Lampas - Volume 54, Issue 2, 2021

The origin of the Olympics is a topic much researched by historians and archaeologists, who are eager to reconstruct ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’. An ancient poet like Pindar had a very different take on this issue: he constructs a past that is attractive to the victors in the games, and does so by modelling the mythic past closely after the historic present. This phenomenon of invented tradition is illustrated in detail for the two odes in which Heracles is portrayed as inventor of the Olympic Games.

Although ancient Olympia is usually viewed as a Classical Greek site, most buildings that are visible nowadays were not there yet when Pindar celebrated famous victors or Peisistratos and Alcibiades won their races. More generally, even though new research has substantially improved our knowledge, the early history of the site is often still neglected in introductory presentations of the site. In this article some important main issues are discussed. First, new excavations have revealed that Bronze Age occupation of the area cannot be connected to the later cult, as some scholars have argued in the past. The older remains were covered by flooding of the nearby rivers when the sanctuary was founded in the 11^th century BCE. Up to the late 7^th century the sanctuary remained an open area around a large ash altar. Its main structure was a large dam protecting it from floods. The temple now associated with Hera, built around 600 BCE, was the first monumental building of the sanctuary. Recent research suggests this may originally have been dedicated to Zeus, but this cannot be proven conclusively. The common idea that this temple was originally a wooden construction has now also been debunked.

The pleasant, quiet archaeological site of Olympia appears a far cry from the fame of the ancient Olympic Games, or from the spectacle of the modern variety. In this article, I discuss the end of ancient Olympia and the gradual re-emergence of the archaeological site. After Olympia was abandoned in early Byzantine times, its location was no longer remembered. However, its fame remained, partly through translations of ancient texts, notably Pausanias, partly through the revival of the Olympic Games in the 19^th century. Early modern travelers and the French scholars who worked at the site as part of the Expedition de la Morée hoped that the site could fulfill their high expectations, in particular with regards to ancient sculpture. As the excavations continued, since 1875 as part of the research program of the German Archaeological Institute, the buried remains have revealed a different material reality. As a result of the combination of continuous research and restoration up until the present day the site of Olympia now provides an independent view on the past.

Most studies of the ancient Olympic Games focus on the Classical period. This is a bit surprising, as it has been established that the Hellenistic and Roman periods constituted the hey-days of Greek sport. In the Hellenistic period, a shared sports and festival culture was one of the main ingredients of an imagined community of Greek cities stretching from southern Italy as far as the Tigris, and beyond. In the Roman Imperial period, sport flourished even more. With Roman support an integrated festival network arose with an empire-wide pull but gravitating in the Eastern provinces. Olympia was the active centre of this system. In this overview, I shall first discuss the athletes who gathered in Olympia, and then the reputation and attractiveness of the Games. I shall conclude with a discussion of some material aspects of the sanctuary.

The modern Olympic Games started with a modest, but international event in Athens in 1896, the result of a long preparation process launched by Baron De Coubertin. Some ancient elements were included, but as a whole these and subsequent Olympics were purely modern manifestations. Several classical references in the modern games were only introduced in the 1936 games which took place in a sinister Nazi Berlin. Here the organizers, in the context of a temporarily international and ‘open to the world’ national socialism, connected classical antiquity to contemporary ideology and instrumentalized ancient body culture as expressions of the ideology of Aryanism and German superiority. These claims of the Nazi games on antiquity form the subject of this contribution.

General introductions to the ancient Olympic Games often paint an idealized picture of intrinsically motivated and fair athletes, competing purely for the honour of the victory. From a scholarly point of view, this image has been adjusted in recent years: also among the ancient athletes there were certainly some who cheated. As the topic of fairness and cheating is very accessible to younger students, this theme is well-suited for classes on ancient culture: it invites them to think about idealizations of the past, and about their own ideas on fair sport. A passage on Olympic cheaters from the travel guide of Pausanias (5.21.2-18) offers a convenient entry point to the topic. As this author is not part of standard school curricula, working with a modern translation would be a logical choice. This article consists of two parts: a historical introduction to the reality of cheating at ancient Olympia, discussing the rules, types of offenses and the most common punishments, and a didactic part, which offers examples of the kind of questions that can be raised in class around this topic, and suggestions how to employ translated sources in your classes.