ancient olympics pics
ancient olympics
ancient olympics girlsIt was like the Super Bowl, Woodstock, Mardi Gras, a holy pilgrimage and Chippendale dancers all rolled into one.
The setting for the earliest Olympic Games some 3,000 years ago was both a sanctuary of soaring marble temples and a foul, drunken shantytown plagued by water shortages, campfire smoke and sewage. The athletes, glistening from olive oil, competed naked. Gymnasiums were restricted to keep the sex trade from overrunning events on the field.
With the 2004 Summer Games set to begin in Athens on Aug. 13, archaeologists and scholars are demythologizing and viewing the original Olympics as they really happened.
Contrary to the modern stereotype, the games weren’t tightly scripted Homeric epics in which warriors dropped their weapons every four years to honor the twin virtues of amateur sport and brotherhood.
While the Olympics’ 3,000-year history is dotted with the heroic champions like the wrestler Arrhichion who fought to the death, researchers say they also were plagued by cheating, scandal, gambling and outsized egos.
Olympic corruption peaked under Roman influence; in A.D. 67, emperor Nero bribed the judges to include poetry reading as an event. They also declared him the chariot champion, overlooking that he fell out and never finished the race.
For the fractious city-states of the empire, the games held every four years offered a slightly less violent respite from their near-constant state of war. Athletes and spectators from all parts of the realm were promised safe passage to and from the neutral site.
The experience of competing against — or cheering alongside — battlefield rivals brought out the best and worst in human nature, especially when immortality was at stake.
“Sport was sort of like war,” says University of Texas-Arlington classical history scholar Donald G. Kyle. “Participation wasn’t enough. They wanted to win so badly, and they feared losing so much. What we’re willing to do to win says an awful lot about our societies.”
Archaeologists have uncovered some evidence of the complexity of the ancient games in excavations at Olympia and other sites that hosted preliminary games, including discus fragments, javelin points and metal objects that could be prizes or religious votives.
Greek art adds rich visual details to the historical record, with paintings on vases, urns and other fine pottery the most important source. They depict disfigured boxers with bloody noses and sprinters thundering down the track, elbows flying. Judges flogged the athletes for transgressions ranging from false starts on the track to eye gouging in the ring.
Literary sources offer still more details, from florid victory odes to inscriptions on statue pedestals.
Experts differ on the number of Olympic events. Was it 14 or 18? The mule cart race was held for just 56 years in the 5th century B.C. And, should the competition for heralds and trumpeters be counted? Regardless, the games were considerably smaller than the 300 rounds of competition staged now with 10,500 athletes from 202 nations.
Winners showered with wealth, fame
A few events have persisted over the millennia, like the discus, javelin, running, wrestling and boxing — although the ancient versions often had different rules. Other events vanished with the empire, like the full-armored sprint and the pankration — which resembled a bar fight that allowed finger-breaking and genital punching.
Only first-place winners were symbolically crowned with laurel wreaths, but the rewards hardly ended there. Today’s concept of amateur status would’ve been foreign in ancient Greece.
These champions were the Michael Jordans of their day, showered with fame and prizes, including huge annual stipends and prized commodities like the best olive oil, free meals and theater seats, hometown parades, statues and sex partners.
The shamed losers, according to the poet Pindar, would “slink through the back alleys to their mothers.”
Excavation of athletic facilities show differences with modern stadiums, too. Instead of today’s oval tracks, the straight track, or stade, at Olympia is 198.28 meters. Runners raced its length and rounded a post at the far end. In some events, they might do this 15 times.
The first Olympic champion was a cook named Koroibos who ran in 776 B.C. Perhaps the greatest runner was Leonidas of Rhodes who won all three footrace events in four consecutive Olympics beginning in 164 B.C.
The balbis, or starting line, in Greek tracks usually was made of stone blocks set in the ground; runners would wedge their toes into parallel grooves carved in the stone, leaning forward.
Seventy miles from Athens at Nemea, reconstructions by University of California-Berkeley archaeologist Steven G. Miller suggest races were controlled by a judge standing in a manhole behind — and below — the poised runners. He pulled tight on ropes that kept a hinged gate upright. When the trumpet blared, the judge dropped the ropes, the gates fell and the runners took off.
In later centuries, the whole system — called a hysplex — became more automated by pulleys and a spring.
Also at Nemea, Miller has excavated the locker room where athletes slathered themselves with oil, and the vaulted tunnel that leads to the track. Its walls still bear their graffiti, some of it reflecting the homoerotic nature of the ancient games.
Miller cites an example in which one athlete praised the physique of another, writing, “AKROTATOS KALOS” or “Akrotatos is beautiful.” Another athlete wrote “TOU GRACANTOS” or “to the guy who wrote it!”
That the ancient games were a very human spectacle of blood, sweat, sex, money and stench doesn’t diminish their historical and cultural importance, experts say.
Nor should it tarnish the athletes’ achievements.
That becomes clear if you were to stand at the end of a hot, long ancient track — fully clothed, presumably -- and pretend that your name is Leonidas, ready to run.
“It really is a thrill,” Miller says, “to be a part of ancient Greece, if only for a few minutes as you come out of the locker room, through the tunnel, to put your toes in the ancient starting grooves.”
“The ancient Greeks were not as idealistic as we represent them to be,” says David Gilman Romano of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and director of a new excavation at Mount Lykaion, 17 miles from ancient Olympia. “They had many of the same problems we have today.”
Potions to win, curses on rivals
The ancient games were held in a remote valley. Forty-thousand spectators crowded a hillside above a sacred precinct containing some of the greatest temples in the empire. Sport, they believed, was a high tribute to the gods, who favored the athletes who won.
