The Ancients - The Olympic Games

Episode Date: May 2, 2021

The most famous sporting event in the world is upon us, so it's only right that we consider what do we know about the ancient origins of the games in Olympia, ancient Greece? Even back then it was absolutely central to everybody's imagination about what a sporting event should be. Ancient history legend and author of ‘Olympia: The Story of the Ancient Olympic Games’ Robin Waterfield joins Tristan Hughes to discuss the Olympic Games in antiquity. The Ancients is a History Hit podcast

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they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, where you might have noticed in the news that the 2021 Olympic Games, they're close at hand. And so in today's podcast, we're going to be focusing on the Olympic Games in antiquity, what we know about the Olympic Games in antiquity.

We're going to Olympia, we're going to ancient Greece. And I'm delighted to say that for this podcast, I was joined by an ancient history legend, Robin Waterfield. Robin has translated several primary sources, including Plato's Republic and parts of Diodorus Siculus. He's written books, including ones on Socrates, on Greek myths, on the wars of the successors, and more recently recently on the Olympic Games in antiquity. So without further ado, here's Robin. Robin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Well, thank you for inviting me Tristan, this is good. Now the Olympic Games and looking at the ancient origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece,

this is an amazing topic looking at the origins of what we could possibly argue is the most famous sporting event in the world today. Yes, as it was then. I mean, it was absolutely central to everybody's imagination about what a sporting event should be. It was the first, and when other great sporting events arose, they explicitly were imitations of the Olympics. They usually introduced something different, let's say a musical contest as well or something like that, but basically the athletic events were modelled on the Olympics. And later in Hellenistic history, by the time of Ptolemy's in Egypt, for instance, Ptolemy II explicitly wrote round to everywhere in Greece, asking them to recognise a new festival of his as equal to the Olympics, as of Olympic status.

And lots of other people were doing that as well. It was the first. It was the greatest. The first, the greatest, and that remarkable longevity, as you say right there. But if we focus on Olympia, the place itself, first of all, I mean, just so we get an idea. I mean, no such thing as a silly question. Whereabouts is Olympia on the Greek mainland? Right. The southern bit of the Greek mainland is that big roundish lump called the Peloponnese. And Olympia is in the northwest

of the Peloponnese. The Peloponnese itself is largely very rugged. And the coastline on the northwest doesn't have many harbours and things for beaching ships. So this made Olympia rather inaccessible. But it itself is in a very beautiful, rather humid river valley where two rivers meet, the Alpheus and the Cladius. I mean, that's interesting. If Olympia is rather inaccessible in its location, why do you think they chose Olympia as the centre of the Olympic Games? Two reasons, I think. One, the place was sacred to Zeus, and there was an oracle of Zeus there. We don't know very much about it, but it seems to have specialised in military matters.

So you went there to ask whether you would be victorious in a battle or something like that. And then you went there afterwards to celebrate perhaps your victory. These oracular sites tended to be pretty remote anyway. If you look at Didyma or Delphi, the other two really famous ones, they're not very easy to get to. So that was one reason why people started going there. And the other reason is more sort of symbolic that people started going there when it started to develop into a festival. People started going there because, in a sense, as a way of showing off, because they were the elite, they were rich, they could afford the time to travel to this rather inaccessible place. And is this important to remember that long before the Olympic Festival emerged and the

Olympic Games emerged, that Olympia is this very important religious site? I wouldn't say it was that important before the Games developed. It was, I think, relatively minor importance, let's say, certainly local importance. And that's true even for the beginning of the Games as well. For the first 100 or so years of the games. It's only people from the Peloponnese, and particularly from the Northwest Peloponnese who were taking part. It only gradually became so famous when it was opened up to Greeks from Southern Italy, Sicily, and everywhere else in the Greek world. So what do we know then about these origins of the games?

