The Rest Is History - 79. Ancient Olympics

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

With the Games underway in Tokyo, Tom and Dominic look back to the Ancient Olympics. They discuss the heroic but incredibly violent stories of the Greek superstars of 2500 years ago, and why the Games were bad news for women, animals and cheats. Plus, Tom reveals how his cricketing woes were compounded by an Ancient Greek poet. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Welcome to The Rest Is History, which comes, not inappropriately, from Greece, or at least partly from Greece. The historian Herodotus tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, when the Spartans made their heroic stand against the Persian king Xerxes. And afterwards, when the Persians had wiped the floor with the Spartans, they asked a group of Greek deserters why there were so few Greeks at the battlefield. And the deserters supposedly replied that the rest of the Greeks were off at the Olympic Games watching the horse racing. The Persians asked what was their prize? What was the point? And the Greeks said the prize

was a crown of olive leaves. And at that, the Persians supposedly cried out and gnashed their teeth and rent their garments and said, what kind of men are these that we're fighting against? They fight not for riches, but for glory. Now, another person who fights only for glory is my collaborator, Tom Holland, the translator of Herodotus' histories, no less. Tom, you're very keen on the Olympics, aren't you? I imagine you're dying to see the kickoff in Tokyo. You can't wait. Well, I'm very keen on the ancient Olympics. I actually find the modern ones a bit boring, to be honest. The synchronized swimming doesn't do it for you, or the powerlifting or whatever it is.

Not really. But the ancient ones are fantastic. And I'm incredibly jealous of you being in Greece right now as we record this and very grateful that you have broken off from Downing Retsina in the shade of Nice evening, flesh pots of Nafleon. In the flesh pots of the Peloponnese. So what I've actually done, exactly, I've broken off my holiday to be lectured by you about ancient religion and I said to my wife as she went off taking my son for an ice cream I said basically for the next hour Tom Holland will be just using the word sacral again and again and again I know exactly what's coming you know me you know me too well have you before we get on to the sacral quality of the ancient olympic games am I wow

am I going to major on that um have you you haven't actually been to olympia though this no although although i've never been although yesterday we went to namia um which is another games location and so there's a brilliant tunnel they've sort of reconstructed i think the tunnel that the athletes it's very like you know stepping onto the the field for the world cup final or something you go through the tunnel and you emerge into the stadium. And, yeah, you get a fantastic sense of what it was like. I mean, I know that's a silly thing to say because you don't really know what it was like,

but you can sort of pretend anyway. I played the final countdown on my phone and got my son to run through the tunnel. Of course, there's nobody else here because of COVID. So it's brilliant. You get it all to yourself. And you win the crown. Exactly, the olive wreath. So you mentioned the Nemean Games.

Yeah, there were four, weren't there? Well, there were lots of games, but there were four games where basically, as in the story that you read from Herodotus, you get a crown. So they're called the Stephanic Games, Stephanos, being Greek for a crown. So the Nemean Games was basically ranked fourth.

Oh, you're telling me I've been to the – I didn't even get on the podium. Yeah, you didn't even podium. The Nemean Games and not even the bronze medal of games. That's so disappointing. Oh, my God. The Isthmian. The Isthmian is the bronze one. So that's at Corinth.

Okay. Joining the Peloponnese, the southern kind of fork of Greece, to the mainland. Then the Pythian, which is at Delphi. And then the Olympian. And Pausanias, who is second century AD, basically he kind of writes travel guides. He writes a travel guide to Greece. The rough guide. The rough guide. And he says of the Olympic Games, they are the greatest, the greatest of games.

And so that's why the modern games are named after them, because they are the pinnacle. Well, did Pausanias, you're not claiming that he invented the idea that the Olympic Games were the best? I mean, were they genuinely the best? He said that they rank first, they come okay if you if you win at the olympic games then that's absolutely the best although the mark of a really elite athlete and you know how keen i am on on elite sport is is to get the grand slam a bit like kind of tennis now you know you get and this is of course what uh what nero did? Well, I'm sure we'll come to this later on. That is what Nero did.

But, and I know how much you've been looking forward to me using the word sacral. Yes, come on. Let's get it over with. Okay. So the key, really the fundamental difference between the modern Olympic Games, which as constituted now is basically about money. I mean, the reason that they're going ahead in a time of covid it's not because of the olympic spirit it's not because the amity of nations it's it's because of tv deals yeah well we're going to do the modern olympics aren't we in

another podcast so we can do all the sleaze and the politics of it but but the um the episode you mentioned with thermopylae the the Persians are invading Greece. This is a massive crisis. Holding the pass at Thermopylae is the best option the Greeks have to stop the Persian advance. But they don't go because of the games. And that's not because they're obsessed by sport, although they are. It's because the Olympic Games have this incredible status as something that is holy to the gods. And so, again, Pausanias, when he goes to Olymp where it's involved with the story of Demeter and

