Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals

by E. Norman Gardiner

Fig. 5. Plan of Olympia.

Olympia lies about ten miles from the sea on the northern bank of the Alpheus, at the point where its valley spreads out into a wide and fertile plain. In an angle formed by this river with its tributary the Cladeus, which rushes down from the mountains of Elis between steep banks formerly shaded with plane-trees, at the foot of the pine-clad hill of Cronus, stood the grove of wild olive-trees, brought there according to tradition by Heracles from the land of the Hyperboreans, the sacred grove from which the Altis took its name. The slopes of the neighbouring hills were covered with a variety of trees, and in the rich undergrowth of flowering shrubs the wild boar, deer, and other game found cover. It was to Scillus, only a few miles distant, that the veteran Xenophon retired to spend his old age in literature and sport. In old days the vegetation was far more luxuriant than now; besides the olive groves, the white poplars, from which alone the wood for the sacrifice to Zeus and Pelops might be cut, and even the palm-tree flourished there. The rich well-watered plain was covered with vines and crops, while its meadows afforded abundant pasturage for horses and for cattle.[^[44]]

To the modern traveller Olympia seems too much out of the way to be the scene of a great national gathering; even to the Greek of the fifth century it must have seemed to stand outside the busy centres of Greek life, and perhaps it was this very remoteness, combined with its ancient sanctity, that saved Olympia, like Delphi, from being the battle-ground between the rival states of Greece. But it had not been so always. The flat, rich, alluvial plains of the western Peloponnese had not formerly lagged behind the rest of Greece. The long, almost unbroken curves of sandy shore offered little harbourage for the triremes of a later day. But the earlier mariner or trader from the East who coasted around Greece had no love for deep land-locked harbours; all he wanted was a sandy shore where he could beach his ships sheltered by some convenient headland as at Triphylian Pylos, or at the open mouth of some river like the Alpheus. Hence there is no reason to doubt the traditions that connect Cretans and Phoenicians with Olympia.[^[45]] The coastline has advanced considerably since those days, and the small boats of these ancient mariners could advance up the river with perfect safety through the flat open plain as far as Olympia. This accessibility of Olympia by sea had yet more important consequences at a later age when the festival attracted men from the great colonies of Italy and Sicily. Olympia may even have been associated with the founding of these colonies; for the coast road round Elis and the shores of the gulf of Corinth connected it with Sicyon, Corinth, and Megara. May we not suppose that, as the colonists sailed down the gulf of Corinth, many of them would turn aside before they bade farewell to their native shores to visit the venerable grove of Olympia and consult its ancient oracle?

Again, Olympia stood full in the way of the Achaean tribes as they pressed southwards from their first settlement at Dodona. In speaking of the Achaeans we are using the word provisionally for convenience’ sake to denote the pre-Dorian Greeks of the Peloponnese as opposed to the original inhabitants and the later Dorians. In the Odyssey they have spread over the islands, over Pleuron by the sea and rocky Calydon, over Elis and Messenia. So close was the connexion between the islands and Elis, then the land of the Epeans, that the princes of Ithaca used its broad plains for breeding cattle and horses. The narrow straits offered no obstacle to this adventurous people, and for centuries before the passage of Oxylus, the one-eyed Aetolian from Naupactus, the Achaeans and others had been crossing over in larger or smaller companies till they had spread over the whole Peloponnese. Hence for the Achaeans in the Peloponnese Olympia stood in the same position as Dodona in northern Greece. The Dorians, indeed, seem to have failed in their attempt to follow in the same course; but legend connected with the return of the Heracleidae the invasion of their Aetolian allies under Oxylus, who dispossessed the Epean lords of Elis. The quarrel between these newcomers and the earlier settlers for the possession of Olympia lasted for centuries, but through all the changes of population, though many fresh cults were added by the invaders, the superstition with which all newcomers in those days regarded the gods and sanctuaries of the earlier inhabitants preserved the old cults inviolate, so that in the buildings and altars of Olympia, and the ritual of its festival, all the various strata of its history are plainly visible.

