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The Olympic Games start Friday in Athens, and I was ready to write a lament about how an ancient and noble ideal, the pursuit of excellence, has been perverted by modern commercialism and nationalism, starting with the 1936 Berlin games that Hitler used to promote the Nazi ideology, and continuing to this day, with professional athletes sometimes representing countries that they have never lived in.
Our myths about the ancient Greek Olympics hold that the athletes competed just for the love of sport, and their only reward for victory was a wreath. They came from various Hellenic city-states like Athens and Sparta, but they competed as individuals, not as representatives of their often-warring polises.
Contrast that Golden Age to our decadent era of doping, bribery and scandal, along with grand displays of nationalism and the pursuit of lucrative endorsement contracts, and we come off looking pretty bad, as though the human race has been on a downhill slide for the past 2,500 years.
However, now we can feel better about ourselves, thanks
to those revisionist historians who delve into the ancient
Olympics. As it turns out, the ancient Greeks weren't any
nobler than we are. (Most of what follows comes from
Athletics in Ancient Athens
by Donald G. Kyle, who
professes history at the University of Texas.)
We can start with the concept of amateurism, unknown to the ancient Greeks. The prize at Olympia was a wreath, rather than money, but after they returned home, winning athletes received valuable benefits and prizes, like cash and free meals. Solon of Athens once arranged for rewards of 500 drachmas (about $300,000) for local Olympic victors.
Some modern athletes compete for countries not their own, but that happened in ancient Greece, too. Astylos of Kroton won races in 488 and 484 BC for Kroton, but in 480, he ran for Syracuse.
We don't know what induced Astylos to switch teams, but
we do have this from an old text: Sotades at the
ninety-ninth Festival was victorious in the long race and
proclaimed a Cretan, as in fact he was. But at the next
Festival he made himself an Ephesian, being bribed to do so
by the Ephesian people. For this act he was banished by the
Cretans.
The ancient Olympics offered not just track and field, but also equestrian contests. In the horse and chariot races, the owners, not the competitors, got the prizes. They did not have to be present to win, and they hired jockeys and charioteers -- another indication that amateurism was not part of the Olympics.
On occasion, owners did compete directly. The most famous, perhaps, is the Roman Emperor Nero, who entered the ten-horse chariot race in A.D. 67. He fell from his chariot and did not even finish, but rank hath its privileges: he was still declared the victor.
Nero wasn't the only Olympic cheater in ancient times. The judges, who could have offending athletes flogged, generally levied fines for lying, bribery and cheating. The money from the fines was used to buy bronze statues of Zeus which lined the route to the field.
This apparently started in 388 B.C. when a boxer,
Eupolos of Thessaly, got caught bribing one of his
opponents to take a fall. An inscription under one of the
first statues warns that an Olympic victory is to be won
not by money but by swiftness of foot or strength of
body.
But then as now, money helped; promising athletes
sometimes received subsidies to help with their training,
and appearance fees,
paid to prominent athletes just
for showing up at an event, were a feature of some ancient
games.
There were some differences. Athletes wore no clothes, and women were forbidden, on pain of death, from attending the games. There was no Olympic torch, either.
That's a modern invention. The organizer of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Carl Diem, wanted to connect with past, so he staged the first lighting of the flame in Greece and consequent relay to the game site. The five interlocking rings, symbolizing the games, do not date from ancient Greece, but from 1913, when they were devised by Pierre de Coubertin, president of the International Olympic Committee.
But even if the symbols and pageantry of the modern Olympics are not really ancient, the old traditions do continue with modern greed and corruption. There was no Golden age.
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