Episode #208- What Are the Olympic Myths? (Part II)

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In the run-up to any Olympic Games, there's lots of talk about the so-called Olympic spirit.

This is a wonderfully vague term that's usually used to conjure all the virtues of peaceful international competition.

This also gets conflated with the very clunky-sounding term Olympism.

Olympism.

The International Olympic Committee defines Olympism as, quote, a philosophy of life exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will, and mind.

In their estimation, the Olympic spirit

requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity, and fair play.

This is the Olympics at their most warm and fuzzy.

The idea is that Olympic greatness comes not from achieving gold, but rather in demonstrating virtue through an honest effort and sportsmanlike disposition.

In the late 19th century, the chief Olympic revivalist, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, once wrote, quote, the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle.

The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well, end quote.

This sentiment was echoed years later by the Australian gold medalist Herb Elliott, who said, quote,

It is the inspiration of the Olympic Games that drives people not only to compete, but to improve, and to bring lasting spiritual and moral benefits to the athlete and inspiration to those lucky enough to witness the athletic dedication.

The ideals being expressed here by de Coubertin and Herb Eliot are often presented as ancient virtues.

It's sometimes suggested that the Greeks were the first to articulate these values at ancient Olympia.

In fact, if you were to ask someone like de Coubertin, he would tell you that the devotion to these ideals was part of the Greeks' ancient religion, a religion that he thought was worth reviving.

In 1935, he wrote, quote, the main main feature of Olympism of ancient as well as of modern times is that it forms a religion, a religio athlete, end quote.

Now he wasn't wrong that for the Greeks the Olympics were quite literally a religious festival.

But to suggest that the Greeks shared the values of the modern Olympic movement is a bit of a stretch.

The ancient Greek Olympic spirit was was noticeably more ferocious and less gracious to those athletes that failed to take home the top prize.

Allow me to contrast two quotes about the journey of aspiring Olympians.

The beloved Canadian rowing champion, Silken Lawman, once said this about the Olympic spirit, quote,

It's important to know that at the end of the day, it's not the medals you remember.

What you remember is the process, what you learn about yourself by challenging yourself, the experiences you share with other people, the honesty the training demands.

Those are things nobody can take away from you, whether you finish 12th or you're an Olympic champion.

End quote.

Now compare that to this ancient appraisal of the same process from the first century Greek philosopher Epictetus.

Quote, you say you want to be an Olympic champion, but wait, think about what is involved.

You will have to hand your body over to your coach as you would a physician.

You will have to obey every instruction.

You will have to give up sweet desserts and eat only at fixed times.

Even wine will be limited.

Then, in the contests, you must gouge and be gouged.

There will be times that you will sprain a wrist, twist your ankle, swallow mouthfuls of sand, and be flogged.

And even after all that, you'll probably lose.

I like that.

Now, Epictetus did not speak for every Olympian, but this underscores a harsh reality of Greek athletics.

Silken Lawman's lovely tribute to the virtues of striving for the sake of striving reflects a very modern attitude.

The ancient Greeks simply had no time for losers.

In fact, many athletes at the ancient games loudly proclaimed that they would rather die than lose the olive wreath that crowned the champion.

One inscription found at Olympia that memorialized a first-century boxer, nicknamed the Camel of Alexandria, read,

He prayed to Zeus, Give me victory or give me death.

And here in Olympia, he died, boxing in the stadium at the age of 35.

Farewell, end quote.

That is not the memorial left by a man who believed that the Olympic spirit was all about friendship, solidarity, and fair play.

One modern Olympian who was perhaps best in tune with the ancient Greek approach to the games was the celebrated American gold medalist Jesse Owens.

Owens once said, quote,

if you don't try to win, you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody's backyard.

The thrill of competing carries with it the thrill of a gold medal.

One wants to win to prove himself the best, end quote.

That is an ancient Greek attitude right there.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that the ancient games were just as riddled with scandal and cheating controversies as the modern games.

When the ancient Greek Olympians approached the stadium for the official start of the games, one of the last things they saw was a string of statues of Zeus, known as the Zanes.

The Zanes had been built entirely with money raised from fining Olympic cheaters.

Enough money had been raised over the years to erect 16 statues of Zeus.

Each statue was then inscribed with a poem, warning competitors against cheating.

That's right, cheating was common enough at the ancient games that athletes were required to read 16 poems about why they should not cheat before they could head into the stadium.

The most common form of ancient Olympic chicanery came in the form of bribes.

Quite simply, athletes would be paid to throw a match.

In the book The Naked Olympics, which has been a very helpful source for this series, the author Tony Peritet details a number of these cheating scandals.

He explains that the first of the Zanes were erected in the aftermath of the games of 388 BC, when a boxer named Eubulus of Thessaly was discovered to have paid three of his opponents to lose their bouts against him.

In 338, an Athenian pentathlete named Callipos paid off the entire field of competitors in the pentathlon, a bribe so audacious that it was impossible to hide.

