When Greece came under Roman rule, no longer could free-born Greeks boast of exclusive right to participate at Olympia. Champions from all parts of the empire, Tiberius and Nero among them, took part in the games. Pausanias speaks of a statue of Augustus, made of amber, and a statue of Trajan, dedicated by the Greek nation, and also of one of Hadrian set up by the Achæan confederacy. Nero, who contended both in the Olympic and Pythian games, dedicated four crowns in the Zeus temple. Under the Antonines the external splendour of the Altis and the comfort of the visiting throngs were enhanced by the public-spirited Herodes Atticus, a Greek from Marathon and the preceptor of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Lucian, who was repeatedly at the Games, gives in his “Life’s End of Peregrinus” a vivid picture of one of the quadrennial celebrations in the time of the Antonines. In place of the deserted ruins of to-day we can see the temples, statues, marble exedra, the echo colonnade, the athletes, and the thronging crowds gossiping, wrangling, gaping after novelty. As the Cynic partisan harangues the people from the pulpit of the Opisthodomus we realize how for centuries Greek life had focused in these gatherings. The festival had become a Greek Exchange. Here, if we are to believe Lucian, Herodotus first gave to the public his history, the great epinician epic that recounted the triumphs of the Greek over the barbarian. Among his audience would be some whose brothers or fathers had fought at Thermopylæ, and all would hear with pride how Xerxes asked: “What are the Greeks doing?” and how he was answered: “They are holding the Olympic games, seeing the athletic sports and the chariot races;” and then, when Xerxes was told that the prize was a mere olive wreath, how a Persian exclaimed: “What manner of men are these who contend with one another not for money but for honour!” Brain and brawn were alike praised at Olympia. The sophist Hippias was Elis-born, and the statue of Gorgias from Sicily was erected among those of the athletes. And here rhetoricians from Gorgias to Lucian delivered their epideictic speeches; artists, painters, and musicians appealed to the eye or the ear; philosophies new or old were hotly debated.
But no Roman patronage could galvanize into real life the dying spirit of freedom. Professionalism grew apace. Christianity, established in the eastern empire, extinguished the fire on the ancient altar of Zeus. The fitful return to polytheism under Julian the Apostate only served to show its decadence, and in 393 A. D. the emperor Theodosius finally suppressed the Olympic games. When the “truce” of the Olympic god no longer interposed a defence, the Altis itself became a Byzantine fortress and the monuments were partially destroyed to build its walls. Amongst the ruins of the Palæstra and the Workshop of Phidias can be seen the remains of a Byzantine church. Earthquakes in the sixth century threw down the Zeus temple, and in this and the following century the Cladeus and the Alpheus, the only gods who still retained their power, united in preserving under deep layers of earth the mutilated monuments for a kindlier age to uncover and to honour. After this destruction and burial, for more than one thousand years the summer moons waxed and waned above the desolated valley disturbed only by the hoof-beats of the horses ridden by the vassal bands of the Dukes of the Morea. Here, as elsewhere in Greece, temples robbed of their acolytes and statues, no longer symbols of a living religion, forgot the incense of a happy past and could look forward to no festal renascence. Sterling, in his “Dædalus,” pictures these orphaned children of Olympus in a loneliness only less pathetic than their irksome imprisonment within unsympathetic Museum walls:—
“Statues, bend your heads in sorrow,
Ye that glance ’mid ruins old,
That know not a past nor expect a morrow,
On many a moonlit Grecian wold.”
In 1875 the German government subsidized the systematic excavations that restored to the modern world some of its most valued treasures and laid bare the greater part of the ruined Altis, the adjacent buildings and the entrance to the Stadium.
The remains excavated outside the Altis bring us to the contests themselves. Close to the western wall of the Altis were the elaborate Palæstra and Gymnasium, where the athletes could keep themselves in form for the contests. From the northeastern corner of the sacred enclosure leads the covered way into the Stadium, which has been only partially excavated at the two ends. To the south, or possibly east, of the Stadium lay the Hippodrome by the bank of the Alpheus. Frazer, contrary to the usual belief, thinks it possible that it may still be intact north of the new bed of the river. From Pausanias, who fortunately described the Hippodrome minutely, we can in imagination reconstruct the scene: the rising tiers of spectators; the bronze turning-posts, on which respectively stood statues of Pelops and of Hippodameia, at each end of the course around which the chariots drove twelve times; the umpires at the goal; the chariots waiting ready for the signal given at the hoisting of the bronze eagle and the dropping of the dolphin. For a typical chariot race of the best period we may turn to the “Electra” of Sophocles, although the scene of the race is laid at Delphi, not at Olympia. Sophocles, who himself embodied the Greek perfection of manly beauty, knew how to give essential details to critical hearers. The danger involved and the skill required on the race track made the owner of the victorious team, provided he was his own charioteer, a worthy recipient of Olympic honours. There are ten contestants in all, two of them Libyan Greeks. They draw lots for the assignment of inner and outer tracks and take their stations at command of the judges, and then—
“At the bronze trumpet’s signal forth they shot: the men
Urged on their horses and with both hands loosed the reins.