An Offering to the Gods — The Festival of Ancient Olympia

Today, broadcasting rights worth billions change hands for a single Games, and the world’s most famous corporations compete beneath the Olympic rings. The Olympics has become the sporting festival into which more money flows than any other on Earth. Yet trace it back to its source, and you arrive at a world about as far from money as could be. In a quiet corner of Greece near the Aegean Sea, at a sacred place called Olympia, people ran, wrestled, and drove chariots as offerings to the gods. The only prize awarded was a crown woven from a handful of wild olive. The long story of the Olympics and money began, ironically, with a festival that sought no money at all.

To make an offering to the gods, people ran

The ancient Olympics was not, from the start, a sporting event. Above all it was a religious festival dedicated to Zeus, the father of the gods. Olympia was held to be Zeus’s sacred ground, and at the heart of the festival held there every four years stood the contests. Before the god, people competed in strength, speed, and beauty, and they regarded the very sight of it as an offering to the divine. Running and wrestling were not entertainment in our sense, but part of a sacred act.

The earliest recorded Games are said to have been held in 776 BC. The ancients counted that year’s festival as the first, and even used the four-year cycle as a measure for the passage of time. Whether 776 BC truly marks the beginning, or whether similar festivals existed before it, is a matter of differing views, and the true origin lies in mist. Even so, it is certain that this number was passed down to later ages and became a guidepost for those who would dream of the modern Games.

At first there was only a single contest: a sprint called the stadion, run the length of the track. One stadion is reckoned at roughly 190 meters, and the one who dashed across that distance and reached the goal first is said to have won the honor of having that Games bear his name. As the ages passed, long-distance running, wrestling, boxing, and races on horseback and by chariot were gradually added, until by around the 5th century BC the lineup of events had nearly come together.

The festival lasted several days, accompanied not only by the contests but, it is said, by sacrificial rites to the god and recitations of poetry and oratory. People gathered from far and wide and, under a sacred truce, laid down their weapons and ringed the track together. The people of city-states so often given over to war came together in one place during the festival, beyond friend and foe — the ancient festival held within it, alongside competition, a power that bound people together. Among the spectators were many merchants and onlookers from distant lands, and a market sprang up around the festival, full of life. Even as a sacred place of offering, it was truly filled with the worldly bustle of people and money moving to and fro.

The prize was a handful of olive, and yet

What the victor received was astonishingly humble: a single crown, woven from branches of wild olive cut from trees in the sanctuary. Not gold, not silver — merely a ring of plant. Yet what this crown signified was by no means small. The victor was permitted to set up his own statue in the sacred precinct, was sung of by poets, and was welcomed home as a hero. The olive crown was not wealth itself, but a token of honor that wealth could not buy.

Why, for the sake of a mere crown of plant, did people compete as if their lives depended on it? One answer lies with the people who stood behind the victors. Ancient Greece was divided into many city-states, or poleis. If one’s own citizen won at Olympia, that glory became, directly, the prestige of the city. Each city treated its victors like heroes, raised statues to them, and, it is said, sometimes granted them generous benefits. The prize itself was honor, but the real rewards that victory brought were by no means small.

And there was another thing: around the festival swirled human greed as well. Wagers and maneuvering inevitably attend a festival where many spectators and merchants gather. That money and goods changed hands over the outcome, or that those who sent athletes into the arena had their own designs, was hardly unheard of — for this is the human world. To paint the ancient festival as a pure utopia untouched by greed is, most likely, too beautiful a picture. Behind the pretext of offering to the god, a thoroughly human reality of prestige and gain breathed quietly on.

The end of a festival that lasted a thousand years

Even so, the vitality of this festival was extraordinary. Counting from 776 BC, the ancient festival of contests is reckoned to have been repeated every four years for roughly twelve hundred years, some two hundred and ninety times in all. Though war and upheaval shook the land again and again, the festival of Olympia continued unbroken. Held under a promise to the god, this festival had a deep-rooted power that supported the lives and the faith of the people.

But even a festival that seemed eternal met its end. As the Greek world was absorbed into the Roman Empire, and the empire in time chose Christianity as the religion of the state, the festival dedicated to the old gods gradually lost its place. Under Theodosius I, who is said to have established Christianity as the state religion around AD 392, pagan festivals were forbidden, and the festival of contests at Olympia is said to have closed for the last time around AD 393. The sacred site was buried under earthquakes and floods, and receded even from the memory of the people.

It would be much later that the buried sanctuary was dug up and the memory of the ancient festival was retold in modern Europe. At last, at the end of the nineteenth century, one Frenchman would seek to rekindle the ideal of that distant festival. What he dreamed of was not money or victory, but a festival that found its meaning in the very act of the world’s youth gathering together to compete. Next time is the story of that idealist — Pierre de Coubertin.