This act of cheating was considered so egregious by the Olympic judges that a huge fine was levied not just on Calipos, but the city of Athens itself.

The Athenians were so outraged by the decision of the Olympic judges to hold the city responsible that they responded much in the same way that a modern state would.

They boycotted the games.

The Athenians finally relented and paid the fine only after the oracle at Delphi refused to provide any fresh prophecies for the city until the matter was settled.

And these were just the most high-profile cheating scandals.

The Roman-era writer Pausanias was shocked at how willing many athletes were were to risk a curse from Zeus himself and cheat at the Olympics.

He pointed out that small-time bribes went on all the time, even in the host city of Ellis.

There he had heard of a father who had fallen so low as to bribe the father of another competitor so his son could win a wrestling match.

Just as worrisome to the ancient judges as bribes were illegal performance enhancers.

In ancient Greece, this meant athletes who had been messing with magic.

There was a strict ban on imbibing magical potions or wearing quote-unquote victory charms.

But the bigger worry was that athletes would attempt to curse their competitors.

Tony Parrotet explains, quote,

The more vindictive competitors might direct black magic toward their opponents.

Curses would be engraved on thin sheets of lead, rolled up and buried in cemeteries or tossed into wells where the dead could carry them to Hades.

End quote.

Archaeologists have recovered a few of these athletically focused curse tablets.

One aimed at an Athenian runner asks the dark forces to, quote,

not allow him to get past the starting line, and if he does get past, make him veer off course and disgrace himself.

Another curse aimed at a wrestler named Utichion explains, quote, let him be deaf, dumb, mindless, harmless, and unable to fight against anyone, end quote.

The only protection against these curses came directly from the gods.

So it was that before the start of the ancient Olympics, all the competitors, their trainers, their fathers, and their brothers were made to stand in front of a particularly fearsome bronze statue of Zeus Horkios, that is, Zeus in his form as the god of oaths.

If you were an athlete at the Olympics, your whole squad needed to swear to Zeus that they would not use bribes, magic, or any other nefarious means to help you triumph.

This was on pain of thunderbolt strike.

And even then, enough athletes were caught cheating that Olympia was able to afford 16 statues of Zeus.

So much for the alleged purity of the ancient games.

But perhaps this is why we need lofty ideals and romantic odes to the Olympic spirit.

Competition does not always bring out the best in people, so perhaps we need myths about virtue and sportsmanship to help keep our sports from devolving into a morass of bribery and magical curses.

In that sense, some of our Olympic myths might be worth keeping.

The only problem is that sometimes they get in the way of us appreciating just how weird and violent the original Olympic Games truly were.

How weird and violent, you ask?

Well, let's find out today on our fake history.

One, two, three, five.

Episode number 208, What Are the Olympic Myths?

Part 2.

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major, and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story.

It simply must be told.

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This week, we are continuing our look at the Olympics.

This is part two of what is going to be a trilogy of episodes tracing the evolution of the Olympic Games.

So if you've not heard part one, you may want to go back and give that a listen now.

If there's an event more steeped in fake history than the modern Olympic Games, then I'm not sure what it is.

In the late 19th century, the modern Olympics presented itself as a revival of a noble ancient Greek festival.

However, as we saw in the last episode, the late 19th century understanding of the ancient Olympics was fairly romantic.

The Olympic revivalists, like the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, cherry-picked elements from antiquity to revive and straight up invented new rituals meant to feel ancient in their presentation.

So, in part one, we started exploring what we actually know about the ancient games in the Greek sanctuary of Olympia.

What we discovered was that the Greeks had their own mythology surrounding the Olympics.

These included stories about heroes like Heracles and Pelops inaugurating the first games.

We also explored the official story of the Games founding in 776 BC and questioned whether or not it may have been a canny piece of fake history.

That tale, which was supported by a dubious engraved discus, may have been created to support the claim of the city of Ellis over the Olympic site.

From there, we explored the idea of the Olympic truce and busted the myth that all conflict stopped in Greece during the Olympic Games.

Not only was that an exaggeration, there was even one notorious instance when the games themselves were attacked by an invading army.

We finished off by looking at the evolution of the ancient Olympic events and explored exactly who was allowed to compete in the ancient Olympics.

This brings me to something I didn't get a chance to address in the last episode.

When the Olympics were revived in 1896, one of the most important rules when it came to who could and who could not participate had to do with the concept of amateurism.

The modern Olympics were meant to be a celebration of amateur athletes.

These were athletes who had never received money for competing, and in the earliest days, they had to swear that they would not ever be paid as an athlete.

This was thought to ensure the purity of the competition.

It was argued that amateur athletes were of a more upright moral character.

They were more virtuous and more sportsmanlike than their professional counterparts, or so went the thinking.

The truth was that this meant that Olympians could only be drawn from the wealthier classes, who had the leisure time and the disposable income to pursue high-level athletics without compensation.

Now, it was argued that at the ancient games in Olympia, all the athletes had been amateurs.

