With the Empire a new era opened for Greece. As the conquests of Alexander had spread Hellenism throughout the East, so the Roman Empire gradually hellenized the whole civilized world. Though Greece was incorporated in the Roman Empire, cities like Athens and Sparta preserved the outward forms of independence; the bodies which controlled her ancient festivals continued to exercise their hereditary functions, and were treated as a rule with all honour and respect. In the sphere of literature and art Greece had long been recognized as the mistress and teacher of her conqueror. Hence the feeling of subjection disappeared, and so complete was the fusion between conquered and conqueror that in the second century, while the ancient families of Elis or of Sparta bore the names of their Roman patrons, such as the Julii, or the Flavii, and were enrolled in Roman tribes, the Greek language had become the language of communication throughout all the Eastern half of the Empire, and at Rome herself was supplanting Latin as the language of literature. These results were largely due to the Philhellenism of the emperors, and nowhere is this Philhellenism more conspicuous than in connection with athletic festivals. The old festivals were celebrated with increased splendour and ceremony, new festivals were introduced in close imitation of them, sumptuous race-courses and gymnasia were provided not merely in Greece but in Italy and in Rome herself, athletic guilds were formed; and though the athletic revival was purely professional and had little effect on the people, whether of Greece or Rome, the privileges and rewards showered on the successful athletes were certainly no less substantial if less honourable than those bestowed on the victors of the fifth century B.C.
The Julii claimed admission to the festivals of Greece as the descendants and heirs of the gods who presided over those festivals. At Olympia their claim was recognized by the re-dedication to their service of the little temple of the Mother of the Gods, in which were placed the statues of Augustus and his successors. Under their patronage the festival recovered much of its ancient glory. The horse-races, which had been discontinued, were revived shortly before our era, when members of the imperial family, emulating the triumphs of the princes of Sicily and Macedon, entered as competitors for the Olympic crown. Inscriptions record the victory of the youthful Tiberius in the chariot-race, and a few years later of Germanicus Caesar in the same event. The building of the arched entrance into the stadium and other improvements possibly belong to the reign of Augustus. The remarkable continuity of Olympic administration is shown by a series of inscriptions recording the names of the various officials connected with the sanctuary.[[240]] These lists begin in 30 B.C. and continue down to A.D. 265. They include every variety of official, from the seers and heralds of the sacred truce down to the cook and baker who provided the sacrificial feasts, and perhaps catered for the higher officials and for distinguished visitors. One important officer bore the title of official guide or exegetes; his duty doubtless was to explain to the crowds of visitors the historical monuments of the Altis. In the second century, owing to the increasing numbers of visitors a second guide was appointed. It was from these guides that Pausanias derived much of the information contained in his books on Elis. The higher offices seem to have formed a regular scale of honours, a cursus honorum, hereditary in the families of the Elean nobility, most of whom bear Roman names. It is curious to find one bearing the name of Flavius Heracleitus, who had the charge of the statue of Zeus, calling himself a descendant of Pheidias. The activity of the administration is shown by the revival of the practice of dedicating honorary statues of athletes and others: perhaps it is to this revival that we may ascribe the rule recorded by Pliny that portrait statues were only allowed in the case of athletes who had won three Olympic victories.[[241]] It is in the inscriptions of these honorary statues that after a long interval we find mention of the council who seem to have held supreme authority over the sanctuary and whose sanction was necessary for the erection of statues in the Altis.[[242]] The revival of ancient forms of administration is characteristic of Roman conservatism and love of order.
The Philhellenism of the Caesars and their Roman love of archaism are particularly manifest in the numerous festivals founded by them in various parts of the Empire. Of most of these we know little besides the names which are mentioned in inscriptions and on coins; a few deserve special notice and may be taken as typical of the rest. Augustus celebrated his victory at Actium, not only by holding Actian games at Rome but by instituting at the newly founded Nicopolis an Actian festival intended to rival or even surpass Olympia. A local festival had long been held at Actium every two years. The new festival which, besides athletic, musical, and equestrian competitions, included a regatta, was, like the Olympic festival, held every four years. The victors received crowns and bore the title Actianicae, and the Actiads were intended to form the basis of a new chronology which was to supplant that of the Olympiads. We feel in all this something of that spirit of conscious rivalry between Rome and Greece which made the Roman poet herald the Aeneid as a work greater than the Iliad. But though in imperial inscriptions the Actia rank with, or even take precedence of the Panhellenic festivals, the new games were destined never to acquire the prestige of the old.
The same spirit of conscious rivalry appears again in the proud title “ἰσολύμπια” applied to the Augustalia at Naples. These games, founded in 1 B.C., were reorganized in A.D. 2 as a quinquennial festival with the magniloquent name “Italica Romaia Sebasta Isolympia.” The new era which began with them was reckoned by “Italids.” The terms ἰσολύμπια and ἰσοπύθια referred originally to the conditions of competition and particularly to the age of competitors. Thus the expressions Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian boys, denote boys within the age-limit for the boys’ events at these respective festivals. Under the Empire the terms have often merely an honorary significance, and such apparently is the use of the word here. A long, unfortunately much mutilated, inscription[[243]] found at Olympia contains regulations for this festival, for the age of competitors, the date of entry, provision for them during the time of training, and the penalties imposed for any breach of these rules. The festival fell into two parts, the first part of which, like the old Olympia, consisted only of equestrian and athletic events. The prize, as at Olympia, was a wreath. The second part, as we learn from another inscription, resembled the Pythian and Nemean festivals in its regulations with regard to ages and prizes. It contained, besides athletic and equestrian events, musical and dramatic competitions, and some of the competitions were confined to citizens of Naples. The prizes consisted in sums of money.
