Ancient Olympia

Gia Recco

Ancient Olympia was a place where the first Olympic games took place. Olympia lies in the Alpheios river valley enclosed by low hills. On a map it would be located in Elis in the Peleponnese. The first Olympic games were held in July 776 B.C., and they took place regularly for over one thousand years. The four-year period between festivals was known as an Olympiad.

View of the landscape from Olympia

At first the only one athletic event was held at Zeus' festival. This was a 186 yard sprint (called the dromos) in which swift young men demonstrated their physical ability by dashing across a filed and back again. The purpose of the race was to pay homage to Zeus.

For fifty years the dromos remained the only athletic event at the festival, but eventually other races were added. When the Spartans took an interest in the competitions, the program was further expanded to include a wide variety of contests. Over the years, the Olympic games evolved into a long series of athletic competitions that were interspaced with religious ceremonies and literary presentations. By the fifty century, the festival had expanded to five days.

The stadium of Olympia.

The Olympic Games eventually became so popular that during the week in med-summer when they were held all fighting between city-states throughout Greece came to a halt. A national truce allowed the athletes to travel safely to Olympia, participate in the events, and return to their stations on the battlefield. This was now as the Sacred Truce.

The Olympic running races to places took place on a wide track that is known as the stadium. The expression "stadium" is derived from the Greek word stade that means "one length of track." More than 20,000 spectators could watch the races from the grassy embankments surrounding the stadium.

The track had starting and finish lines that the two ends. The runners fitted their toes into the grooved marble slabs and the blast of a trumpet signaled the beginning of a race.

Among the most popular Olympic events were the throwing the discus, the hurling of the javelin, wrestling matches, and boxing. There was also a standing broad jump in which the athlete grasped metal weights in his hands for added momentum.

A very strange and vicious event was called the pancratium. It was a wild free for all brawl where a contestant could box, wrestle, spit, kick and do just about anything, except bite and gouge out opponent’s eyes. The fight continued until one man held up his hand in defeat. Occasionally there was a fight where one man was killed.

Chariot racing was later added to the games. The horses raced on a special oval shaped track called a hippodrome, and a wooden post marked the turning point at each end of the track. In additional races at the hippodrome jockeys rode the horses bareback.

The victorious received garlands of wild olive branches cut with a golden knife from the trees of the sacred olive grove that grew near the temple of Zeus. After the awards ceremonies, the winners and the other contestants consumed the meat of hundreds of animals that had been sacrificed to Zeus.

The Olympic Games were held every four years until 394 A.D. By that time the Romans had conquered Greece, and the emperor Theodosius the first, cancelled them since he thought them to be pagan festivals that offended Christian religious doctrines.

The tracks and arenas of Olympia soon fell into ruins, and the natural crumbling and decay were made worse by two earthquakes.

Only in 1875 were the ruins uncovered by archaeologists. The discovery of the ancient site aroused great interest in the Olympic Games. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French nobleman, was so motivated by the ancient games that he made it so that the world created mordern series of athletic contests. The Olympic Games were resumed in 1896.

Reconstruction of one of the columns at the Temple of Zeus.

The first resumed Olympic games were held in Athens (in honor of the first Olympians) and are held all over the world every four years.

Many of the traditions of the ancient Olympics have still survived. An athlete lights a fire at the altar of Zeus to mark the starting of the festival, and a runner carries a torch and lights the fire that burns during the time that the Games take place in the host city.

On the day we went I went to the stadium and ran the length of it. It was amazing thinking that thousands of years ago people had done the same thing. We also visited the workshop of Phideus, which also had been a church for a time. We saw the temple of Zeus, which was very big and had huge columns that had fallen everywhere. The statue that used to be in it is one of the wonders of the ancient world. They were even fixing an old column that had fallen, piling on top of each other so that it looked like it used to. We saw a few old Roman houses that were made out of small bricks. They originally had been covered in stucco, so they would have probably looked like most houses in Greece look like now. We also visited the Roman baths, which were built in the second and third century A.D. In addition to the baths, there was a gymnasium where the athletes lived and practiced javelin throwing, discus throwing, and racing. We visited the palaestra which athletes used to practice boxing, wrestling, and jumping. We saw the Leonidaion, which was the largest building in the sanctuary. It had rooms that were used to house official guests.

The palaestra.

Olympia was very interesting and I really enjoyed seeing it.