The controversial IOC president from 1952 to 1972, Avery Brundage, often made that point.

He once said, quote,

the amateur code coming to us from antiquity, contributed to and strengthened by the noblest aspirations of great men of each generation, embraces the highest moral laws.

No philosophy, no religion preaches loftier sentiments.

End quote.

I mean that quote kind of says it all.

Not only was amateurism a value inherited from the ancient Greeks, amateur athletes were simply a better caliber of human being, at least according to Avery Brundage.

But right from the outset, enforcing this amateur code at the Olympics proved to be complicated and inconsistent.

At the earliest games, professional fencing masters were allowed to compete, despite the fact that many of them were paid salaries by their country's military.

The IOC also turned a blind eye towards professional cyclists who competed in the first three modern Olympiads.

But while there was lenience for these professionals, the IOC would occasionally come down hard on an athlete who was discovered to have violated the so-called amateur code.

The best-known early example of this came in 1913, when the indigenous American athlete Jim Thorpe was stripped of the gold medals he won in the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm.

This was because it was discovered that during Thorpe's college days, he had spent his summers playing semi-professional baseball, where he was paid a pittance of $2 a game.

The truth was that many college athletes did this, but most of them competed under fake names, just in case they ever wanted to go to the Olympics.

Now,

I'm just guessing here, but one can't help but wonder if Thorpe's time as a semi-pro ball player was investigated a little more vigorously because he was Native American.

I can't prove that.

I'm just asking the question, you know.

Now, it's been argued that despite the often arbitrary way that the IOC enforced the amateur code, it was still a value worth preserving.

The argument goes that the amateur code kept the Olympics from succumbing to a certain kind of crass commercialism.

When the Olympics finally embraced professional athletes, some argued that it had completed its transformation into a sports entertainment product.

There were some who lamented that Baron de Coubertin's belief that the Olympics should be a sacred event meant to encourage the physical and moral development of young adults had been cast aside.

But it needs to be said, whatever the value of amateurism might be, we should know that it was not an ancient Greek value at all.

The idea that the competitors at the ancient Olympics were amateurs is a historical myth.

First, the ancient Greeks didn't even have the concept of an amateur.

They didn't even have a word for it.

Many of the competitors at the ancient games in Olympia were supported by stipends paid by their home cities.

Many more competed for cash prizes in other events all over the Mediterranean.

This was especially true of the boxers and wrestlers, for whom prize fights were incredibly common.

Now, interestingly, there was once an Alexandrian boxer who was barred from participating in the 93 AD Olympics after it was discovered that he had been competing in prize fights in Asia Minor.

According to the author Tony Peritet, this guy was nicknamed the sprinkler thanks to his habit of making his opponents spray blood around the ring.

I love that, the sprinkler.

Anyway, the sprinkler was kept from competing not because he had accepted money to box, but because the prize fights had made him late to arrive for the official registration in the city of Ellis.

The sprinkler had apparently given the excuse that he was late because his ship was delayed by a storm, until another athlete sold him out.

Prize fights were all good in the eyes of the Olympic judges.

Tardiness, not so much.

The veneration of amateur athletes is very much a 19th-century ideal.

It comes out of a very specific British sporting culture that was developed in the upper crust private schools, or as they call them, public schools in the UK.

It's no secret that Pierre de Coubertin admired this aspect of aristocratic British sporting culture.

His ideal Olympic athlete was an aristocratic man of means who had used the leisure time afforded to him by his class to develop both his body and a code of gentlemanly conduct.

Coubertin thought that this type of athlete could be a role model for people from all walks of life.

This type of amateur ideal was very much the product of de Coubertin's lifetime and not of ancient Greece.

While the ancient games were imbued with a sacred significance, they were hardly gentlemanly.

De Coubertin once wrote, quote, anyone who studies the ancient games will perceive that their deep significance was due to two principal elements, beauty and reverence.

End quote.

He may have had a point about reverence, given the game's deep deep connection to the veneration of Zeus, king of the gods.

But beauty?

I'm not so sure.

In fact, as someone who has studied the ancient games, I've come across a lot that's pretty ugly.

So just how far were the ancient games from de Coubertin's imagined ideal?

Well, let's head back to ancient Olympia and see just how weird things got.

If you Google the question, are the Olympic Games becoming too commercial?

you will quickly be directed to a long list of editorials and spirited debates examining exactly that.

While there are many opinions about this, it won't take you long to find a pundit, cultural critic, or sports writer who is lamenting the corrosive effects that unbridled capitalism has had on the games.

One of the most succinct expressions of this attitude that I found in my research came from the blogger Robert Weissman, who wrote, quote, Commercialism is overrunning the Olympics.

It is undermining the professed ideals of the Olympic Games and subverting the Olympics' veneration of sport with omnipresent commercial messaging and branding, end quote.

You can find many others who echo Weisman's sentiment here.

The idea is that the Olympics is supposed to be about the celebration of athletic excellence, and unrestrained commercialism is damaging that.