Persephone and Persephone going into the underworld and then coming back for six months and going back. And it's all basically about life and death. So it's absolutely at the heart of everything that a mortal might want to learn. But he says that the Olympics, the Olympic Games are, the Festival of the Olympics are on that level. And actually, when I say Olympic Games as a synonym for festival, that's wrong, because the games are only a part of the broader festival. Let's go back to the origins. So when did they, the conventional date is 776, isn't it? And we get that from Aristotle, am I right? That he says it was 776 bc um yes well we we get it also from um a guy called hippias of

ellis and ellis is the the kind of the town that um over the course of history comes to kind of monopolize and and lay claim to the games and the festival um and essentially if you win the sprint which is the first race and it's won by this butcher supposedly called koroibus right then nice from that point on your name as the guy who wins the sprint you you know this is how the greeks date this is this is the dating system that they use so it's kind of i mean how elite is that you win a sprint and then your name, you know, is going to be used forever after by people drawing up histories. Well, just to interject on this, we were in Sparta the other day, in modern Sparta, which, as my son said, is not,

it doesn't quite live up to his image of ancient Sparta. But in the middle of modern Sparta, there is a monument, an Olympic monument, and it has the names of every Spartan who won the Olympics, going back to the 8th century BC or whatever it is, and going right up to the early 21st century. And I thought, I mean, they're basically pretending there's no break. They're pretending that the Olympic Games are the same thing and that's Sparta. So I loved that of that they're still

remembering these guys you know 2500 years ago and they still got this sort of monument to their to their spartan olympic heroes so the names do live forevermore well yes yes absolutely um and so greek contenders knew that i mean the fame that you, in a sense, the kind of the key to it. But it won't surprise you to know that there are complications. So one of them is, you know, is this true? And actually, the kind of the weight of opinion is probably that it vaguely is. What, that the butcher did win and all that sort of stuff? Yeah, perhaps. Who knows? knows i mean we've got no way really i've known but it seems it seems feasible but this this kind of you know we we

can recognize that that's a historical account but for the greeks this this well i'm afraid i'm gonna use the word the sacral quality of the game yeah i'm so glad you did that tom i mean it would be disappointing if you didn't i know there's interwoven with myth okay so you can basically with the Greeks you can hold you know kind of three or four ideas simultaneously in your head so you can have this idea that there is a kind of recognizable starting point that you get on the blocks you know firing gun goes and you're off the games have begun but at the same time you also have to kind of enmesh it in your ideas about the stories told of the gods and the heroes. And as is always the way with Greece, there is no

definitive account. So it's held at Olympia. Olympia, obviously, there's the resonance with Olympus, the home of the gods, where Zeus, the king of the gods, rules. And it's used- Is it named after Olympus, Tom? Is it named after mount olympus the place well it's it's named after olympian zeus so zeus presides over the games and so therefore one of the stories that's told about the origins of the games um and again going back to borsamias who really is that kind of you know the crucial source for this he says some say zeus wrestled there at olympia with kronos himself for the throne of heaven um some say he held the games as a at Olympia with Kronos himself for the throne of heaven. Some say he held the games as a celebration of his triumph.

Kronos was Zeus's father who swallowed, there was a prediction that he would be toppled by his child. And so he devours his children as they're born. And he gets tricked because Zeus's mother gives him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. And Zeus is then able to live and comes and defeats him. So that is kind of pinning the origins of the Olympics right to the beginning of the reign of the Olympians, the coming of the Olympians. So that's the kind of measure of its significance. But Tom, I read this story. I read it only today that uh pelops yes the son of tantalus a man who had survived being eaten by the gods being served to the gods as food by his own father which is not a claim many of us can make

but he had he had done this and lived to tell the tale that he had a chariot race with his prospective father-in-law in which he replaced the linchpins and the wheels of this father-in-law's uh chariot with wax so that they melted and he died and he then held funeral games to remember his his sort of father-in-law which became the olympics is that not the origin of the games so that's that's another story yeah and that's the one that actually the kind of kind of wins you know i say you can keep all these different ideas in your head. So it matters to identify the origins with Zeus. But yes, absolutely.

Pelops, who gives his name to the Peloponnese, where you are sitting now. Yeah. And actually, there's a link to the Lucian mysteries there as well, because the one god who eats a bit of Pelops is Donita, because she's in mourning for Persephone, who's just been abducted by the by Hades the king of the underworld and so from that point on the gods kind of bring him reconstitute him bring him back to life from that point on he has a an ivory shoulder to replace the bit that Demeter had snagged. So he's from Anatolia he crosses Aegean he comes to what will become to be called the

Peloponnese the island of Pelops and um he goes to a place called pisa which isn't the place in italy it's about a mile from where the games the where olympia will be and um absolutely yes so there's a guy called oinomaius who's the king there and he has a daughter hippodamia and a bit like kronos having been told that he will be killed by a son Onomius has been told that he will be killed by the man who marries his daughter and so he's not keen on this and so every suitor he challenges a suitor to a chariot race with the proviso that if the guy who who wins the chariot race loses, he could be killed. And so Pelops arrives and they're welcoming him to Pisa above the palace of his prospective father-in-law,

a kind of, you know, a rack of skulls, decaying heads, the flesh dripping off. A lot of us are very familiar with those kinds of scenes with our own fathers-in-law. Yes. So he obviously is twitchy, but he's got advantages because he's got winged steeds that are a gift from the gods, so that's a kind of advantage, but he wants to make absolutely sure and so he bribes his father, prospective father-in-law's charioteer, a guy called Myrtilos, to exactly, as you say, replace the spokes with the axle, the thing to keep the wheels in, with wax. And so the father dies, Pelops marries, and is a great hero.