Before the games, athletes pledged their piety as they were paraded past a row of statues of gods and former champions that were paid for from the fines of disgraced cheaters. At the feet of a 40-foot statue of Zeus — one of the seven wonders of the ancient world — they sacrificed oxen and boar and roasted hunks of the flesh in a sacred flame.
Then the games would begin, lasting five days. The athletes would consult fortunetellers and magicians for victory charms and potions — the ancient precursors to steroids, classics experts say — as well as curses on their opponents to fail.
The first recorded incident of actual cheating occurred in 388 B.C. when the boxer Eupolus of Thessaly bribed three opponents to take a dive.
Others were induced to swap allegiance, often at the risk of exile from their homelands. The city-state of Syracuse was as notorious as New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner in its quest for free agents that would bring religious favor and glory.
When Syracuse induced sprint champion Astylos to quit Kroton in southern Italy, fans in his hometown tore down his statue and turned his house into a prison.
ancient olympics symbolThe decision to record Coroebus’s name had more to do with the Greeks’ growing respect for athletes than with any felt need to keep track of time. Four centuries later, however, when Greek historians were trying to make sense out of the different time-reckoning systems used by different city-states, the long list that began with Coroebus offered a single national timeline.
This timeline consisted of four-year units known as Olympiads. Coroebus’s victory marked the beginning of the first Olympiad, which lasted until the year we know as 772 B.C. Although 772 marked the beginning of the second Olympiad, it was also linked to the first by the way the Greeks counted.
They counted inclusively, so the years from 776 to 772 included 776, 775, 774, 773, and 772. That’s why the Olympic symbol includes five linked circles instead of four. The circles can be thought of of individual years, and five of them linked can be thought of as one segment in an unbroken chain of years that stretches for over a millennium.
The ancient era of the Olympics — and the timeline based on its Olympiads — came to an end when Greece lost its power first to the Romans and then to the Christians. The athletic competitions and attendant record-keeping faltered during the 3rd century A.D. and ceased altogether in A.D. 393. That year the Christian Emperor Theodosius I decreed the Olympics pagan distractions and abolished them.
The Olympiads persisted until the year A.D. 440, but the old timeline was no longer supported by quadrennial athletic competitions with a growing list of winners. By 1896, when the modern Olympics reinstituted the old traditions, every year had its own assigned number in the new Roman-Christian timeline that recently hit the year 2000.
ancient olympics pictures
ancient olympics artsLegendary origin
The origins of the Ancient Olympic Games are unknown, but several legends and myths have survived. One of these involved Pelops, king of Olympia and eponymous hero of the Peloponnesus, to whom offerings were made during the games. The Christian Clement of Alexandria asserted, "[The] Olympian games are nothing else than the funeral sacrifices of Pelops." That myth tells of how Pelops' overcame the King and won the hand of his daughter Hippodamia with the help of Poseidon, his old lover, a myth linked to the later fall of the house of Atreus and the sufferings of Oedipus.
A myth tells of the hero Herakles, or Heracles, who won a race at Olympia and then decreed that the race should be re-enacted every four years, while another claims that Zeus had instated the festival after his defeat of the Titan Cronus. Yet another tells of King Iphitos of Elis, who consulted the Pythia Oracle at Delphi – to try and save his people from war in the 9th century BC. The prophetess advised him to organize games in honour of the gods. The Spartan adversary of Iphitos then decided to stop fighting during these games, which were called Olympic, after the sanctuary of Olympia where they were held. Had they been named after Mount Olympus, the mountain on which the Greek gods were said to live, they would have been called Olympian games rather than Olympic. The favorite story is that Heracles celebrated cleaning the Augean Stables by building Olympia with help from Athena.
Whatever the origin, the games were held to be one of the two central rituals in Ancient Greece, the other being the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Another possibility for the actual origin of the Games is that they essentially 'evolved' from Funeral Games.
ancient olympics best arts(Epiktetos Painter, 520 – 510 BC )
Yup – that’s because the Ancient Olympic Games didn’t have any medals or prizes. Winners of the competitions won olive wreaths, branches, as well as woolen ribbons. Oh, that and the all important honor.
They did, however, come home as heroes – and got showered with gifts there. Many victors subsequently used their fame to endorse products and to get paid posing for sculptures and drawings (just like today, huh?)
ancient olympics images
the ancient olympics
special olympics group picChildren in a Special Olympics program take part in a 50-meter footrace.
Kyle Nosal—Enid News & Eagle/APRelated Articles:
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special olympics picThe University accommodation will provide a base for many of the athletes as they take part in the Special Olympics Ireland Games 2006 which run from the 21 to 25 June in Belfast.
The UU Sports Centre is playing host to the Gymnastic events and the UU Clinic is the base for the ‘Healthy Athlete Programme.’ The Programme provides health care screens for all of the athletes while they are taking part in the games. Physiotherapists, podiatrists, audiologists, optometrists and dentists are all on hand to offer expert care.
Staff and students have also been getting involved in the event, volunteering their time and skills. Musicians from the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts at Magee helped with the musical direction for the opening ceremony at Belfast’s Odyssey Arena on Wednesday night.
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special olympics picturesPlan on attending the Appreciation Reception followed by the Opening Ceremonies on Friday, March 2nd begining at 6:00 pm upstairs in the McAlister Field House.
Opening Ceremonies will begin at 7:30 pm.
The parade of athletes and lighting of the "Flame of Hope” is a very moving experience so please bring your family to cheer for these amazing athletes.
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