The subtext is often that the Olympics were once pure and are being corrupted.

Now, I would agree that the forces of commercialism have become more intense, not just at the Olympics, but in all aspects of life in the last half century.

But this anxiety about commercial interests using the Olympics as an opportunity to hawk their wares is actually quite ancient.

The original games at Olympia were not simply a religious pilgrimage paired with austere and reverent athletic competitions.

The some 40,000 spectators who came to Olympia every four years brought with them a secular festival that was part marketplace, part carnival, and part brothel.

In the year 100 AD, the Roman writer known as Dio the Golden Tongued wrote this of Olympia while the games were on: quote, It was an excellent place to be if you wanted to hear crowds of wretched philosophers heaping abuse on one another, an endless number of historians reading out their imbecilic writings, innumerable poets reciting their drivel to the wild applause of other poets, gaggles of magicians showing their tricks, throngs of fortune-tellers telling fortunes, countless lawyers perverting justice, or armies of peddlers hawking whatever rubbish came to hand.

As Dio suggests, the ancient Olympics had a reputation for attracting both peddlers of chintzy wares as well as authors, artists, lawyers, and politicians looking to drum up a little publicity.

A few millennia before the invention of mass media, Olympia was one of the few places where you could get the attention of the wider Greek world.

One thing that I found particularly fascinating was that historians used the Olympics as an opportunity to promote their work.

The most famous of these was our old buddy, the patron saint of this podcast, Herodotus, father of history, father of lies.

In 440 BC, after Herodotus finished his renowned work on the Persian Wars, he apparently journeyed to Olympia to stage what may have been history's first book launch.

The Roman writer Lucian related this story many centuries after the fact, so take it with the appropriate grain of salt.

But he tells us that, quote, behaving less like a spectator than an athletic contestant, end quote, Herodotus paraded into the temple of Zeus and started loudly reading from his new book.

This apparently attracted a crowd.

Lucian tells us, quote, it was not long until he was better known than the Olympic victors.

There was no man in Greece who hadn't heard the name of Herodotus, either because they had been at Olympia or they were told about him by returning spectators.

So, if we trust Lucian on this one, then the Western tradition of history writing was popularized thanks to a clever act of Olympic-adjacent promotion.

Also, did we just all learn that Herodotus invented the history podcast?

Maybe that's a stretch.

Anyway, apparently other historians followed suit, including the other giant of Greek history writing, Thucydides.

According to the author Tony Perrotet, there's a legend that Thucydides was in the crowd at Olympia when Herodotus did his reading, and apparently he was moved to tears.

When Thucydides completed his work on the Peloponnesian War, he too debuted it at the Olympics.

But that story is not as well attested to, so be careful when telling your friends about that one.

And if you're concerned that this type of shameless self-promotion was beneath the dignity of the Olympics, you should remember that most ancient authors comment on the fact that the fringes of the Olympic Games were dominated by sex workers.

In fact, every four years, Olympia became a hub for the ancient Mediterranean sex trade.

The point is that at ancient Olympia, the Greeks did not nobly set aside earthly concerns to venerate pure athleticism.

All these things mingled together.

Even the Temple of Zeus could become the venue for an informal book launch.

While many loved the messy spectacle of the ancient Olympics, some Greek thinkers thought that the whole thing was tacky and maybe even bad for society.

Now, these folks were certainly in the minority, but there were some well-known figures who thought that the Greek obsession with sport was unhealthy.

One was the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who lived at the time of Alexander the Great.

Diogenes is notorious in the Western philosophical tradition for his salty takes and his rough lifestyle.

My friend and fellow podcaster Danielli Bolelli once called him the punk rocker of ancient Greece, and I think that's awesome.

Anyway, Diogenes thought that the way his contemporaries revered athletes was completely unjustified.

He famously made this point through an act of, I guess you would call it performance art at the Corinth Games.

This was a huge athletic festival, only slightly less prestigious than the Olympics held in the city of Corinth.

Apparently, Diogenes went to the games and boldly stole one of the winner's wreaths off the judges' table and crowned himself, declaring that he was the only one who should wear the wreath because as a philosopher, he had won the contest of life.

He then declared,

I think athletes should be used as sacrificial victims.

They have less soul than swine.

Who is the truly noble man?

Surely it is the one who confronts life's hardships and wrestles with them day and night, not like some goat for a bit of celery or olive or pine, but for the sake of happiness and honor throughout his whole life.

He then apparently capped off this protest by reminding everyone that Heracles founded the Olympic Games after cleaning out the Aegean stables.

He then dramatically squatted down, emptied his bowels on the street, and then declared that the athletes should clean it up, just like their hero Heracles.

What a guy.

Diogenes is perhaps the most extreme example of this anti-athletic rhetoric, but even the influential Roman-era doctor known as Galen was worried about the immoderation of athletes engaged in an intense Olympic training regimen.

He claimed of athletes that, quote, even at their physical peak, their vaunted strength is useless to society.

Can you fight wars with discuses in your hands?