But he has bribed Mytilus. He said, you know, I'll give you all kinds of goodies. And Mytilus comes to Pelops for his reward. And did you read what Pelops does? Does he kill him? He does. He chucks him over a cliff. That's harsh, isn't it?

That's bad form. It is harsh. It's very bad form. So Pelops, you know, he's not a nice guy. No. I'm feeling bad about being in the Peloponnese now. So Pelops reigns. It's all great.

But there is a curse that's been put on his family. And I know you just went to Mycenae, didn't you? Yes, House of Atreus. Atreus is the son of Pelops. So Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, all that stuff. All that stems from this disastrous chariot race. Well, not disastrous for Pelops, but disastrous for his successors. Exactly, yes. And so you have there the sense that – so in sport we talk about heroes. A lot of talk about heroes. A hero in Greece is something faintly menacing. It's someone who kind of has a touch of the divine,

and the divine is always dangerous. So pelops is not a pleasant guy i mean he's he's a cheat um he's really not pleasant at all and yet he has something of the night about a strain something of the strange something of the kind of demonic in the greek sense um and that sense of the strange and the weird hangs over the games that then kind of emerge. So there's a sense of the games being expiating sin, do you think? Is that too strong? I think that is too strong. I think the key is that the age of heroes has passed. So it passes with the Trojan War. But you come to Olymplympia and if you're watching the chariot races or the wrestling or whatever and you see astounding performances you are as close to the age of heroes as you possibly can be in the age of iron we all live in and and that's that's the fascination of it that it's kind of opening up a portal

to the weird so you've got you've got zeus is one of the founders pelops is the other the third one is heracles you know with his 12 labors and and the other story is that um he comes there after he's finished his labors and he institutes the games and he sacrifices a black ram before the tomb of Pelops. This is something that they do every four years of the games. They sacrifice a ram to Pelops. You are taking part in these incredibly vivid stories. They are alive and a part of what you were doing. That is absolutely fundamental to everything that the Olympics in antiquity are about.

So just to get away from the myth for a second, where did the idea of games come from? Is it something the Greeks have got from, where have they got it from? From Crete, from Egypt, from Anatolia, or do they invent it? Are there games in other places i think it's an expression of um a kind of obsession with being best so the greeks can make a contest out of anything you know you can make a contest out of well you may famously play so tragedy and comedy poetry but it's kind of beauty contests um weaving i mean there's absolutely nothing that the Greeks can't make into a contest.

I wouldn't pay to see the weaving contest. But if you're a Greek, you might. And particularly, you know, if it's kind of Athena against Arachne, you know that the loser's going to be turned into a spider. That's true. I would pay to, I'd definitely pay to see that. Yeah, so that's the measure.

There's jeopardy in everything. And it kind of reflects the way in which the Greeks, they have no concept of sport for sport's sake. So we were talking about podiuming, the idea of gold, silver, and bronze. But basically, there is no bronze or silver. You win or you lose um and and when you win you one of the perks you get is you get to commission a kind of victory hymn so it's like you know it's like i don't know getting beyonce or somebody to celebrate your victory in 100 meters something like that rihanna um and the the famous guy who does this uh ancient Greece is a guy called Pindar from Thebes.

Is he a playwright, Pindar? No, he writes these odes, these kind of victories. That's what he's chiefly known for. And so as much as he's writing in praise of the winner, he's also writing about the losers um and uh while you were sunning yourself in in um in greece yesterday i had this disastrous game of cricket where i got out for naught um that always happens to you tom isn't it you always go not always not always i'd bowl the over that lost us the game it was absolutely disaster um and i came back and was reading some pinder in preparation for this episode and i came across this about the losers where Pinder writes no

joyous homecoming for them on their return to their mothers no sweet laughter no surge of joy down dark alleyways they slink avoiding their enemies nor that by the consciousness of their defeat oh Tom my heart bleeds for you I. You've clearly been through a dark night of the soul after this cricket match. I have. I have. So there's none of this, you know, plucky British contender coming in eighth kind of thing. Right, yeah. Anyone who comes in eighth, anyone who comes in second is a loser.

And you slink back. Exactly. Some gallant Scottish long-distance runner trailing in in fifth, no good. Absolutely no good at all. Absolutely no good. So I think that it's that kind of ambition to be the best.

So there's no Corinthian spirit. The Corinthian spirit is a total British invention. There was no such thing as the Corinthian spirit in ancient Greece. No. That's a kind of... So that amateur spirit... The Greeks have no word for amateur either. That strain within the modern Olympics is...

Well, I'm sure we'll talk about that when we get onto our programme about the modern Olympics, but it comes from Shropshire, doesn't it? It's a British invention. Shropshire and the Cotswolds, two places I know very well, are basically the cradles of the modern Olympics. But we will come onto that later on. Tom, the athletes, they have no word for amateur, but the athletes that are participating are amateurs, aren't they?

