CHAPTER III
THE OLYMPIC GAMES
The Greeks were bound together by their language, by their religion, and also by their great national games. The origin of these games is still somewhat in doubt. They probably began as some kind of religious ceremony in connection with burials, such as the Funeral Games described by Homer that were held in honour of Patroclus. But whatever may have been their origin, they were firmly established in the earliest times of historic Greece.
Greece was never free for long at a time from warfare. The very fact that the country was divided into so many small and independent states bred jealousies and hatreds, and state was often at war with state. This made it necessary that every Greek citizen should be ready at any moment to take up arms in defence of his home, and so he had to be physically always in good condition. This was brought about by regular athletic training which was an important part of the education of every Greek. It was considered just as bad to have an ill-trained body as it was to have an ill-trained mind, and one reason why the Greeks so despised the barbarians, as they called all those who were not of Greek race, was because the barbarian did not train his body to the same extent, and because he loved so much luxury.
All Greeks, then, received athletic training, and this training aimed at developing a beautiful body, for it was believed that to run gracefully was as important as to run swiftly, but though the Greeks loved contests and competition and strove hard for the victory, because they cared so much for grace of movement they did not lay much stress on record-breaking, and so they kept no records of exceptional athletic feats, which prevents us from knowing details of some of their great athletic achievements.
Games were held in nearly every Greek city and were a source of great pride to the citizens. The more important festivals were those held in honour of Poseidon at Corinth and called the Isthmian Games, those at Delphi which commemorated the slaying of the Python by Apollo and called Pythian Games, and the greatest of all, held every four years at Olympia in honour of Zeus, and known as the Olympic Games. These games were the oldest in Greece and they were at all periods the most important. The first were held, if tradition tells truly, before Greece had begun her history, and the last long centuries after she had ceased to be a free state. The first games in historic times were held in 776 B.C. and the interval between each festival was called an Olympiad. These Olympiads constituted the Greek calendar, which took 776 B.C. as its starting point.
This great festival at Olympia was held in August or September and lasted five days. It was a national affair and Greeks from all over the Greek world went to Olympia to take part in it. For a whole month a truce was proclaimed throughout Greece, all warfare had to stop, and all ordinary business and pleasure gave way to the greater business of going to Olympia. The games were usually held from the eleventh to the sixteenth day of this month of truce, the days before and after being given up to the journey to and from Olympia. All roads were declared safe for these days, and great was the punishment meted out to any who dared molest the pilgrims to Olympia, for they were going to pay honour to Zeus and were considered as specially under his protection. Visitors thronged every road and they came from every direction. They came from all the Peloponnesian states, from Corinth, Athens and Thebes. They came from the far-off Greek colonies, some from the shores of the Black Sea, looking almost like the nomads with whom they came so much in contact; some from Ionia, men clad in rich robes and of luxurious habits learnt from their Oriental neighbours; others from the western colonies, from Italy and Southern Gaul; and yet others, dark and warm-blooded men, from distant Africa. Yet all were Greeks, bound together in spite of their differences by the common ties of blood and religion. Some were rich, and were accompanied by slaves who brought everything necessary for their comfort, others were poor, who tramped the roads footsore and weary, but sustained by the thought of the joys of the festival when they reached their goal.
The gathering together of so many visitors brought all kinds of people to Olympia: merchants with rich and rare goods for sale, for a regular fair was carried on during the festival, makers of small statues hoping for orders to be placed in the temples, poets who wanted to recite their poems, musicians ready to play on their lyres to any who would listen, gymnastic trainers from all over Greece who hoped to learn some new method that would improve their own teaching, people of all and every kind. Only there were no women. The games were considered too public a festival for it to be fitting for women to be present, and the journey was too long and difficult for them to undertake it. The women who lived near Olympia had a festival of their own, when they, too, raced and were awarded prizes, but it was at a different time from the great national festival.
There was no city at Olympia and but few buildings beyond the temples, so when the throng of visitors arrived, the first thing they did was to provide sleeping quarters for themselves. Certain people were allowed to sleep in some of the porticoes of the buildings connected with the temples, others had brought tents and a regular camp arose. Booths of all kinds were erected in which the merchants displayed their wares; friends and acquaintances from different parts of Greece met and talked over all that had happened to them since they last met. Many announcements, too, were made by heralds at this time; the terms of treaties between different Greek states were recited in public, for in those days of difficult communication between states, such a gathering as that at Olympia ensured that news made public then would be widely spread amongst the different states.
Then there were visits to be made to the great temple of Zeus and sacrifices to be offered. From the middle of the fifth century B.C. onwards every visitor to Olympia went reverently into the temple to gaze at the great statue of Zeus.[[1]] This statue was said to be so marvellously wrought that "those who enter the temple there no longer think that they are beholding the ivory of India and gold from Thrace, but the very deity translated to earth by Pheidias," and it was said that to have made such a life-like image of the god, either Zeus must have come down from heaven and shown himself in a vision to Pheidias, or Pheidias must have gone up to heaven and beheld him there.