Very little, guesswork. There are a number of stories that the Greeks themselves used to tell about it. For instance, one was that it was started by Heracles in the course of his 12 labours. After one of them, I think, cleaning the Orgean stables, he celebrated by creating the stadium there for the first time. And then there's another story that three local kings put their heads together at one point because their people were tending to fight, you know, the usual border wars and things like that,

and said, how can we stop this? And the Oracle said, create games in order to, as it were, use up the energy that people are currently spending on warfare, on battle. These are all legends, of course. Quite a lot of games that we know of were originally celebrations of somebody's death or commemorations of somebody's death. So some scholars think that that was the start of the Olympics, but we don't really know, we don't

really have a hero whose death needed to be commemorated at Olympia. The only suitable candidate would be Pelops. There's another origin story there, but Pelops wanted to marry Hippodamia, the only suitable candidate would be Pelops. There's another origin story there, that Pelops wanted to marry Hippodamia, the daughter of Oinomaus, the local king, and in order to do so, he had to defeat Oinomaus in a chariot race. You know this story, everybody knows this story, it's a famous story. And he did defeat Oinomaus, and there are two versions of how he did so. The one which is most common is that he cheated. He suborned Oinomaus' charioteer and got him to substitute a weak lynchpin in one of the wheels so that the wheel came off in the course of the race and Oinomaus fell to his death or was dragged by his horses to his death. Nasty.

I don't like that version because I don't think encouraging athletes to cheat was really in the spirit of the Olympic Games. think encouraging athletes to cheat was really in the spirit of the Olympic Games. So I prefer the version where, because Pelops was loved by the great god Poseidon, Poseidon gave his horses wings. And so he beat Oinomaeus. Well, he had winged horses, perhaps that wasn't fair, but he defeated Oinomaeus that way and won the hand of Iquodamaea. But he's the only suitable hero whose death might have been commemorated by some running race. But that doesn't really make sense because he's famous for a chariot race. And one thing we do know for certain about the early Olympic Games for the

first 100 or so years or 60 or so years was that they consisted only of running races, not chariot races. I think it was to do with that Oracle of Zeus that I've already mentioned. I think, as I say, that people might have gone there to ask for victory or solicit victory, and then having won a victory, they might have gone back and started to celebrate it by some kind of festival. And many, many festivals in Greece involved athletics,

so that would have sort of fairly naturally sprung up there. And also because, as I said, this was the rich, the wealth elite of Greece were the ones who were going there and they were naturally very, very competitive. They liked to beat their rivals and to be seen to do so. And so starting an athletic programme would have been fairly natural to them. So these early runners, as you're saying, they're not the hoi polloi of the city-states of Athens or Sparta or wherever. They are from the noble houses, let's say.

Yes, very much so. I mean, the spectators, by the time the games were in full swing by the 4th or 3rd century BC and were being spectated by literally tens of thousands of people would have gone to the festival, then yes, there must have been plenty of the hoi polloi there. But the contestants themselves certainly originally were members of the elite, and the culture remained elitist throughout, even though it's quite likely that as the decades and centuries went by, that people from the lower classes who had demonstrated great ability were able to come up, but it needed funding, so they

would have needed to be funded by another rich person or by their state. But the culture remained elite, and particularly for the horse events. You see, there's very little of Greece, particularly southern Greece, which is suitable for raising horses, So owning a horse was a sign of prestige, like owning a Ferrari today or something. race was a real way of showing off. And the ultimate of that was in 416, when Alcibiades of Athens, this very arrogant playboy, entered seven four-horse chariot races. He only funded six. He borrowed one from a friend, but he entered seven at once. I mean, that is the ultimate in showing off. It was taken to be a sign that he wanted soul power or some kind of tyrannical power back in Athens. So within a few years, he was sent into exile for that and for other reasons. Well, let's keep on those equestrian events for a moment. You

mentioned the chariots there and the horse riding. It sounds like, although they weren't there right at the start of the Olympic Games, right at the beginning, these horse events, they become a key part of the Olympic Games and the Olympic schedule? Very much so, yes, at least in part for the reason I've already said. But they were dangerous. If it was a horse riding event, horses didn't have saddles or stirrups. And so that was uncomfortable for one thing. And if it was a chariot event, those were notorious for crashes and even for deaths. It's kind of ironic because basically the Olympic ethos was, as I said before, to compete against your peers and to defeat your peers. But very, very few of these rich horse owners drove their own chariots or rode their own horses, what they did was they got a

highly trained slave to do it, you know, a lightweight slave to do it, so that he would suffer the consequences if there was a crash and things like that. But nevertheless, the slave never gets any credit. You never hear, you know, the winner of the four-horse chariot race was such and such a slave. It's always the owner of the horses. And on one notorious occasion in the horse race, a horse, as they sometimes do in modern races as well, lost its rider and carried on, and it came first, and it was still the owner who was given first prize,

even though there wasn't even a slave on top of the horse at the time. So the slave was considered no more than a kind of a steering mechanism for the horse. So it's really emphasised, isn't it, that often forgotten or overlooked aspect, the driver itself, and in these Olympic Games, it sounds like they were the slaves. Yeah, absolutely. For the horse events, for all the other events, the elite contestant himself was taking part. And these elite contestants, let's say the owners of these chariots, you mentioned Alcibades and obviously the city-state of Athens, but do we hear of elite figures coming from places away from the mainland of Greece?