They're not professionals, surely? Well, you have to train for 10 months. And for one of those months, you have to do it at Ellis. And it's true you don't get paid for your victory. But when you go back, you're guaranteed all kinds of perks and goodies and sponsorship deals and things like that. Yes, tea companies will queue up to employ you as an influencer, as is the case with podcast presenters. Exactly.

It requires time and money to do that. Yeah. So Karoibos, for instance, the butcher, he's unusual because generally butchers don't have time to have 10 months to train for a sprint. So by and large, are the contestants quite, are they rich? They tend to be very rich, yeah. You know, it's a bit like today, isn't it? Because it tends to be wealthy countries that win the most medals.

Of course, and people often say too many public school boys and all this kind of thing. Yes, exactly. So it's exactly the same. And then, of course, there's the further dimension, which is that um in the uh the hippodrome so the chariot racing and the um the riding on horseback um the person who gets the medal isn't the person who's driving the chariot or the person who's riding the horse

it's the person who owns the horses so horses are much more valuable this is something i really want to ask you about because i was looking at the list of famous winners, and I saw that, for example, Arsinoe II, Queen of Ptolemaic Egypt, had won the chariot race. And I thought, really? I thought women weren't allowed to participate in the Olympics, but clearly she had sponsored or whatever,

some other chariot racer. And of course, Philip of Macedon, his horse won on the day, supposedly, when Alexander the Great was born, But he wasn't racing it himself. So it's rather like the Queen's horse winning the Derby or whatever. Yeah, that's exactly right. And yeah, I think we should go to a break, but just quickly on the issue of women. So women are not allowed to compete and they're not even allowed to go into the sanctuary.

And married women are not allowed to go to the festival full stop. So it's very sexist. Hold on. Married women aren't, but single women are? Well, kind of, yes. So prostitutes are allowed to go, high class courtesans, unmarried virgins. Although since it's a massive kind of whore fest, by and large, unmarried virgins although since it's a massive kind of whore fest by and large unmarried virgins tend not to go there but definitely you know as a woman you're not allowed to compete but the one way that you can compete is to enter chariots and so the very first woman to win in the olympic games is a spartan and I'm sure her name would have been on that list of

Spartan victors, called Kyniska, who enters the chariot in 396, wins again four years later in the next bout of the Games. And she has this kind of wonderful inscription, which the survivor says, my father and brothers were kings of Sparta. I proclaim myself the only woman in all of Greece to have won the crown. So she's commemorated as a kind of great hero of the Olympics. But there's one other woman who plays a key role, which is a woman called Veronique, who has a, she's kind of part of this great boxing tradition. Is she a boxer? No, she's not.

But she belongs to this. She's kind of married to one. He's an Olympic champion. His grandfather, his father was, his brothers were, and his son is training to become one as well. And the son's father, so this son, he's called Pisadorus.

He's from Rhodes. he's in busy training for the for the games and his father dies and his father's been training him so he's stuck you know he's gonna have to train him and then this mysterious figure appears cloaked in a white cloak um and he assumes that it's a god who's or a hero who's come to uh to to coach him um coaching goes through you know they do their nine months training in Rhodes. They go to Olympia. They do their months training in, in Ellis.

And then the procession to, to Olympia, settle down in the village. The time comes for the, for the game. Pisadoris is, is, is he wins,

he wins the final bout. And the trainer who's kind of cloaked and hooded is so excited that he leaps over the fence and of course they you know they like scotsman they don't they don't wear pants they don't wear underwear and everyone is able to see that this mysterious figure is in fact a woman and it turns out to be ferinike whose name aptly enough means bringer of victory and this is a capital offense if you are a woman and you're found at the games you get chucked off a mountaintop yeah so so they're brought before the Olympic judges and um you know they're deciding well

what are we going to do and they decide that because she is from this great dynasty this great sporting dynasty they can't possibly chuck her off a cliff. And so they say, OK, we'll let you off. You will be the one woman who has trained an Olympic champion. Exception that proves the rule. But they institute a new rule, which is that from this point on, not only the the athletes but also the trainers have to perform in the nude oh my word that is hilarious and i you know i mean who wouldn't like to see that i think okay i mean yeah be great fun the trainers and the athletes in the nude yeah i mean imagine

imagine the sunburn. That's true, but I probably wouldn't pay to see some of those kind of, I don't know, Eastern European heavyweights. Hair sprouting in all kinds of peculiar places. Yes. Well, I think on that shocking note. No stereotype goes unused on this podcast. Right. We should take a break, shouldn't we? We should leave you with that image. We should take a break and we'll return. I think we should talk about the politics.

I think we should talk about the Olympic truce. I think we should talk about famous Olympians. We've got tons to discuss. See you in a minute. Okay. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about the ancient Olympics to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics.

So, Tom, something that absolutely fascinates me and I think has fascinated lots of people about the ancient Olympics is this sort of political dimension and particularly the idea of the Olympic truce, that it marks a kind of whether it marks a cessation of hostilities between the city states or whether you just can't take weapons into the olympics or or what so explain exactly what's going on it's more like an armistice so war carries on um the you know that's why the olympics you know they play them in 480 when the persians are invading and they they play them throughout the peloponnesian war and so on. But essentially, it means that if you're an Athenian or you're a Spartan, you can go to the Olympics and you will meet and you will compete and everyone will accept your right to be there.