Lastly, though remote from the struggles of later history, no place in the Peloponnese was more accessible to other parts. Besides the coast-route that connected it with Messenia and the gulf of Corinth, the valleys of the Alpheus and its tributaries afforded a natural means of communication with all parts of the interior, and it was to the athletic character of the inhabitants of the Peloponnese that the athletic fame of the festival in the first place was due. Without this native talent it could never have attracted competitions from northern Greece or from the colonies of the West, nor could it ever have acquired its peculiar sanctity but for the position it had held in the earlier migrations.

It is unnecessary here to discuss the various myths which Greek imagination wove about the beginnings of Olympia, and the perplexing problems which they raise. Two propositions may be regarded as fairly established. In the first place, Olympia was a holy place before the Achaeans came to the Peloponnese. In the second place, the beginning of the games was earlier than the Dorian invasion, but later probably than the coming of the Achaeans.

The antiquity of Olympia is proved by the presence there of those elements of primitive religion which preceded the worship of the Olympian deities. The altar of Cronus on the hill top which bore his name recalled a sovereignty earlier than that of Zeus. An ancient oracle of earth preceded the oracle of Zeus. Of the worship of the powers of the underworld there is abundant evidence at Olympia, as in the rest of the Peloponnese; the priestess of Demeter Chamyne, for example, was exempted from the rule that excluded women from Olympia, and had her place of honour in the stadium opposite the seats of the Hellanodicae. In Hera, whose worship at Olympia was earlier than that of Zeus, we may probably recognize a Hellenized form of the great Mother Goddess of the Aegean world. Lastly, that Pelops claimed precedence of Zeus is clear from the fact that the athletes sacrificed to Pelops first and then to Zeus. At his tomb within the Altis, originally a barrow, only afterwards enclosed in a shrine, he was worshipped with all the ceremonial due to the dead, and every year the youths of the Peloponnese lashed themselves upon his grave till the blood ran down.[^[46]] Yet it does not follow that the cult of Pelops was pre-Achaean. We cannot clearly draw the line between what belonged to the Achaeans and what to the original inhabitants. There was no violent breach, but rather a gradual fusion of the races, in the course of which the Achaeans made their own much of the earlier civilization. Certainly the cult of heroes continued all through Greek history; in later days even noted athletes were canonized.

The ancient writings of the Eleans, according to Pausanias, ascribed the institution of the games to the Idaean Heracles, one of the Cretan Curetes to whom the infant Zeus was entrusted. But to Pindar and Bacchylides the games are associated with the tomb of Pelops. Pelops, as the story goes, came to Olympia as a suitor for the hand of Hippodameia, whose father Oenomaus challenged all her suitors to a chariot-race, and slew with his spear all whom he defeated. Thirteen suitors had been slain when Pelops came and, by the aid of Myrtilus, the charioteer of Oenomaus, who removed the lynch-pins from his master’s chariot wheels, slew him and won his bride and kingdom. This story, afterwards represented on the chest of Cypselus and on the pediments of the temple of Zeus, was commemorated by the earliest monuments of the Altis. Besides the tomb of Pelops himself, there was an ancient wooden pillar said to be the only remnant of the house of Oenomaus, which was struck by lightning,[^[47]] and also the Hippodamium, apparently a funeral mound, surrounded afterwards by a wall, where the women of Elis every year offered sacrifice.

It was at the ancient tomb of Pelops, Pindar tells us, that Heracles the son of Zeus, returning from his victory over Augeas, founded the Olympian games. There “he measured a sacred grove for the Father, and having fenced round the Altis marked the bounds thereof. There he set apart the choicest of the spoil for an offering from the war and sacrificed and ordained the fifth year feast.” “In the foot-race down the straight course was Likymnius’ son Oeonus first, from Nidea had he led his host; in the wrestling was Tegea glorified by Echemus; Doryclus won the prize of boxing, a dweller in the city of Tiryns, and with the four-horse chariot Samos of Mantinea, Halirrhothius’ son; with the javelin Phrastor hit the mark; in distance Eniceus beyond all others hurled the stone with a circling sweep, and all the warrior company thundered a great applause.”[^[48]]