Bodies Offered to the Gods — Olympia, the Sacred Arena

Once every four years, the Olympics draw the eyes of the whole world. Yet it is surprisingly little known that their original form was not a sporting event at all. The Olympic festival of ancient Greece was, before anything else, a prayer to the gods. Those who ran, those who threw, those who wrestled — all offered their bodies to Zeus, the supreme god. Any journey in search of the origins of sport must begin here, in this sacred arena.

To Run Was to Pray

The ancient Olympic Games are said to have begun in 776 BCE. This date, recorded by Aristotle, has been accepted by many historians ever since. But the exact year is not what matters. What matters is that, before it was ever an arena, this place was a sanctuary.

At the heart of Olympia rose a great temple enshrining Zeus. The seated statue of Zeus, thirteen metres high and wrought in gold and ivory by the sculptor Phidias, was counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. On the middle day of the festival, a hundred oxen were sacrificed to this god. The first two days were given over not to competition but to religious sacrifice.

What the victor received was neither gold nor silver. It was only a crown woven from olive leaves. That people staked their lives to compete for it was because victory meant being favoured by the gods. Contest was itself the very channel through which gods and mortals met.

A Truce That Halts War, a Contest That Mimics War

The Olympic festival held another astonishing mechanism: the ekecheiria (Olympic Truce). During the games, three heralds were dispatched from Elis to each polis to announce the truce’s beginning. For its duration, armies were forbidden to enter Olympia, and even the carrying out of executions was suspended — so that athletes and pilgrims could travel safely among the endlessly warring city-states.

The city-states quarrelled ceaselessly over scarce resources. Yet those same states, once every four years, laid down their arms and gathered beneath the same god. The Olympics can be seen as a device that momentarily replaced naked violence with contest.

And yet, ironically, the contest itself was continuous with war. The hoplitodromos, run at the festival’s close, was an event in which men ran in full armour, bearing helmet and shield. It derived from the tactic of running while still armed in order to ambush the enemy. At the very heart of a festival of peace, the memory of war was engraved.

Before Greece, Too, There Was the Body

It is wrong to seek the origins of contest in Greece alone. Humankind had been pitting bodies against one another since far earlier.

In Sumer, in Mesopotamia, a bronze figure from around 2600 BCE depicts two wrestlers locked together. In the epic ‘Gilgamesh,’ there is a scene in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu grasp each other by the belt and struggle. In Egypt, too, the tomb at Saqqara (c. 2400 BCE) and the murals at Beni Hasan (c. 2000 BCE) preserve the figures of people at wrestling, swimming, archery, and weightlifting.

Going back further still, in the Minoan civilisation of Crete, ‘bull-leaping’ — vaulting over a charging bull — was practised as a religious and funerary rite. A fresco from 1500 BCE conveys that perilous feat to us today. In the epics of Homer as well, contests were held as funerary rites to mourn the war dead.

For the ancients, to move the body to its utmost was a sacred act that touched the boundary between life and death and communed with gods and the dead. ‘Play’ and the ‘sacred’ had not yet been separated.

The story of bodies offered to Zeus existed, in a strikingly similar form, far from the Mediterranean, in the New World. But there the price of contest was not a crown of olive but, often, a human head. The story continues, on to a ball game played with lives at stake.