And that's the kind of ideal. So it's kind of pan-Hellenic and that's the great ideal. And I think in the context of the Greek world where they are endlessly fighting each other, it is the one chance for enemies to meet up and to kind of, to that extent, feel a certain degree of kind of kinship. That question of kinship is really interesting.

So is the mark of being a Greek whether or not you can go to the Olympics? So do the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, in Sicily, in Italy and so whether or not you can go to the olympics so do the greek colonies in asia minor in sicily and italy and so on do they send people to the olympics they do absolutely absolutely yeah absolutely um yeah you have to be freeborn freeborn greek basically um and how do you prove you have to speak greek do you have to prove you have to speak greek yes and the judges decide whether you can compete or not um so that you know you'll know that there's kind of disagreement about whether the macedonians say a greek yes yeah uh but by and large yes it's it's it's for freeborn greeks um so greek speakers uh yes and absolutely i mean

some of the greatest champions come from um from sicily say and so they all meet up um they uh that you know the the trainers and the athletes will have been at ellis for a month practicing there um and then i think it's it's the kind of the first or second full moon after the summer solstice and when that comes you uh you set off from ellis it's a kind of about 35 miles to olympia um takes you two days um you uh you know the route is marked by various rituals so there's an awful lot of of sacrificing pigs at the olympics so there's bad news for it's terrible news for pigs and it's also terrible news for oxen which will come to you in due course you know but you kind of you go past sacred spring you kill a pig you you come to a place where some hero did something you kill a pig And you all arrive at the Olympic Village.

And so Olympia is not a city. So it's kind of like Glastonbury. It's a great festival. It's a great feel. They stay in tents, don't they? Do they all sleep in tents? They all sleep in tents or not at all. You sleep out in the open.

It's incredibly hot. It's incredibly dusty. There are no toilet facilities. So it's even worse than Glastonbury. But here a question about the heat so i'm in greece right now it's incredibly hot mid to late 30s they are competing in the heat of summer is that why they're naked or is the nakedness to do with the worship of the human body kind of thing well the story is is that there's there's contender and his his loincloth slips off while he's running uh and it kind of improves his performance and so everyone goes for it i mean that's the story is that there's a contender and his loincloth slips off while he's running.

And it kind of improves his performance. And so everyone goes for it. I mean, that's the story that gets told. Pausanias is rather cynical about it. It says that this contender says that it slipped off, but actually he'd realized and thrown it aside to get this competitive advantage. I mean, it's very homoerotic. I mean, there's a lot of kind of ogling and eyeing people up. And one of the things that the Olympic Games offer is that we have male and female different contenders. They divide it up between men and boys.

So the first round of games is actually the boys. The first day, they run, they wrestle, they box. When you say boys, what, teenagers? Kind of up to the age of 20. But there are no birth certificates, so it's up to the judges. So there's always the risk if you're a boy and you've entered the boxing and the judge says, actually, you're a man, and you're up against some terrifying man mountain.

I mean, run away. So it's always a kind of risk. So that's what happens on the first day. And also, the boys compete. And also, you swear an oath. You swear an oath before zeus. And you swear it over a dismembered pig. Pigs again. What do the Greeks got against pigs? And if you cheat, so this doesn't happen very often, but it happens occasionally, you will be fined and the fines will go to make a bronze of you. And your shame will then, you know, it'll be put up publicly and it'll be there forevermore. So what's his name? Is it Ben Johnson?

Ben Johnson. So it's actually Ben Johnson put up wherever it was. That's quite a deterrent actually, isn't it? It is quite a deterrent, isn't it? So there's actually Ben Johnson put up wherever it was. That's quite a deterrent, actually, isn't it? It is quite a deterrent, isn't it? It's a very good deterrent. I think they should introduce that to all tournaments. You get red carded. Yeah.

But here's a question about people who – so isn't there some suspicion that people change teams? So I was reading about a man called – I've got my piece of paper – Sies at the 99th olympics so first he competed for crete and then he competed for ephesus the next time the ephesians paid him to represent them because he was a he was a star he was an elite athlete um and then the cretans banished him forevermore because they were so cross with him yeah and there's a further risk that you might be banned because your city has committed some offence.

So this happened to Sparta in the last years of the Peloponnesian War. Sparta is the most powerful city in Greece, but the aliens banished them so that they can't take part. And so various Spartan athletes kind of smuggle themselves in as pretend to be Thebans and so on. So it's a bit like South African athletes in the 1980s 1980s like zola bud or something exactly so so there's absolutely so politics is all part of this this kind of great snarl um so um so yeah so in a way the most famous example of that again in in the backdrop to the peloponnesian war this great war between athens and sparta is

alcibiades who is um the kind of the golden boy of Athens, who plays a key role. He actually switches from Athens to Sparta at one point, then switches back to Athens. But at his kind of peak, as he's preparing the Athenian invasion of Sicily, to kind of signal the power of Athens, he goes to Olympia and he enters, I think it's nine chariots in the chariot race and he takes cheating surely he takes the top three spots yeah well i mean it kind of is cheating but you know and and there are lots of people who do think this is too much but equally there are lots of people who are wowed by it and it's remembered and it's something that uh kind of you