In fact, athletes are weaker than newborn babies.

End quote.

Ouch!

Now, that may seem harsh, but many Greek authors agreed with Galen that the best athletes did not always make the best soldiers.

For instance, one of the earliest written descriptions we have of a Greek athletic contest comes to us from the Iliad, the epic poem attributed to Homer, detailing the Trojan War.

Near the conclusion of the poem, the hero Achilles holds a series of games as part of the funeral for Patroclus, his slain cousin and likely paramour.

Many experts, like historian Nigel Spivey, believe that Homer's descriptions of these contests may not truly reflect Bronze Age athletics, which is when the story was set,

but they may give an insight into how games were run at the time when the Iliad was written down, around the 8th century BC.

Interestingly, there's a verse in the Iliad where the Greek warrior Epius steps forward and admits, while he is not the best soldier, he is the most ferocious boxer.

He claims that he, quote-unquote, comes up short in war, but then goes on to explain, quote, a man can't be good at everything, but let me tell you this, and it's a sure thing.

Anybody who fights me, I'll bust him wide open and crush his bones, end quote.

Even Homer seems to have agreed that athletic greatness and battlefield effectiveness did not always go hand in hand.

This sentiment is echoed in a play by the famous Athenian dramatist Euripides.

He has one of his characters go off on a long diatribe against athletes, where he claims, quote, These athletes cannot survive neediness.

They're so entrenched in their useless routines, they can hardly adapt when trouble arises.

I deplore the Greek custom of lionizing these types.

Will they go into battle waving a discus, or break through a barrage of shields and scatter an enemy with their fists alone?

What fool thinks of sport when they are plunged into the thick of battle?

Now, to be clear, these anti-athletic sentiments were consciously running against the grain of mainstream Greek thought.

As Euripides' character points out, the Greeks lionized their athletes.

And yet, I think it's worth noting that fairly early on in the development of Greek athletics, a vocal minority of thinkers were pointing out that sports had stopped serving the function of training soldiers.

Athletes and soldiers were a different breed.

But that's not to say that ancient Olympians weren't ferocious in their own right.

The modern Olympics were founded to promote the values of sportsmanship, fair play, and perhaps most idealistically, peace among nations.

As I detailed in part one of this series, the modern torchlighting ceremony ceremony is filled with the symbolism of peace.

The runner is handed an olive branch.

A single white dove is released by a priestess.

The modern Olympics even awards a special medal named for Pierre de Coubertin to athletes who demonstrate the spirit of sportsmanship and cooperation.

You might remember the 2016 games when New Zealand's Nikki Hamblin took a fall in the women's 500-meter race and took American Abby D'Agostino down with her.

Both women were awarded the medal named after de Coubertin after they helped each other up and finished the race together, despite the fact that D'Agostino had sustained an injury.

That episode was touted as a shining example of the Olympic spirit, but I think it underscores just how different the modern modern Olympics are from the ancient games at Olympia.

That type of sportsmanship simply was not an ancient Greek value.

The Greeks certainly valued fairness and abhorred cheaters, but sympathy for one's fellow competitors was in short supply.

In fact, the violence of the ancient games can be downright shocking to a modern observer.

Death was a big part of the Olympics.

The few attempts that were made to make the games safer for both the athletes and the spectators were often harshly criticized by those who worried that the Greeks were getting soft.

For instance, many of our ancient sources comment on the scorching heat of Olympia and the scanty supply of fresh water at the Olympic site.

It was quite common for spectators and athletes to pass out from heat exhaustion or even die of dehydration while at the games.

Some relief finally came after roughly 900 years of competition at Olympia in 150 AD.

And that year an aqueduct was finished culminating in a grand oyster-shaped drinking fountain at Olympia.

It had been paid for entirely by the Athenian aristocrat Herodes Atticus.

Now, this was a much-needed piece of infrastructure, so you would think that people would have been pretty jazzed.

But believe it or not, there were critics who thought that this was a luxury that was ruining Greek fortitude.

The writer Lucian reports that a cynic philosopher named Peregrinus made a speech denouncing Atticus and his aqueduct because, quote, the spectators of the Olympic Games ought to endure their thirst and, yes, by Zeus, even die of dehydration if need be, end quote.

So, if that was the attitude when it came to the spectators, you can only imagine what the expectations were for the athletes.

For many events at the ancient Olympics, there was an understanding that an athlete could be seriously hurt or could die during the competition.

The dangers were perhaps most obvious in the combat sports.

Ancient Greek boxing was known to be especially brutal.

Traditionally, boxers wore oiled leather straps wrapped around their knuckles and wrists, creating something known as soft gloves.

These soft gloves were fairly effective at protecting the boxer's hands, but they didn't do too much for the face of the person being hit.

But the ironically hard soft gloves were downright humane compared to a later development known as sharp gloves, which author Tony Perrotit says, quote, created an effect like modern knuckle dusters, end quote.

Further, Greek boxing was especially brutal because body blows were banned.