Okay, so I've said that Olympia was pretty remote. It was hard to get to from southern Greece. From Athens, for instance, you wouldn't have gone over land, most likely. You'd have sailed. And that meant sailing around Cape Malaya, which nobody in the ancient world ever wanted to do because two seas meet there and the currents were horrible and things like that. But once seafaring got better, once shipbuilding got better, Olympia was actually very accessible from Sicily and southern Italy. So the members of those elites, particularly from

Syracuse and Acragas and places like that, and Crotone was one of the most famous athletic cities, Crotone in southern Italy. So they started coming. And yes, others were coming from northern Greece, from Macedonia eventually, once the Macedonians were recognised as Greek, and even from Egypt, once Egypt was ruled by Macedonians, i.e. Greeks, and further afield from the Near East and so on. They were coming from everywhere. The Sicily example you mentioned there seems absolutely fascinating, especially because we think of Sicily in ancient Greek history being ruled by these citadates, being ruled by these tyrants, these very powerful tyrants, these very rich tyrants. And I can imagine for them,

going to the Olympic Games was this huge coup. And it was, in a sense, an affirmation of their Greekness for these people to be able to come from these outlying areas to somewhere which was considered to be just for Greeks. Is that the political side of the Olympic Games in ancient Greek history, that idea that to enter the Olympic Games, you had to be considered Hellenic, you had to be seen as Greek? Yes, we're bordering on the political side, but I'll say a bit more about that at first, because from the 5th century onwards, we know that there was a panel of judges at Olympia called the Hellano-Dikai, the judges of the Greeks. And one of their jobs, their job was to supervise the games

in general, to supervise the preliminary training in the city of Elis beforehand, but one of their jobs was to weed out people who were not Greek, or at least that was one of their stated jobs. But having said that, A, we never hear of anybody being kicked out because he was considered not to be Greek. We never hear of it. And later, when the Romans became the masters of Greece, they were allowed to enter the Olympic Games. So it's a little obscure, but it was considered to be a venue for Greeks. Yes, definitely. And keeping on that slightly political side of things for a bit longer, because when we think of antiquity in the Greek city-states, there's always a war, a lot of battles going on between these city-states. But do we sometimes see competitions

and rival athletes at the Olympic Games playing against each other? They're in the same competition at the Olympic Games, but they're from rival city-states that were then currently at war. Very much so. And I'm sure in some of their minds, it was like an extension of the war. But they were also competing against fellow members of their own city-states, and they were trying just as hard to beat them as well. Now, where you get the rivalry is slightly, well, slightly more difficult to explain, for one thing. Olympia was always organized, the Olympic Games was always organized and arranged and supervised by one particular city-state, and for most of its history, that was Elis, which is about 40 kilometers to the north of Olympia. Now, Elis was a regular, well, in some

ways not regular, but it was a typical Greek city-state in the sense that it was a member of certain military alliances and of certain commercial networks that would have naturally brought it close to others, to some, and made it hostile to others. And so you do get a certain element of rivalry from that. And for instance, I mean, on the most notorious occasion in 362 BC, when Ellis had briefly lost control of the games, they attacked it. They actually went to war against the Pisatans from the city of town, really, of Pisa, who were currently in charge of the games, and they actually went to war about it. In 420 BC, to go back 60 years or so, well, there was a lull, but essentially we're in the middle of the Peloponnesian War,

the Great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. In 420, there was actually a period of very tense peace, but nevertheless, that big rivalry between Athens and Sparta was very much a live issue. And Elis had just allied itself with Athens. Now, just before the games in 420, the Spartans, there was some technicality, some error that they'd made, and the Aelians fined them for it. The Spartans refused to pay the fine, and the Aelians banned them from the games. No Spartan was allowed to take part in the games, although actually one did. A man called Lichas of Sparta, who knew he had the winning four-horse chariot team, and he sneaked in pretending that he was a Theban. But then when his team did indeed win,