know lives on so um the the chariot the chariot race is the first kind of adult race right and that's obviously because that's going back to the the race that pelops has done so it's kind of and that's a big highlight isn't it the cherry absolutely massive highlight and then you have the horse race um and again pelops has these horses uh and if you go to if you go to olympia you go to the museum they the horses of pelops are kind of i mean some of the most beautiful terrifying sculptures you could ever see they're breathtakingly and they kind of evoke the the power and the strangeness and the glamour and the terror of the games i think better than almost anything else that i can think of that

survived from antiquity they're incredibly powerful um yeah and and i think the greeks felt that as well so there was particularly with the chariots they were so dangerous there was there was that you know when you turn the risk is always that you're going to kind of your chariot's going to splinter and then you're going to die and it said that there was a ghost that haunted that turning point um and nobody was quite sure who it was but maybe it was oinomaus or myrtilos or you know one of these guys in the myth but but this idea that there is a kind of curse a ghost haunting it I mean it's kind of adds jeopardy to it okay yeah so you have the equestrian events in the morning of the

day to then you have the pentathlon which again it's kind of it is absolutely the kind of the Greek ideal really that you you're proficient at all these various skills. Because if you're a runner, you want to be slim. If you're taking part in the brawnier feats, then you want to be bulky. But the pantathlete is kind of the midpoint, the ideal of physicality. Yeah, the Daley Thompson.

Yes, absolutely. And then day two comes to an ending you have a massive piss up and that's where so alcibiades has brought all the kind of the gold um fittings from athens and he passes it off as his own um and vegetarians are catered for so uh yeah so empedocles who's who's a vegetarian he goes to the olympics and he he um uh he provides this kind of massive ox that's been baked in an oven made of dough and garnished with herbs and spices and things. That's very impressive. Yeah, so that's nice to know, isn't it? And then obviously everyone is absolutely slaughtered.

So they wake up. It's boiling hot. You can't possibly compete. Yeah, can you imagine? I mean, they're sleeping in the tents with these colossal hangovers the sun pounding down and so you know what you do need to see if you got if you wake up it's incredibly hot and you've got a pounding hangover i'd go swimming personally what do they do they slaughter 100 oxen in honor of zeus oh i'm a bit of a lightweight by comparison and it's it's kind of, we know it's disgusting because –

Just think of the flies and the stench of blood and all that. Okay. So you make sacrifice to Zeus apomweos, which means Zeus who keeps flies away. Oh, right. I don't believe that. I'm sceptical about whether that would work. Apparently it did. So around the altar, apparently there were no flies. You may well express sceptical about whether that would work. Apparently it did.

So around the altar, apparently there were no flies. You may well express scepticism. But the altar, do you know what the altar was made of? Dead pigs? It's made of the ashes of the slaughtered oxen mixed with water into a paste. So it's a great lump of... This just sounds the most terrible occasion imaginable. Well, everyone says it's a terrible occasion,

too many crowds, too many flies, it's too hot, it's too disgusting, but everyone says it's amazing. So that's what makes it last a week, because that's what people say. It's kind of... But yes, this altar is used sorts of uses made up of the ashes of dead oxen if you said to me is it not the kind of thing i can imagine somebody like elon musk doing they're not they're all gonna be naked they're gonna be naked and pounding midsummer

heat there's gonna be like flies everywhere dead oxen yeah it's great i see so you see it's nothing really like the corporate the corporate schmooze fest that is the model i don't see the ioc introduce some of these uh some of these proper traditions so that's so you do and you do that at the temple of zeus you know with its great statue by phidias who also does the uh the the parthenon um And then you have day four, and this is the running. So you've got the middle distance run, you've got the sprint, you've got the long sprint. And then in the afternoon, you've got the real crowd pleasers, which is the wrestling and the boxing.

And actually, you asked about getting burnt in the sun. So the wrestlers, I mean, they oil themselves, and then they cover themselves in dust. They're frying, surely, in the sun. So the wrestlers, I mean, they oil themselves and then they cover themselves in dust. They're frying, surely, in the sun, aren't they? I mean, does the dust protect you? I mean, all the oil. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I guess so.

But, I mean, you can look very odd. You look like, what's his name in Poclips now, kind of rising up out of the mud. Oh, Martin Sheen. Martin Sheen, I mean, kind of terrifying. But he had a heart attack while he was filming that. I mean, you wouldn't want that to out of the mud. Oh, Martin Sheen. Martin Sheen, I mean, kind of terrifying. But he had a heart attack while he was filming that. I mean, you wouldn't want that to happen at the Olympics. There you go.

There you go. And the boxing and the Pankration. Yes. Which is obviously an event that we don't have. The boxing, these are terrifyingly violent. So somebody won the Pankration when they were dead, I read. What's his name? His name is Arikion. Arikion from

Arcadia. He was choking his opponent or being choked and he broke his opponent's... Yeah, he was getting throttled in a scissor grip. But while being throttled, he broke his opponent's toe or something. His opponent said, I yield. I yield or whatever. And at that point he died. And everyone said, hur yield. I yield or whatever. At that point, he died.