The two boxers squared off and did their best to land devastating headshots until one competitor was either knocked out or submitted by raising their middle finger on their right hand.

Submissions were often booed by the crowd, so it was common for boxers to fight to the death.

Now, if the Olympic judges decided that a boxing match had been going on for too long, they would insist on a tiebreaker, which was brutal.

The boxers were separated, and then each fighter was given a chance to land an undefended blow on their opponent.

This would keep going until one man was knocked out or submitted.

Once again, I'll quote from Tony Paratet, who relates a particularly horrific tiebreaker in his book.

He writes, quote,

In one famous tiebreaker at Nemea, a certain Demoxenos of Syracuse jabbed out with his outstretched fingers, pierced the skin, and pulled out his opponent's intestines.

The judges denied Demoxenos the victory, not for killing the other boxer, but on the obscure technicality that he had actually struck four blows, one for each of his fingers.

End quote.

Oh my goodness gracious.

So yeah, if we trust that story, then ancient boxing had more in common with the video game Mortal Kombat than most modern sports.

But what really strikes me about that anecdote is that the death of a competitor is not what troubled the judges.

Dying while competing was considered quite honorable.

Just as deadly as the boxing matches was the event known as the Pancration, which was a type of no-holds-barred combat that combined wrestling, boxing, and really anything else you could do to hurt your opponent.

The only move banned in the Pancration was the gouging of eyes.

But everything else, we're talking shots to the genitals, biting, and straight-up strangulation, was permitted.

Some athletes became experts at gaining submissions through dealing out extremely painful but non-deadly injuries to their competitors.

Take for example Sostratos of Sisyon, a three-time Pancration Olympic champion from the 360s BC.

He earned the name Acrochersites, which translates to something like Mr.

Digits, because he found that he could gain quick submissions by breaking his opponent's fingers.

Interestingly, despite his success, this tactic never really caught on because many Greeks found it to be cheap.

Pancration was supposed to be more brutal than that.

As such, the most celebrated of the Pancration victors was an athlete named Arhykion.

Now, his story is pretty unbelievable.

So I would say there's a strong possibility that this is a historical myth.

But here we go.

The story goes that during the Olympic final of the Pancration, Arhicion's opponent got the upper hand.

He had Arhicion in something like a sleeper hold and was slowly starting to choke him out.

Apparently, Arhicion started to raise one of his hands to submit.

But just then, his trainer yelled from the sidelines, quote, oh, what a beautiful epitaph.

He never gave up at Olympia, end quote.

Spurred on by this encouragement, Arhicion managed to grab hold of his opponent's foot and twisted it so viciously that in a spasm of pain, the other wrestler raised his finger in submission.

But when the judges rushed in to declare Arhicion the victor, they discovered that he was dead.

His last breath had been used to win the Pancration.

Now, I don't know about you, but to me, that story seems physically impossible.

Still, the veneration of Arhicion and the relative ambivalence towards Mr.

Digits, I think, illustrates Greek attitudes towards athletics.

Our Hiccion story was presented as a heroic ideal.

It was better to die, having never given up at Olympia, than live and be second place.

For the ancient Greeks, being a sportsman had nothing to do with being a gentleman.

Killing in the service of a great victory was celebrated.

Dying rather than surrendering was considered the noblest thing a Greek athlete could do.

The idea of stopping and generously helping a fellow athlete who had stumbled likely would not have occurred to these ancient athletes.

In this sense, the most admirable ideals and values promoted by the modern Olympics do not come from the ancient Greeks.

A sporting event based on the shared dignity of the athletes, a commitment to cooperation, and fair play is a very modern idea.

The ancient Olympics had nothing to do with that.

But critics of the modern games often point out how poorly various nations or the IOC itself live up to those ideals.

It's a rare modern Olympics that isn't mired in some kind of scandal.

The question I have is: Were the ancient games any better?

We've already seen how the ancients handled cheaters, but how incorruptible were these ancient judges really?

Well, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll get into it.

When trying to judge just how clean or corrupt the ancient games were, it's good to zoom out and put them in the wider context of ancient Mediterranean athletics.

First, it's important to understand just how widespread sports gambling was in the ancient era.

People placed wagers on absolutely everything.

Obviously, the more money that was riding on an event, the greater likelihood that someone would try and rig the outcome.

This was especially common in combat sports and in chariot racing.

In this way, the ancient Mediterranean wasn't all that different from the sporting culture of the early 20th century, when the worlds of boxing and horse racing were famously corrupt.

The records suggest that this became a more acute problem in the Roman era when gamblers started becoming more aggressive and less secretive in their efforts to rig races and prize fights.

By the time you get to the first century AD, many Roman commentators were openly discussing how gambling had made clean competition difficult.

So, by the standards of the era, the games at Olympia were fairly clean.

This was largely thanks to how seriously the city of Ellis took the administration of the Olympics.

The sports bureaucracy that developed in that city after the 400s BC really had no parallel in the ancient Mediterranean.