he leapt up and in doing so expressed the fact that he was a Spartan. And the Aelians immediately rewrote it and attributed the victory to Thebes, not to Sparta. And then things got worse. There were other incidents with Spartans over the next 10 or so years, 20 years, leading in 401 to the Spartans actually attacking Ennis. They wanted to liberate some territory that the Aelians had possessed for a long time, and that was their excuse for attacking. But all of this Olympic politics was in the background as well. And another way that politics figured quite extensively was in the placement of statues and other commemorative things. And the Aelians, because they were in charge of the game, always had the right to say

which statues went where. And again, they made sure that the Spartans got the worst end of it sometimes. So for instance, once the Spartans, in celebration of a military victory, dedicated a large golden shield, which was hung in a prominent place on one of the temples and there it hung but then in 424 the Spartans were defeated in the battle of Spacteria which was very unusual I mean the Spartans have essentially had the reputation of not being beatable and in celebration of this victory the Mycenaeans, who had defeated them, put up what was and remained for centuries one of the most glorious commemorative statues, which was a statue of victory on top of an enormous tall pillar. Victory in rather sexy,

flimsy clothing, swooping down onto the Altus, the sacred grove that was the center of Olympia. And the Aelians got them to place this thing so that it was swooping down directly looking at this Spartan shield. So it was flipping the digit at the Spartans. There was a lot of stuff like that going on, placement of statues between rival states and things like that. Is that another thing we need to consider with ancient Olympia and the Olympic Games and the religious heart of Olympia as well? I mean, Delphi was this ancient notice board with all these monuments and these beautifully adorned temples and sculptures.

Olympia sounds very similar in that this was a way to really promote a city-state or to emphasise a political point through the construction of a very monumental construction. Yes, it was a way for Elis to glorify itself. And in the history of Olympia, each time Pisa or Elis or somebody else became the master of the games, they tended, at least in the early days when there were few and small structures, they would level those old structures and put up new ones as a way of saying, this is our place now. I mean, the huge Temple of Zeus, the largest temple in the Peloponnese, was put up by the aliens, as was the Temple of Hera, and so on and so forth. But let's talk about religion, because it's very, very important to the Olympic Games. It was a religious festival,

and we need to get our heads around that. We need to understand, first of all, that a lot of religious festivals in ancient Athens weren't like going to church. It wasn't po-faced and pompous in any way. For instance, all the great dramatic festivals in ancient Athens, all the great plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were put on as part of a religious festival to Dionysus. So the Olympic Games was a long extended religious festival in honor of Zeus. And the Altis, which means the grove, there weren't that many trees left by the classical period, but it was still called the Altis, was explicitly religious. There were these huge temples. There was a shrine of Pelops. There was the enormous altar of Zeus there, which wasn't made out of stone. It was just

solidified fat and ashes from decade after decade of sacrifices and things like that. And the games itself was explicitly religious. The pivot of the games, the hinge of the games on the central day was a massive sacrifice, a hecatomb sacrifice. Hecatomb literally means sacrifice of a hundred oxen. In other words, very, very expensive. It might not be exactly a hundred, it just means a very large number. And on the second day, before the athletes started competing, they paraded round all of the altars and religious places in the altars. It was explicitly religious. It was a fair, as well as the games. People came to sell their goods and provide food for the spectators and so on and so forth. But everybody still knew

that they were taking part in a religious festival. It's even possible, this is a modern theory, that the athletes felt that they were giving their energy as a kind of a sacrifice to Zeus. Yes, sometimes today we divide the secular from the religious as being two different events, don't we? But in antiquity, and it sounds like with the Olympic Games, they were very much interconnected together. All of life, Tristan, you're absolutely right, yes. Religion permeated everything you did. Every council meeting there was a sacrifice beforehand. When you got up in the morning you maybe tossed a few grains onto the hearth of your home and prayed to the gods for a good day.