And everyone said, hurrah, Rikian has won. The fact that he's dead is... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're really not selling... Great stuff. Great stuff. And in many ways, the Pankration is even more terrifying

because on that, you can literally do anything except gouge out your opponent's eye or bite bite him so mike tyson would be disqualified but anything you can grab his testicles that's what i was going to say absolutely you could do all that but not biting yeah i think they've got their priorities wrong i think wouldn't that be great spectacle i mean you're not naked yourself you're not naked yourself as a spectator, are you? No. You're hungover and sunburned. I'm thinking for TV.

Covered in flies, but you're not naked. And you're watching men twisting each other's testicles. Well, hopefully you're watching. I mean, the crowds are massive. The stadiums are too small to cope. So you're standing behind other people watching men twisting their testicles you have to get there very early to get vantage point and then of course you've got the question of

what do you do if you need a pee you get there really early, the sun you just wet yourself and then the final event is you running in armour so you dress up in armour and run well that's ludicrous because of course in the greek weather 38 degrees centigrade or whatever but that's where the spartans come into their own

right that's so they they often win that do they yeah i guess so yeah i guess so um and then uh everyone goes that's it and the winners on the fifth day they all go to statue of zeus and they're given their um their olive crowns so yeah tom that sounds awful and you have comprehensively shattered any romantic um faith i had in the ancient olympics so one quick question before we get on to some great olympians um it continues after greece has been absorbed into the roman empire but non-greeks are taking part that's right right, isn't it? So Roman emperors and other Romans. Now, is that general or is it just big names, kind of VIPs? It's basically Nero.

But didn't Tiberius take part? Yes, he takes part in the Questrian event. But by and large, it remains focused on Greece. So it goes into decline in the early Roman period uh Sulla who's the uh this kind of terrifying general who marches on Rome and and kind of um at the beginning of the first century BC um and he is he plunders Olympia uh and uses it to kind of fund his fund his army in a civil war yeah but then Augustus is very keen on it. Julia Cronin is very keen on it.

Nero is massively keen on it. Hadrian, who is hugely into everything Greek, he's very keen on it. And it's very successful through the second century. Third century, you get these Rome Empire kind of implodes into civil war, barbarians sweep across, goes into decline. And basically by the fourth century's it's on its last legs

and it it kind of i think the last the last recorded mention of the games is i think three nine four something like that yeah um theodosius the great isn't it it doesn't theodosius ban it basically i'm not sure he bans it i i think it i mean that's that's i think i think basically there's no market for it because everybody has become christian so nobody's going for yeah so that that sort of reinforces that point about it being religious rather than sporting or sporting being religious that they see it as a pagan festival you know the the flies and the the nudity aren't enough to to compensate for the pagan religious connotations. Well, Paul, you know, when he writes to the Corinthians, makes reference to the

Ismian games. So he says that, you know, as Christians, we are competing for a higher crown. Right. Yeah. So his dissing of the games is there in the new testament um i mean basically yes if you're not worshipping zeus then um what's the point and the great statue of zeus has been carted off to constantinople um you know it's been taken there not as not as a kind of religious icon but as a kind of you know cultural symbol um so there's just no there's just no call for them and so um tell me about some olymp you've got some have you got some good olympians up your sleeve or some olympic facts or something to yeah so the the ones the ones who um who tend to live on are boxers and wrestlers i think because they

kind of evoke uh spirit of Heracles. So there's actually, there's one who is said to be the son of Heracles, a guy called Theagones who comes from the island of Thassos in the north of the Aegean. And he's interesting in the context of the episodes that went out last week about statues. Yeah. Because as a young boy, he was very keen on he'd pick

up statues and carry them around just because he was so strong he was kind of seven he just pick up a statue get told off and have to take it back um and when he when he died he's a kind of great hero and they make a statue of him put it up in the um in the uh the marketplace in Thassos. And this is awful for another Thassian who had gone to the Olympics and had failed. And so this guy goes and kind of pisses and writes graffiti on the statue and generally insults it. And the statue gets really cross about this and kind of warns this guy off, says, you know, watch it. And this guy carries on, carries on.

So eventually the statue keels over and crushes him to death. Wow. That's an omen for and crushes him to death. Wow. That's an omen for today's statue of Obes. Yes, I mean, there's warning there. And the sons of the guy who's been crushed to death are so cross about this that they abduct the statue and dump it in the sea. And then everything goes wrong for Thassos. Just terrible. Everything goes wrong.

So they send an emissary to Delphi. And Delphi says, you have great the agonies unremembered. You have cancelled the agonies. Wow. I wish I'd known this before we did our statue walk, Tom. This is great stuff. So they have to uncancel him. So a bit like getting Colston out of the bay. They have to go to where he's been dumped and dredge him up and put him back up on his up on his pedestal so to rename all these william gladstone halls of residence that have been exactly yes so so there's a there's a kind of um he's famous but i think that the great hero the really famous one is a guy called milo who comes from croton which is in sicily so one of those colonies that you were talking about. He's a wrestler. He wins five in a row. You know, I mean, that's kind of unheard of.

