The ancient Olympic Games

Olympia is in the west of the Peloponnese, in a green valley by the river Alpheios. It was not a city. It was a sanctuary, a holy place for Zeus, the father of the gods. In the sacred grove, the Altis, there were altars, a temple of Hera and later a huge temple of Zeus, built between 470 and 456 BC.

The games were a religious festival. Athletes and visitors prayed and offered sacrifices to Zeus, and the contests were a way to honour him. The ancient word for a contest was ἀγών, and today the word αγώνας still means a match, or a hard struggle.

The Greeks counted the first games from 776 BC. A runner from Elis called Coroebus (Κόροιβος) won the only event, a footrace. This date comes from ancient lists of winners, and the festival itself may be even older. After that, the games came back every four years. The Greeks called this four-year period an Ὀλυμπιάς, an Olympiad, and used it to count the years, like a calendar.

At first there was only one event: the stadion, a sprint of one length of the track. The track was also called στάδιον, and the modern word στάδιο (stadium) comes from it. Over the years, the Greeks added more contests:

• a double race (724 BC) and a long race (720 BC);
• the πένταθλον, five events in one, and wrestling (708 BC);
• boxing (688 BC) and the four-horse chariot race (680 BC);
• the pankration, a rough mix of boxing and wrestling (648 BC), and a race in armour (520 BC).

A sportsman was an ἀθλητής, a word linked to ἆθλον, "a prize". Yet at Olympia the prize was very simple: a crown, a στέφανος, made from wild olive, the κότινος. The ancient writer Pausanias says that the wild olive was brought to Greece by Heracles. A winner brought great honour to his city, and poets such as Pindar wrote songs for Olympic winners.

Greek cities often fought each other. But for the games there was a truce, the ἐκεχειρία. Ancient tradition says that Iphitos, king of Elis, set it up in 776 BC with two other rulers. During the truce, athletes and visitors could travel safely to Olympia and home again.

Not everyone could compete. The athletes were Greek men and boys. Married women were not allowed to watch the games on certain days. Pausanias, a travel writer of the 2nd century AD, says that a law of Elis threatened to throw any woman caught there off a cliff.

Girls had their own games, the Heraia, for the goddess Hera. Every four years they ran races in the same stadium, on a track about one sixth shorter. The winners also received a crown of olive. Women could win at Olympia in one more way: if they owned the horses, they could be named winners of a chariot race.

The games lasted for more than a thousand years. The last games are traditionally dated to 393 AD. Soon after, the Roman emperor Theodosius I banned the old festivals of the gods. Later, floods and earthquakes buried Olympia under mud, until archaeologists dug it out again.

In 1896 the Olympic Games began again, in Athens. In Greek, modern Games are still called an Ολυμπιάδα, the same word as the ancient four-year period: people speak of «η Ολυμπιάδα της Αθήνας» for the Athens Games of 2004.

One modern custom links today's Games back to Olympia. Since 1936, months before each Games, a flame is lit at the temple of Hera with the rays of the sun and a curved mirror. An actress dressed as a high priestess performs the ceremony. The ancient Greeks did not do this: it is a new ritual held in an ancient place. Then runners carry the flame, from torch to torch, to the host city.