And everything you did had a religious dimension to it. And what do we know about the stadium at Olympia? The stadium that we see now is actually the third version of it, or it's largely the third version. It was refurbished a couple of times. It was built in the fourth century BC. Before that, the stadium had been within the Altus itself, within the sacred grove, but that was getting too crowded and they wanted to build temples and things like that. So they moved the stadium out. You've seen pictures or you've probably been there and lots of people listening to this will have been there it's a fantastic open structure with lightly banked

seats on either side capable they say of holding 40 000 spectators although i don't know that anybody's tried to do that so i mean that's not a huge amount by some of you know modern stadium standards but it's as big as um what's chelsea football clubs ground oh goodness stanford bridge yeah stanford bridge yeah i mean if it could possibly house 40 000 spectators it begs the What's Chelsea Football Club's ground? Oh goodness, Stamford Bridge, yeah. Stamford Bridge, yeah. I mean, if it could possibly house 40,000 spectators, it begs the question, because you mentioned it lasts for several days, where would these spectators have lived? Well, dotted around, camping out, literally. And camping didn't mean bringing a little pup tent.

It meant just probably, at best, either sleeping out or, you know, slinging a piece of canvas over two convenient bushes. There came to be some accommodation there. Even as early as the 4th century BC, a large hotel was built there. But that was only for the elite and everybody else continued to camp out. Most likely, richer people would occupy slopes of the nearby hills so that they could catch some breezes. Poorer people went and sort of sweltered down in the valley. You mentioned earlier some of the events. You mentioned the running races and the equestrian events. But were there any other events at the Olympic Games that the spectators would come to watch?

Well, the ones we haven't mentioned are the heavy events and the pentathlon. The heavy events were boxing, wrestling, and pancration. Boxing and wrestling were kind of similar to what we would recognize as boxing and wrestling. They're a little more brutal, more was allowed than we would allow nowadays. And in particular, they didn't wear boxing gloves, but wore leather thongs strapped around the sort of base of their fingers and by the fourth century or the third century these thongs were a bit like knuckle dusters I mean they had you know projecting bits on it so they could do quite a lot of damage and wrestling was different because you weren't allowed to put any part of

your body on the ground except your feet and a knee, if you were using your knee to pivot and throw your opponent. And a win was if your opponent's shoulders and back or some other part of his body touched the ground three times. That was a win. And then there was Pankration, which was like a mixture of boxing and wrestling. You could do virtually anything in it. and wrestling. You could do virtually anything in it. You weren't strictly allowed to gouge your opponent's eyes, but you still see pictures of that happening on vases and things like that, if you could get away with it. The closest parallel to that today is mixed martial arts. In fact, mixed martial arts is sometimes called the modern pancration. The pentathlon consisted

of five events, discus, jump, javelin, sprint, andcus jump javelin sprint and wrestling now sprinting and wrestling were events on their own but the other three discus the jump and javelin weren't the rules governing the pentathlon are terribly obscure and scholars have great fun concocting very complex theories about what the rules were and how you decided what a winner was and how many throws of the discus you were allowed we We don't even know what kind of jump it was. Was it a regular long jump? Was it a hop, skip and jump? We don't know. And we don't know how it was recorded. But that was considered, you know, the best all round. Well, it was the only all round event. And it was all rounders who trained and went for that. For the running events, there were four of them.

There was the sprint, which was one length of the stadium. And the stadium at Olympia was about 192 meters. It varied from place to place, but that's how it was at Olympia. Then there was the dioulos, which was two lengths. And then there was the dolichos, which was 12 laps or 24 lengths. So that was a long distance one. And then even worse, there was a two-lap racing armor. No, sorry, one lap, two-length racing armor, which originally was carrying a heavy hoplite shield with a helmet on your head and greaves on your shins. And since armor was notoriously ill-fitting, that must have

been an ordeal. And in fact, over the centuries or over the decades, the greaves on your shins. And since armour was notoriously ill-fitting, that must have been an ordeal. And in fact, over the centuries or over the decades, the greaves were dropped. I think the helmet was dropped as well. And so you're only running with the shield. It's quite interesting for what you're mentioning there that it sounds like in antiquity and after the 5th century BC, there was no race called the marathon. Ah, yes. No, there wasn't. The marathon was invented in the 1890s. And even then, it's probably misnomer to call it a marathon.