Somewhat similar was the character of the Olympic and Pythian festivals which we find in Rome, Athens, Ephesus, and a number of other places. The right to bestow these titles must originally have rested with the authorities at Olympia and Delphi, but seems later to have been exercised by the emperors.[[244]] Each new festival founded was the beginning of a new series of Olympiads. At Rome the great Capitolia, founded by Domitian in A.D. 86, bore the title Olympia, and Flavius Archibius, an Olympic victor in Ols. 220, 221, is also described as victor at Rome in the 3rd and following Olympiads. The judges at these festivals were sometimes called Hellanodicae,[[245]] and doubtless many other features of the original festivals were reproduced. Perhaps the most interesting of all these games are those held at Daphne near Antioch. Founded originally by Antiochus Epiphanes, they obtained from the Eleans the title of Olympia in A.D. 44. Their interest lies in the fact that the model of Olympia was followed in every particular, not only in the programme and administration, but in the relations existing between Daphne and Antioch, which corresponded entirely to these between Olympia and Elis. In the fourth century a fierce dispute arose between a popular party, which wished to transfer the important part of the festival from Daphne to Antioch, and the conservative party headed by Libanius, who characterized the proposed change as sacrilege and a violation of the true Olympia. We have frequent references to the festival in the writings of St. Chrysostom, for a long time presbyter at Antioch; and it continued to be celebrated as late as the reign of Justinus in the sixth century.[[246]]
Imperial patronage was not at all times an unmixed blessing for the Greeks. Caligula would have carried off to Rome the statue of Olympian Zeus had he not been prevented by the miraculous protest of the statue itself. Nero actually carried off to Rome thousands of works of art, and in his jealousy caused the statues of victors at the games to be pulled down and thrown into the sewers. Despite his pretended flattery of the Greeks and desire to win their approbation for his art, he had so little respect for religion that he caused the times of the festivals to be altered so that they might all be celebrated during his visit to Greece.[[247]] At Olympia contests in tragedy and singing were introduced into the programme at his behest; a house was built for his entertainment at the south-east corner of the Altis, and almost opposite it a magnificent processional entrance was constructed, the Altis wall being at the same time extended southward so as to include the triangular strip between the old wall and the northern line of the council house. The story of his performances at the games is a piteous proof of the degradation of the festivals and of the servility of the Greeks. At Olympia he won crowns in the chariot-races, in the competitions for singing and for tragedy, and in the heralds’ competition. For the latter he entered wherever he competed in order to have the privilege of proclaiming his victories with his own voice. In the hippodrome he appeared in a chariot drawn by ten horses; thrown from his chariot, he was picked up and replaced, resumed the race, and was finally awarded the prize by the obsequious officials. Though he was said to be fond of wrestling, he had sufficient respect for Roman prejudice to abstain from exhibiting his skill in the stadium, and contented himself with playing the part of a brabeutes, sitting on the ground during the rounds, and with his own hands pulling the combatants back if they got too far away. The servile Hellanodicae were rewarded with Roman citizenship and with large sums of money, which they had to disgorge in the reign of his successor. Finally, at the end of his tour, he proclaimed himself at the Isthmian games as the restorer of the liberty of Greece. Returning to Italy with 1808 crowns which he had won, he was welcomed at Naples with all the most extravagant honours which were ever recorded to have been paid to an Olympia victor. A breach was made in the city wall through which he entered in a chariot drawn by white horses. The same farce was repeated at Antium and Albanum. He entered Rome in the chariot in which Augustus had triumphed, clothed in purple, with the Olympic crown upon his head, and holding the Pythian crown in his right hand, while before him marched a procession of courtiers carrying the crowns which he had won, and proclaiming to the populace the names and details of his triumphs. No wonder that such as remained of the old Roman stock regarded the competitions of the Greeks with amused contempt, that Seneca and other writers of the first century were unanimous in their condemnation of Greek athletics, and that the Olympic competitor became the butt of the epigrammatist. That Olympia survived even this degradation is perhaps the strongest proof of its vitality.
While the emperors were introducing Greek festivals into Italy, the influence of Rome was degrading and brutalizing the public taste of Greece. Gladiatorial shows had been introduced into the East nearly two centuries before Christ. They had long been popular with the cosmopolitan crowds of Antioch and Alexandria. In Greece they found a congenial home in the equally cosmopolitan crowd of Corinth, which, refounded as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar, quickly regained her commercial supremacy, and eclipsed even the records of her past in wealth and luxury and vice. Athens followed and even improved upon the example set by her rival. For while at Corinth the gladiatorial shows had been held in a ravine outside the city, at Athens they were exhibited in the theatre of Dionysus.[[248]]
The growing love of excitement and bloodshed is evident in boxing. The caestus had, as we have seen, become gradually more ponderous and more murderous, and boxing consequently less scientific. Every one is familiar with the description of the boxing match in the Aeneid. The brutal, unscientific fight is in perfect keeping with the ponderous character of the weapons, and even the gentle and refined Vergil can only represent a heroic fight by heaping horror upon horror, and by ascribing the heavy caestus to heroic times, he actually reverses the whole history of boxing. We should not perhaps take Vergil’s description as typical of Greek boxing even in his day, but only of the feeling at Rome, where scientific boxing was of so little account that even Augustus preferred to watch a fight between two street roughs to a match between trained boxers. But the brutality of boxing even in Greece is strikingly illustrated in a collection of epigrams written by or collected by one Lucilius in the reign of Nero. Their tone of persiflage, so different from that of the early Greek epigrammatist, is just what we should expect from such an age. Some of them are skits upon the athletes or would-be athletes of the age; a whole series are devoted to describing the disfigurement and mutilation of the boxer. Here is an old translation of one of them which may be taken as typical of them all:—
This victor, glorious in his olive wreath,
Had once eyes, eyebrows, nose, and ears and teeth.