The fact that Ellis had a governing body like the Olympic Council meant that the games were more impartially judged, because even the judges had to answer to the council.

This bureaucracy was also fairly effective at catching and punishing cheaters.

Part of the reason that we know that the ancient Olympics had cheaters is because the officials managed to discover and punish them.

Over many centuries of games at Olympia, the Elian judges maintained a fairly impressive reputation.

One ancient source approvingly noted that the Olympic judges acted, quote, as if they were on trial as much as the Olympic athletes, anxious not to commit any errors, end quote.

However, that does not mean that the ancient games were scandal-free.

One of the biggest issues was the fact that the judges themselves could compete in the games.

Yeah, believe it or not.

As I mentioned in the last episode, the loophole whereby women could win Olympic titles also existed for the judges.

They could enter horses and chariot teams in the equestrian events.

The convention was that the owner of the winning horses was awarded the wreath.

Now, after the Olympics, Ellis was famous for just one other thing, and that was breeding fine horses and oxen.

The myth of Heracles having to clean the stables of the king of Ellis reflects this very real aspect of the city's economy.

So this meant that many of the rich aristocrats from Ellis who served as Olympic judges were usually horse breeders who had some of Greece's most renowned racehorses.

So, as you might expect, these guys often wanted to enter their horses in the Olympics.

Now, many Greeks of the era complained that this was a pretty huge conflict of interest, but the Elians clung stubbornly to their right to both compete and judge.

Our man Herodotus tells us that in 590 BC, a delegation of Elians traveled to Egypt to get advice from the Pharaoh on how to better administer the ancient games.

According to Herodotus, the Pharaoh said that not only should the judges not be able to compete, but no athletes from the city of Ellis should be permitted to participate in the games.

In the Pharaoh's estimation, if anyone from Ellis was competing, there would always be a suspicion that the judges were biased in favor of the hometown athletes.

Allegedly, the the annoyed delegation thanked the pharaoh and then promptly ignored all of his advice.

Now, remember, our source for this story is Herodotus, father of history, father of lies.

So there's a very good chance that this trip to Egypt never actually happened.

But the story illustrates that by the time that Herodotus was writing in the mid-400s BC, most Greeks understood that it was problematic that the Elians could compete, and downright scandalous that the judges themselves could become Olympic champions.

As Herodotus's pharaoh correctly predicted, there was often grumbling that in close decisions the Elian judges favored local athletes.

One of the better-known scandals came in 396 BC and was around the judging of the foot race known as the Stade or the Stadion.

This was a roughly 200-meter sprint, so named because it stretched one length of the ancient Olympic stadium.

In many ways, this was the signature Olympic event.

Tradition held that it was the oldest event at the Olympics, and in many ways, it came with the greatest prestige.

If you won the stade, your name would literally be used to mark history.

What do I mean by that?

The ancient Greeks used the Olympics as a signpost in their dating system.

The winner of the Stade would always be connected to the year that they won.

Author Tony Perrotet has pointed out that the Greeks referred to the year 457 BC as quote: the third year of the 80th Olympiad when Ladas of Argos won the Stadion,

end quote.

That runner, Ladas of Argos, quite literally went down in history.

When referencing that four-year stretch in Greek history, convention dictated that you had to mention Ladas.

So, winning the stade or the stadion

was a big deal.

But given that this was a sprint and we were thousands of years away from the photo finish, the judges really needed to be watching closely.

Sure enough, the race in 396 BC had been incredibly close, and there was a split decision among the three judges over who had won.

Two of the judges were sure that the athlete from Ellis had won the day, whereas the one dissenter thought that the first man across the line was the competitor from Ambracia.

Normally, in a split decision, majority ruled, but the fact that the winner was a local from Ellis seemed a little too suspicious.

The protest from the other athletes was so intense that an investigation was carried out by the Olympic Committee.

And sure enough, it was discovered that the two judges in question had clearly been rooting for the Elian athlete.

Now, many believed that this kind of favoritism had been going on for years, but in 396 it was finally called out, and the judges in question were punished.

The winner of the Stade

was just too important.

You couldn't have a man's name associated with the calendar year under suspicious circumstances.

But things really came to a head for the judges in 372 BC, when a judge named Troilus ended up winning two of three chariot events at that year's Olympics.

Now, obviously, this caused an uproar.

To have an actively serving judge nearly sweep the races was just beyond the pale.

The scandal finally convinced the Olympic committee that they needed to make it illegal for judges to enter horses in the races.

But despite this obvious conflict, Troilus was allowed to keep his Olympic wreaths and apparently erected a large statue to his glory at Olympia.

But perhaps the most notorious story of Olympic corruption is one of the least reliable, as it has to do with an hour fake history alumni, the notorious Roman Emperor Nero.

Now, longtime listeners know that Nero, who reigned as emperor from 54 to 68 AD, has one of the most demonic reputations of any Roman emperor, rivaled only by another OFH favorite, Caligula.