The idea, the legend on which it's based, is that after the famous Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, a runner ran from the village of Marathon to the council house in Athens, a distance of about 40 kilometers or 25 miles, and just had time to gasp out, victory is ours, before expiring on the floor of the council house. That's the legend. But we only hear that legend for the first time many centuries after the Battle of Marathon. And Herodotus, the historian who's closest to the Battle of Marathon, doesn't mention it at all. He mentions an entirely different run from Athens to Sparta and back to give the news the Persians are coming, come and help us please,

by a runner called Philippides. So the marathon run was essentially a modern invention. That is very, very interesting. Dispelling the myths, Robin, dispelling the myths. And further in regards to these events, do we have any idea about how some of these elite athletes would have trained for these events? I know there's so many different events, a big question, but do we have any idea? Actually, we do have extant that has survived a manual on athletic training by a man called Philostratus, but it was written in the third century AD. So in other words, a good a thousand years after the Olympics started, and we really don't know what kind of training went on

beforehand. This is one of the difficulties of studying the Olympics in general, is that there are surviving no books written in ancient times dedicated entirely to the Olympic Games. So when you get a piece of information here, a piece of information there, from poetry, from prose, from this source and that source, and we put it together. And by putting that sort of thing together, as far as training is concerned, we can be pretty certain that for much of the history of the Olympics, training was really training in your event. You were expected to be all-round fit anyway. As a member of the wealth elite, you were out hunting, you were riding, you lived a pretty outdoor life.

You were walking from Athens or somewhere to your estate out in the country to supervise your slaves at work or something like that. So you had a good basis of fitness. And then on top of that, you went to the wrestling school and did some wrestling. But basically you practiced your event and just trying to hone your skills. But there was some cross training, as I say, you know,

little light weights perhaps or wrestling or something like that, but not much. You mentioned wrestling right there. And I think I'd like to go on to this topic next because we also talked earlier about possible celebrities

from Greek city-states who were very good at the game that they were specialized in and particularly i like to talk about a man called milo of croton now he was he was quite a figure he was the most famous athlete in the ancient world i mean there were others who were very famous but his name crops up in all this sort of odd context that I just mentioned. All he needs to sort of do was mention the name of Milo and everybody knew you were talking about an athlete. I'll read you just one little bit from my book about Milo because it's easier than remembering all the details. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you.

From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Milo, it was said, once carried an ox around the stadium at Olympia and then ate it in the course of a single day. And his daily fare consisted of huge amounts of meat, bread and wine. He would stand on a greased discus and challenge men to try to push

him off. He would tie a ribbon around his head and burst it by holding his breath and swelling his veins. He could hold a pomegranate in his hand so securely that no one could prise even one finger off the fruit and yet the fruit remained unmarked and uncrushed." So all these sort of fabulous stories grew up about Milo and certainly some others. And they became massive celebrities in their day. By Roman times, when there were many, many games around the Greek East, the Greek mainland and the Near East and so on in Egypt, celebrities like Milo could command huge appearance fees.

They were millionaires. You know, you wanted to have them the same way the top marathon runners are paid to come to the London or the Berlin marathon or something like that. They were so famous that sometimes through a slightly tortuous course of events, some of them actually became semi-divine after their deaths. They became heroes in the Greek religious sense, not in the sense of a heroic warrior, but a hero as an intermediate class of supernatural entity between gods and men. And you could make offerings to some of these athletes afterwards. They were particularly healing deities, supernatural beings and things like that. They were so famous. It sounds like an ancient Arnold Schwarzenegger or The Rock. I mean,

it's that kind of fame, isn't it? Yes, certainly. And talk about another key figure from the Olympics. And you mentioned there how these winners were memorialised in literature and all that. I'd like to talk about the person, the poet Pindar, because he seems to also have a very key role in the memorialising of victors from the Olympic Games. Very much. I mean, we say Pindar, chiefly because more of his poetry survives than that of others who were doing the same job, people like Simonides of Chios and Bacchylides.

