Book: The Ancient Olympics
Author: Nigel Spivey
Price: OUP, ?17.99
Fourteen days before the 11th Olympiad began, a Greek high priestess, attended by 14 virgins, focused the noonday sun to ignite a pyre, from which a torch was lit, and relayed by 3,075 runners from Olympia to Berlin. The year was 1936. Adolf Hitler was in power, and before conquering the modern world, he was attempting to rout history. That he should do so by way of the Olympics is appropriate: despots from Alexander the Great to Augustus Caesar sought to situate their legacy there, and Olympia itself, site of javelin-throwing and chariot-racing, was a surrogate battleground. Does it matter that the torch ceremony was a Nazi fabrication meant to inspire the Aryan race?
In anticipation of the forthcoming Olympics in Athens, two new books seek to show how dramatically the ancient games differed from the modern. The ancient games, unlike our own, were the culmination of military training. They were also, through the sacrifice of 100 oxen, intended as a tribute to Zeus. But the more fundamental distinction each book seeks to make - that the ancient Olympics contrast with ours because the games are no longer about conquest, or imbued with religion - is pure sport romance. On the contrary, the ancient games serve to highlight the pitfalls of our modern mythology.
In The Ancient Olympics, Cambridge classicist Nigel Spivey persuasively argues that, for the Greeks and Romans, "there was an acceptance, at both the popular and philosophical levels, of a prime imaginative and imitative purpose in play; an understanding, essentially, that all games were war games." This may sound odd: the sacred truce - forbidding warfare during the five days of the Olympics - was openly broken only once in the 1,200-year history of the games. But the Olympics might equally be seen as a massive premeditated pan-Hellenic skirmish, a quadrennial fight for the sake of fighting. From that perspective, the truce wasn't about giving peace a chance, but giving cause and occasion for perennial bloodshed.
Indeed, each Olympiad was extremely bloody. Ancient witnesses testify that one pankration contest was won by a corpse, while a wrestler, about to surrender, was stabbed to death by his own coach. Boxing matches were fought without weight category, by men whose fists were wrapped tight in unpadded oxhide thongs. Body blows were forbidden; only punches to the head were permitted, an adaptation of the dubious Spartan practice of hardening the skull for battle.
In fact, as Spivey points out, "there was only one intent and aim of athletic contests: to feint the stress of battle; to stay sharp and ready for war." Nobody today would argue that javelin-throwing is appropriate preparation for flying a fighter jet, and it is hard for our modern minds to imagine the city-state of Croton routing Sybaris in the 6th century BC, simply by positioning a victorious Olympic wrestler (dressed up as Herakles) in the front ranks. Yet we haven't really departed far from 6th-century Croton in our use of propaganda and intimidation as weapons. The Olympics remain a central proving ground for national supremacy, a fight for the sake of fighting. Hitler was only the most unabashed pugilist, grabbing the Olympic flame as a prelude to taking Austria and Hungary; a large part of the cold war took place on pommel horse and balance beam, pitting the scientific discipline of the Soviets versus that of the Americans in an international showcase of choreographed jingoism. Certainly, it was preferable to global thermonuclear war. Yet who but a sport fanatic could be naive enough to see it as innocent acrobatics?
Baron Pierre de Coubertin's intent may have been honourable when he founded the modern Olympics in 1894. But if the purposes were international brotherhood and peace, why organise a contest between nations rather than individual people? Indeed, why make the gathering an athletic competition in the first place?
The ancient Greeks had a good reason: according to legend, the Olympics were founded in 776 BC by King Iphitos of Elis, after he asked the oracle at Delphi how to end years of plague and warfare. The answer, he was told, was to organise a pan-Hellenic sporting competition in Olympia. A couple of hundred miles from Athens, Olympia was not exactly cosmopolitan. Still, it was a natural choice for the gods: Apollo had once bested Ares in a boxing match there, and outrun Hermes, and the nearby Hill of Kronos was where Zeus had, in the beginning of time, wrestled the world from his father. Olympia was sacred ground. As journalist Tony Perrottet argues in The Naked Olympics, the games were "an all-consuming pageant, the meeting place of heaven and earth, as spiritually profound for pagans as a pilgrimage to Varanasi for Hindus or the Muslim hajj."
The games were sacred not only because they obeyed a divine decree, but also because the spectacle of athletes competing, nude and basted in olive oil, was pleasing to the gods. The athletic body, especially in the act of competition, was a beautiful body, and beauty was an outward sign of goodness: Greek gods were appreciative of athletics in the same way that the Judeo-Christian god might be gratified by acts of charity.
Indeed, akin to the godliness accomplished by saints through the imitation of Christ, Olympic victory was, to quote Perrottet, "as close to deification as any mortal could come." In this context, it makes sense that the Elian judges were constantly running to the 40-foot statue of Zeus to tell him who won each event. And we can also understand how Leonidas of Rhodes, who had won the foot races in four consecutive Olympiads, could be said to run "with the speed of a god" and be worshipped as an immortal.
Yet how is this so different from the present? We still worship athletes, and say that victory confers immortality. True, we use such terms metaphorically. Metaphor is the unspoken assumption of any modern religion. But within the framework of how we worship, a sport fan's reverence for Jesse Owens isn't meaningfully different from a Catholic's attitude toward Christ.
Hitler recognised the awe and devotion Olympic victors could command, both at home and abroad. That hasn't changed. If anything, courtesy of mass media, it has been magnified.
In 776 BC, the Delphic oracle told King Iphitos that the Olympics would end warfare, yet over the following 1,200 years scarcely a week went by without battle between city-states. And in the century since Baron Pierre de Coubertin organised the modern Olympics to inspire international brotherhood and peace, fighting between countries has only increased. As the Olympics return to Greece, perhaps the time has come to extinguish Hitler's flame, and to admit that the oracle was wrong.
