leisure time – that is, who did not need to work on the family farm, like Glaucus.

Like amateurism, another modern tradition about the ancient Olympics played into Coubertin’s vision for a revived games. This one lives on vigorously to this day, to judge by a novel feature of Tokyo’s Olympic Village in the 2020 Olympics, postponed to 2021: Athletes and officials participating in the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 will be encouraged to show their support for the Olympic Truce by signing the Olympic Truce Mural in the Olympic Village

. . . [Inaugurating the mural] the International Olympic Committee President said: ‘. . . The athletes show us that, despite all our differences, it is possible for humankind to live together in peace.’

Taking his cue from the scholars of the time, Coubertin had seen the ancient Olympics as a time when ‘all armed conflicts and all combat among Hellenes had to cease’. These were his own words. The idea that international athletics can promote international peace was, and is, obviously commendable. That there was ancient Greek precedent remains a common belief. A few years ago, the august Harvard International Review ran a piece on ‘The Olympics in International Relations’. With reference to the supposed date of the first ancient Olympics, it claimed that ‘As early as 776 bc, warring states set aside conflict to briefly congregate in the spirit of peaceful athletic competition.’ Well, not exactly. A distinguished German sports historian back in the 1970s argued that the original Olympic truce had a far more limited purpose. It gave the sanctuary of Olympia immunity from attack and athletes safe passage to and from the games. A more general cessation of war throughout the Greek world was out of the question. The ancient sanctuary itself was far from symbolising a state of peace among Greeks. It not only hosted the games every four years: Zeus here was closely linked to warfare and ancient Olympia positively ‘bristled with the booty and spoils of Greek victories over other Greeks in war’. Finds have included over a thousand helmets and ‘hundreds and hundreds of other pieces of offensive weapons’. The most eye-catching of these thank-offerings to Zeus was a marble female statue personifying victory, erected in the late 400s bc by Greek enemies of the Spartans. It stood on a pillar nearly twenty feet high, right outside the entrance to the temple of Olympian Zeus. If the ancient Olympic festival was a religious event, so was the celebration of success in Greek-on-Greek war. This cultural prox-imity of two activities that are – to a modern mind – seemingly so different makes sense given that, to the ancient Greeks, ‘battle – like athletic competition – was considered an agōn’, in Ancient Greek, meaning a contest: ‘a word applicable to war no less than to athletics’.

One thing the ancient Greeks certainly gave to modern Olympism was the idea for one of its most famous sporting events – although the ancient model had nothing to do with sport. At the Athens Olympics of 1896, local enthusiasm for this new contest reached fever pitch: If the winner is Greek, a tailor has promised him a suit of clothes, a barber has undertaken to shave him for life, a man at a kaphphe-neion [coffee-house – spelling sic] has promised him two cups of coffee daily for life, another has promised a dinner a day for a year, another has undertaken to do his washing for life, and another to keep his things ironed, and last, but not least, a lady has offered to marry him. The winner was a twenty-three-year-old Greek water-carrier, who promptly became a national hero. What he had done was to run approximately 22 miles from the plain of Marathon to the north-east of Athens to Averoff’s new stadium in the capital. Here a rapturous home crowd greeted him, delighted that at last the host country had won something. As for the course, it was not for the faint-hearted. A German eye-witness of the time described the route as going ‘over mountains and valleys, over stony boulders and dusty roads, sometimes it went kilometres up the mountain’. An American and a French athlete were among the contestants who dropped out on the way. The idea for this event was suggested to Coubertin by a senior French professor of ancient linguistics who gave informal advice for the first Olympics. A letter from him to Coubertin survives, dated September 1894, just before a planned visit by Coubertin to Athens, the city chosen a few months earlier to host the first games. Almost as an afterthought, Michel Bréal – the professor – wrote at the end of this missive, penned ‘at the gallop’ in a Swiss hotel room:

Since you go to Athens, see if a race can be organised from Marathon to the Pnyx. This will have the savour of antiquity. If we knew the time it had taken the Greek warrior, we could establish the record. For my part I would claim the honour of offering the ‘Marathon Trophy’.

The letter refers to a rather wobbly ancient Greek tradition that in 490 bc the victorious Athenian troops sent one of their own to run from Marathon back to Athens, supposedly still in his armour, to report the news to their fellow citizens: Thersippus of the deme Erchiae brought the news of the victory at Marathon, as Heraclides of Pontus relates. But most people say that it was Eucles, who ran in full armour, hot from the battle, and, bursting in at the doors of the leading men of the state, could only say, ‘Hail! we are victorious!’ and straightway expired. These writings date to the years around ad 100. They show that by this time – six hundred years after the battle – the ancient tradition about this messenger was muddled, if only as to his name. A further muddle, in Greek writings half a century later, confused the Marathon runner with another long-distance messenger, an Athenian contemporary called Phidippides, who ran from Athens to Sparta. The scholarly Bréal seems to have known these sources. He suggests the Athenian hill of the Pnyx as the finishing point presumably because he knew that this was the open-air meeting place of the Athenian citizen assembly in the fifth century bc. He must have imagined the gathered citizenry in 490 bc anxiously awaiting news. Coubertin evidently liked this idea and shared it with the Greek organisers of the Athens games. In this manner it made its way onto the official programme. The event was Bréal’s invention, based on a one-off episode in Greek military history with no connection whatsoever to the ancient Olympic Games or even (as already said) with ancient Greek sport. This seems to have worried neither man. It shows that for Coubertin’s purposes the ‘savour of antiquity’ was indeed all that mattered. The last thing he was interested in was ‘an antiquarian recreation of the actual contests held by Greek youths’.

As for the modern Greeks, their euphoric celebration of a Greek victory in this first marathon is particularly understandable, given the nationalist and patriotic resonances of the ancient Athenian defeat of the Persians. Educated circles at the time, the kind of Greeks encountered by Coubertin, will have known the lines of Lord Byron, the English milord who actively supported Greece’s struggle for independence from the Ottoman empire, dying for the cause in 1824: The mountains look on Marathon – And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dream’d that Greece might still be free; For standing on the Persians’ grave, I could not deem myself a slave. In 1896, the liberation of Greece from the ‘despotic’ rule of the Ottomans was far from complete. What is now northern Greece, including Salonika (to become the modern state’s second city), was still under Ottoman rule; so was the great island of Crete. When the Athens crowds adulated Spyridon Louis, the Greek winner of the first marathon race of the modern Olympics, they would not have forgotten that Greece, as in classical times, still had an eastern imperialist foe on its doorstep.


About the Author

Tony Spawforth is emeritus professor of ancient history at Newcastle University. As well as leading cultural tours in Greece, he has presented eight documentaries for the BBC and has published thirteen books, including The Story of Greece and Rome.

About the Book

 Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like “pandemic,” a Freudian state of mind like the “Oedipus complex,” or a replica of the Parthenon in a Chinese theme park, ancient Greek culture shapes the contours of our lives. Ever since the first Roman imitators, we have been continually falling under the Greeks’ spell.
 
But how did ancient Greece spread its influence so far and wide? And how has this influence changed us?
 
Tony Spawforth explores our classical heritage, wherever it’s to be found. He reveals its legacy in everything from religion to popular culture, and unearths the darker side of Greek influence—from the Nazis’ obsession with Spartan “racial purity” to the elitism of classical education. Paying attention to the huge breadth and variety of Hellenic influence, this book paints an essential portrait of the ancient world’s living legacy—considering to whom it matters, and why.

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