But Pindar's the most famous because quite a bit of his poetry survives. And yes, that's what he and his peers did. He made himself available. And if you wanted to use that method to commemorate your victory, you commissioned him to write a poem. And his poetry is wonderful. It's very dense, very layered. He would typically bring in all the mythological precedents for the victory that the person who was writing it for had won, but very, very sort of dense and elusive in its approach. very, very sort of dense and elusive in its approach. And he would typically not just compose the words. So he wasn't just a poet in our sense,

but he would also write the music and train the choir, the chorus that would be the first people to sing this celebratory ode at a festival where presumably the tyrant of Acragas or whoever it was that you remember in the poem for was present and lots of spectators. And it was a very expensive but very effective way of memorialising your victory. The other main method was erecting a statue. If the Aelians gave you permission to put up a statue, and there came to be hundreds of these statues dotted around Olympia, then you put up one. It wouldn't necessarily be, as it were, a likeness of yourself. It was more likely to be a fairly sort of stylised pose of an athlete. But on the

base, there would be an inscription saying, this is Robin Waterfield, the greatest runner in the history of whatever. And because tens of thousands of people went to Olympia every year, then that was a really good way over the generations, over the decades, to have your name remembered. Absolutely. It sounds very similar to Delphi in that regard, where it could be where people could really... Crowded with statues and things like Delphi, yeah. And in that regard, from what you've been saying there, does it really emphasise that, especially for the ancient Greek elites, not just the importance of winning, but also in

being remembered for your victory too? Absolutely. That was very much part of the elite culture, not just to win, but to be seen to win. Following on from that, with the statues and pindar and people like that, it seems that the Olympic Games in antiquity, they've reached their heights in the classical Greek period, perhaps Hellenistic period, but does it continue into the Roman period that follows? Very much so. But what I said a few minutes ago about how difficult it is to dig up evidence about the Olympics becomes even more relevant after about the 4th century BC, because by the 3rd and 2nd century BC, well, first of all, very little literature from that period survives,

because later scholars decided that Greek classical literature was the best and let everything else sort of disappear. But secondly, the focus of those people who were writing shifted away from Greece to Rome and to the great kings of the East, the Seleucids and Ptolemies in Egypt and so on and so forth. So information about Olympia becomes even harder to find. So the reason I say that it remained important is because just from incidental mentions, like for instance, at the moment, I'm translating a Stoic philosopher called Epictetus, and he quite often uses Olympia as an analogy. He's saying the struggle you're entering on to try to become an enlightened Stoic is no ordinary contest, it's the Olympics. So it remained absolutely

central to the imagination and so I think it remained also very important. We can tell from archaeology that money was still being spent on it in large quantities. You know, new buildings were being put up, not so much religious buildings, they were already existing, but accommodation and in Roman times, bath houses and things like that. A lot of money was still being spent on it. But information is so sparse that we don't even know the winners of events. I mean, that's a difficult enough thing. We don't know the winners of many events, but it becomes even more sparse in those periods. And it's probably true to say that from about the middle or end of the second century AD, that the Olympics probably went into a fairly steep

decline. As I mentioned before, there were a lot of events around the world, and a lot of them were more accessible, especially if you were transporting a horse or four horses or in alcibiades's case anyway 28 horses um a lot of them are more accessible than olympia so it went into decline from about the end of the second century a.d and then it was closed by an edict of the christian emperor Theodosius the Great in 393 AD, who issued an edict banning all pagan religious festivals altogether. It's pretty clear that the edict didn't take effect straight away, but that would have been the final death blow. And indeed, Olympia soon became a little Christian town. Now, going back to this whole idea of the spectators, how many spectators there were, a very public event,

particularly in the classical Greek period and the early Hellenistic period. Was this also a place where ambassadors or, let's say, a king wants to announce something to the crowd? This would be the ideal place to do it because he's got a lot of people there who will be able to listen to him to make a big public announcement at the end of the festival. Very much so, absolutely. Let's take two famous cases. Alexander the Great was in the middle of his eastern conquest. He was way out east somewhere, but he still was the nominal

ruler of Greece. That is, he was the president of the League of Corinth, as it was called, almost like being president of the United States of Greece. And he sent his proxy, who was a man called Nicanor, the nephew of the philosopher Aristotle. And he sent him to Olympia in 320, I think, to issue what's known as the exile's decree, because Alexander wanted every town in Greece to take back all the people who'd been banished from it. Banishment was a very common punishment in ancient Greece for political reasons or other reasons, and he wanted