And he is, he's so strong that he can tie a cord around his head and then just kind of flex and it just bursts the cord. I reckon I can do that. So that's his party trick. I reckon I can do that. I mean, I'm not going to do it live for the rest of history listeners to watch, but I'm going to try later tonight. You can do it now.

I could describe it if you want to do it now. I have no cord to hand. Oh, what a shame. What a shame. But also, he had a diet for heroes. So do you know his elite sports diet? Probably pork, judging by the content of this podcast. Well, 20 pounds of meat a day.

20 pounds? 20 pounds of bread a day. Two gallons of wine. Wow. But he had a very entertaining sports death. So he was out and he saw a kind of tree that had been split to dry it out and there were kind of pegs holding the two halves apart and he thought just funny take the pegs out and put his hand in and he put he put his hand in and the two halves of the tree kind of slapped around it and

he couldn't pull his hand out okay so he was stuck with this tree and he got eaten by a pack of wolves wow that is that's no way to go is it no so all his strength availed him naught it could availed him naught it availed him and so and so it kind of horrible deaths is is another way in which these olympic figures are kind of heroic you know they are heroes in the Greek sense rather than in the kind of, you know, Marcus Rashford sense. So there is there's another one, Polydamus, who was a great kind of winner in the Pankration, who killed lions with his bare hands, who he would capture bulls and pull off their hooves. That's just bad behavior and um and he um they he was with some friends in a cave there was an earthquake uh he held the cave up while they all got out and they got crushed to death so that's him that's a proper hero isn't it yeah that is that's actually quite heroic but the most the most sinister one and the one who is literally proclaimed a hero by the delphic oracle um is a guy called cleomedes and again he's another he's another of these guy who kills his opponent in the in the games

and he gets disqualified by this for the judges because killing your opponent is seen as being too much yeah um he he goes mad with this disqualification he goes back to um uh his home island and do you know what he does there um he i don't he pulls down a school and there are 60 boys in it and they all get killed oh my god and so the parents are understandably cross about this. And they chase him through the streets. Because he's Olympian, he can run very fast. So he gets up to a temple of Athena, locks himself in the temple. And they're all banging away. And he hides in a chest.

And they burst in. And they smash open the chest. And he's vanished. He's gone. He has. Yeah, that's quite a party trick so they they they obviously they send a messenger to delphi to try and find out what's what's happened um and the delphic oracle says he is the last hero offer him sacrifice he is no longer mortal and i think that that that in a way is the kind of paradigmatic account of – he's the paradigmatic Olympic hero because he literally becomes a god.

And there's that incredible element of darkness to it that I think is a constant part of these games. That's an extraordinary story because it's such a terrible story. It is a terrible story. So he's in no way punished for his killing of all these kids in this school. That's just seen as an absolutely reasonable way of reacting to your – as no it's not seen as reasonable it's seen as terrible but heracles for instance i mean he kills his own children he's driven mad by the gods and that sense that that men of phenomenal strength are prone to go mad and do terrible things that's part of what the olympic

games are all about and the people who are remembered are often remembered for feats of kind of hideous violence it's interesting isn't it because our image of the greeks and the olympics certainly our image of the ancient olympics our image of ancient greece is this sort of pristine marble heroic sporting spirit heroic using in the sort of modern sense this sort of almost this lost golden age of you know milk and honey or whatever. And clearly the whole, the Greek world is so much darker and more sinister than we commonly think. And when we use it as a stick to beat ourselves and to beat the modern Olympics,

commercialized and tawdry and sold out and all the rest of it, I mean, in some ways the modern Olympics are much more cuddly and sort of… Well, they're more antiseptic yeah i think and that but they they lack that they lack soul i guess is what i would say yes i think the the ancient games are are dark and terrible and that's why they last as long as they do i mean they you, they last over a thousand years. Far longer, yeah, of course. Inmeasurably longer than the modern Olympics. And they do that because they're holding a mirror up to something very, Greece that seems to us modern, that seems familiar, it isn't.

So democracy would be another example. You know, the Athenian understanding of democracy is immeasurably alien to us. And the fact that we have the same, you know, the same word can apply to the system that the Athenians had in the system that we have disguises the way that it's it's measurably different and the same is absolutely true of the olympics so the so the the project of revitalizing the olympics was an absolute pipe dream they were never going to manage to do that so that's been a fascinating um glimpse into actually a much darker world and frankly more off-putting world than i anticipated. So I think now that we've, you know, got into the sordid underbelly of the ancient Olympics, we should do the same with the modern Olympics in our next podcast and we should do things like, you know, the Munich Olympics,

the disaster in Montreal, Moscow and LA and so on. The origins of the Olympics, of course. Hitler's Olympics. Exactly. We're going to do all that. So there'll be tons to discuss then. And it won't be quite so sacral. And fewer flies.

There'll be fewer flies and it won't be sacral. So you'll be safe. Yes. Great. So we will see you all next time, I guess. Tom. See you soon. If I do still. Yes, us.

Yep. See you, Dominic. See you back. Have a safe flight back. And I hope you don't get put into a hotel for 10 days at Heathrow. Thank you. That's more of a threat than a hope, I think, from you. You're going to be straight onto the border force.

See you, sir, man. All right. Okay. Bye-bye, everyone. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening