Rambles and Studies in Greece

by J. P. Mahaffy

The commemoration of gymnastic victories by these statues seems to have completely supplanted the older fashion of triumphal odes, which in Pindar’s day were so prized, and so dearly bought from lyric poets. When these odes first came to be composed, sculpture was still struggling with the difficulties of human expression, and there was no one [pg 316]who would not feel the great artistic superiority of Pindar’s verse to the cold stiffness of the archaic reliefs of the same epoch, which attempt portraiture. The portrait of Aristion by Aristokles, the similar relief by Anxenor the Naxian, and the relief of the discus thrower, are sufficient examples of what sculptured portraits were in comparison with the rich music of Simonides and Pindar. But while lyric poetry passed into the higher service of tragedy, or degenerated into the extravagance of the later dithyramb, sculpture grew into such exquisite perfection, and was of its very nature so enduring and manifest, that the Olympic victor choose it as the surest avenue to immortal fame. And so it was up to Pausanias’s day, when every traveller could study the records of the games at Olympia, or even admire the most perfect of the statues in the palaces of Roman Emperors, whither they were transferred.

But the day came when the poets were avenged upon the sculptors. Olympia sank under general decay and sudden catastrophe. Earthquakes and barbarians ravaged its treasury, and while Pindar was being preserved in manuscript, until his resurrection in the days of printing, the invasion of the Kladeus saved the scanty remains in the Altis from destruction only by covering them with oblivion. Now, in the day of its resurrection, pedestal after pedestal with its votive inscription has been unearthed, but, except the Niké of Pæonius, no actual [pg 317]votive statue had been recovered when I saw the excavations, after two years of labor.

The river Alpheus, which has done such excellent work in its inundations, does not confine itself to concealing antiquities, but sometimes discovers them. Its rapid course eats away the alluvial bank which the waters have deposited ages ago, and thus encroaches upon old tombs, from which various relics are washed down in its turbid stream. The famous helmet dedicated by Hiero, son of Deinomenes, was discovered in the river in this way; and there is also in the Ministry of Public Instruction a large circular band of bronze, riveted together where the ends meet, with very archaic zigzag and linear patterns, which was found in the same way some twenty years ago, and which seems to me of great interest, as exhibiting a kind of workmanship akin to the decorations in the Schliemann treasure of Mycenæ. There is also a rude red earthen pot in the Turkish house on the Acropolis at Athens, which is decorated with the same kind of lines. It is very important to point out these resemblances to travellers, for there is such endless detail in Greek antiquities, and so little has yet been classified, that every observation may be of use to future students, even though it may merely serve as a hint for closer research.

The Stadium and Hippodrome, which lie farther away from the river, and right under the conical [pg 318]hill called Kronion, have not yet, I believe, been completely investigated; but they may no doubt offer us some new and interesting evidences on the management of the famous Olympian games.

These games were not at all what most people imagine them to be. I will, therefore, delay the reader with some details concerning this most interesting side of old Greek life.

The establishment of games at Olympia was assigned by the poets to mythical ages, and not only is there a book of the Iliad devoted to funeral games, but in Pindar’s eleventh Olympic Ode this particular establishment is made coeval with the labors of Herakles. Whether such evidence is indeed conclusive may fairly be doubted. The twenty-third book of the Iliad, which shows traces of being a later portion of the poem, describes contests widely differing from those at Olympia, and the mythical founders enumerated by Pausanias (v. 7) are so various and inconsistent that we can see how obscure the question appeared to Greek archæologists, even did we not find at the end of the enumeration the following significant hint:—“But after Oxylus—for Oxylus, too, established the contest—after his reign it fell out of use till the Olympiad of Iphitus,” that is to say, till the first Ol., which is dated 776 B. C., Oxylus being the companion of the Herakleidæ, who obtained Elis for his portion. Pausanias adds that when [pg 319]Iphitus renewed the contest, men had forgotten the old arrangements, and only gradually came to remember them, and whenever they recollected any special competition they added it to the games. This is the excellent man’s theory to account for the gradual addition of long races, of wrestling, discus throwing, boxing, and chariot racing, to the original sprint race of about 200 yards, which was at first the only known competition.

Kronion Hill, Olympia

The facts seem to me rather to point to the late growth of games in Greece, which may possibly have begun as a local feast at Olympia in the eighth century, but which only rose to importance during the reign of the despots throughout Greece, when the aristocrats were prevented from murdering one another, and compelled to adopt more peaceful pursuits.[120] It was in the end of the seventh and opening of the sixth centuries that the Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games show by their successive establishments the rapid spread of the fashion, and a vast number of local contests diffused through every district in Greece the taste and the training for such competitions.[121] These games lasted all through clas[pg 320]sical Greek history—the Olympian even down to later times, for they were not abolished till nearly 1200 years (Ol. 294) had elapsed since their alleged foundation. But the day of their real greatness was gone long before. Cicero indignantly repudiates the report that he had gone to see such games, just as a pious earl, within our memory, repudiated the report that he had attended the prize-fight between Sayers and Heenan. The good generals of earlier centuries, such as Alexander the Great and Philopœmen, set their faces against athletics as bad training for soldiers. Nay, even earlier, the Spartans, though they could contend with success in the pentathlon, when they choose, did not countenance the fiercer competitions, as engendering bad feeling between rivals, and, what was worse, compelling a man to declare himself vanquished, and feel disgraced. The Athenians also, as soon as the sophists reformed education, began to rate intellectual wrestling as far superior to any bodily exercise. Thus the supremacy of Athens and Sparta over the other [pg 321]Greek cities in the fifth century marked, in my opinion, the real turning-point in the Greek estimate of athletics, and the fact that the great odes of Pindar sing the glories of no Spartan, and only twice, very briefly, those of Athenians, seems to indicate that even then men began to think of more serious rivalries and more exciting spectacles than the festive meetings at Olympia. In the very next generation the poets had drifted away from them, and Euripides despises rather than admires them. The historians take little notice of them.

Two circumstances only tended strongly to keep them up. In the first place, musical competitions (which had always been a part of the Pythian) and poetical rivalries were added to the sports, which were also made the occasion of mercantile business, of social meetings, and not seldom of political agitation. The wise responses of the Delphic oracle were not a little indebted to the information gathered from all parts of the Hellenic world at the games, some important celebration of which, whether at Nemea, the Isthmus, or the greater meetings, occurred every year.