them to take them all back, which was going to cause immense, especially economic hardship. These are families who'd been banished 50 years ago. For 50 years, their property has been occupied by another family, and now they're going to come back and say they want it. So it was going to be really difficult, but Alexander wanted to sow people who were friendly to him in all the Greek states. So that was one example. And then in 196 BC, another good example, this is during the, example. And then in 196 BC, another good example, this is during the, in the course of the Roman conquest of Greece, the Roman general Titus Quinctius Flamininus, when he initiated a regime change in Greece, actually it wasn't the Olympics, it was the Isthmian Games, but that's a good

example. He used the Isthmian Games to proclaim this regime change. It might not have been Nicanor himself who made the announcement. One of the curiosities about the Olympics is that before the athletic competition started, there was a competition for town criers, for heralds, for who had the greatest voice, and for trumpeters who could blow the trumpet most clearly and loudly. And whoever won those two contests was then used afterwards as the public address system of the Olympics. The trumpet would call for silence, and the winning town crier would announce the event or whatever announcement was going on. So he was probably used to make these kinds of political announcements as well. And we know that famous speakers went there.

For instance, the famous speaker Gorgias tried to promulgate a more sort of wider pan-Hellenic view, saying, you know, stop fighting each other. Let's unite against the common enemy, who in his case were the Persians, and things like that. So, yeah, you'd have had a lot going on besides the athletic events. I've already mentioned there'd be a fair, so there'd be all sorts of buying and selling going on, but you'd have philosophers speaking, a playwright perhaps giving snippets of his play, lots of different forms of entertainment going on. Right, so an economic hub, a philosophical hub, a religious hub, and also a sporting hub too, amazing. Yes, it was like a gymnasium writ large. All of these

things went on in each town in the gymnasium. Gymnasia had rooms where lectures were given and things like that. And then just multiply that by a thousand or so or 10,000 or so, and you've got what's going on at the Olympics. What do we know about women in the ancient Olympic Games? Well, the first thing is that they weren't allowed. They weren't allowed as spectators. They weren't allowed as contestants. The only woman who was definitely allowed was the local priestess of Demeter, and she had an honorary seat in the stadium. But other than that, no women were allowed, but very oddly, unmarried women were allowed. Now, when I say unmarried women, that's actually girls, because in ancient Greece, girls got married at age about

14 or 15. And this is very peculiar to our way of thinking, because the competitors were naked, the male competitors were nude. So, you know, you're letting 14, 15 year olds in to see these men strutting around showing it all. Seems odd to our way of thinking. Now, I think the reason they were there was actually in a sense, precisely to look for husbands or to have their fathers who would have been chaperoning them or their guardian to look for husbands. Now, I'm going to come about this in a slightly circuitous way. We know that there were women's games sacred to Hera, the wife of Zeus, the Olympic games were sacred to Zeus. We know roughly that they probably occupied only one day and only were sprint events in different age classes. We know that they sprinted over a slightly reduced length of

stadium. That's what we know for certain. The rest is largely guesswork. We think that it was a genuine contest. You know, there were winners and losers. But we think that the overall purpose of the event was initiatory. Because we know from elsewhere, from girls' runs elsewhere in Greece, that running was considered to tame them, to move them out of girlhood and into womanhood, ready to marry. And also another facet that makes it seem initiatory in function is that we're not at all sure, but if we can be at all sure, what they were wearing,

they were wearing a garment that was actually very like a male garment that was worn by men for hunting or something. And that makes it seem initiatory as well, because cross-dressing is a common feature of initiatory events, rites, rituals. Now, so I'm going to make one final guess, now so i'm going to make one final guess because we don't actually know nobody tells us when this event took place and in fact we never even hear about it until pausanias in the second century a.d but it does seem to have been going on for some time it just you know was brushed under the carpet by all those male writers so i'm going to make one final guess that the event took place immediately before the male olympics and that's the girls were there. And that's why they were allowed in as spectators with their fathers to possibly pick out suitably aristocratic husbands because they would have been aristocratic girls themselves. And that really is it. That's pretty much all we know about women's games at Olympia. it that's pretty much all we know about women's games at olympia so it's possible that said if these women's olympic games happened before the main olympic games aristocratic victors of those

games were then allowed into the main olympic games to possibly look for husbands from the male victors yes or to have their guardians look for husbands for them they wouldn't have any say in the matter ah fascinating robin that was a brilliant chat about the ancient olympics uh last of all your book is called olympia the story of the ancient olympic games published by head of zeus robin thank you so much for coming on the show thank you tristan Thank you.