But one of the difficulties of assessing the reign of Nero is that many of the Roman historians who documented his time in office were openly hostile to him in their writing.

As such, there's a large collection of scandalous historical myths that have collected around Nero.

Now, that's not to say that Nero was, in fact, a good emperor.

Not in the least.

But I've learned that any stories involving Nero, especially ones that sound particularly ridiculous, need to be handled with care.

So, you can imagine my trepidation when I read that the Olympics hit a low point for corruption when the Emperor Nero decided that he was going to compete in the Olympic Games in 67 AD.

The story goes that first, Nero paid an enormous bribe to have the year of the Olympics moved so it coincided with his tour of Greece.

Then he insisted that the Olympics also include official poetry reading, music, and theater events, which were actually quite common at other Greek athletic festivals, but were novel for the Olympics.

Now, Nero was famously a lover of the arts and fancied himself to be a great musician, poet, and actor.

Nero then declared that he would be competing in all of these artistic events and he would also be racing in the 10-horse chariot event.

After paying a gigantic bribe to the Olympic judges, allegedly 250,000 drachmas a head, and if you're wondering, a laborer usually earned about a drachma a day, so you do the math, Nero was awarded the top prize in poetry, theater, singing, and performance on the lyre.

But, most scandalously of all, Nero won the chariot race.

The story goes that the race was a total farce.

Apparently, the emperor lost control of his team of horses and was thrown violently from his chariot.

After recovering, he chose not to finish the race.

But, of course, he was still declared the winner because all the judges agreed that he would have won if, you know, the accident hadn't happened.

Now, if these stories are true, then this truly would have been a low point for Olympia.

But our sources for these stories are highly suspect.

Many of the most salacious tales about Nero at the Olympics come to us from the Roman historian known as Suetonius.

Longtime listeners of the show know that Suetonius is notorious among lovers of Roman history as the most unreliable, gossipy, and sensational ancient writer.

Now, Suetonius is fun to read because his work can be totally off the wall, but it always needs to be checked against other ancient sources.

One of the other key Roman sources for the life of Nero that's considered a bit more sober and reliable is the work of the historian Tacitus.

Now, Tacitus does not let Nero off the hook for some of his more horrific excesses, but notably, Tacitus says nothing about Nero at the Olympics.

He mentions that the emperor liked to dress up as a charioteer for public events and that he sometimes competed in rigged chariot races.

But he never once mentions that stuff in connection to the Olympics.

These Olympic episodes simply do not appear in Tacitus, unless I miss something.

There are also some things about Suetonius' descriptions of Nero at the Olympics that should perhaps raise the eyebrows of a critical reader.

For instance, take this wild description of Nero's Olympic singing performances.

Quote,

While he was singing, no one was allowed to leave the theater, even for the most urgent reasons.

And so it is said that some women gave birth to children there, while many who were worn out with listening and applauding secretly leapt leapt from the wall since the gates at the entrance were closed, or feigned death and were carried out as if for burial.

End quote.

So if we believe Suetonius, then Nero sang for so long that women trapped in the audience literally gave birth to children.

Is it just me, or does that sound like a Mel Brooks movie?

It's also curious that Suetonius claims that Nero drove a 10-horse chariot at Olympia.

If that's true, then this was the one and only year that such an event was held at the games.

The records fairly clearly show that two-horse and four-horse chariot races were part of the Olympic program.

A 10-horse race would have been unusual.

So, did any of this happen?

Well, it's hard to know.

Another Roman historian, Cassius Dio, also reports that Nero bribed the Olympic judges and was awarded the champion's wreath despite having fallen from his chariot during the race.

Dio also tells us that one of Nero's successors, the more frugal Emperor Galba, went back to Olympia and demanded that the judges repay their bribes.

Now, this does seem to corroborate Suetonius' story, but it's worth noting that Cassius Dio was writing much later than both Tacitus and Suetonius, so it's unclear how much we should trust him.

So, it is quite possible that Nero pulled a little chicanery at the Olympics, but Suetonius' version of things is likely an exaggeration.

Still, I just love the idea of pregnant women giving birth while the emperor sings the longest song you can possibly imagine.

That's just, that's just amazing to me.

All of this is to say that the Olympic judges may have been some of the most upright in the ancient Mediterranean, but they were far from incorruptible.

They were not immune from the realities of ego, money, power, and a healthy dash of hometown pride.

In this way, the ancient Olympics seem exactly like the modern Olympics.

This seems ironic to me because the organizers of the modern Olympics, especially during those shaky early years, argued that the ancient games offered an ideal to be aspired to.

The ancient games were invoked in flowery speeches to sell the idea of a new Olympics.

In a way, the modern games finally found their footing when they either abandoned their ancient pretenses or brazenly reimagined the ancient past to better fit with modern sensibilities.

The first few attempts at a modern Olympic Games were far from roaring successes.

To make the Olympics stick, we needed to get creative.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will conclude our trilogy on the Olympics.

And by that time, we will be right in the midst of the 2024 Paris Games.

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