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Ancient Olympics
According to historic records, the Ancient Olympic Games were held for the first time in 776BC as part of the festivities honouring the Olympian god Zeus. These had roots in the funeral games established by Pelops, a prince from Lydia, with worshipping at the site. When the Ancient Olympic Games came under the cult of Zeus, they lost some of their religious character.
Scholars have speculated that the games in 776BC were not the first games but rather the first games held after they were organized into four yearly festivals. Various Greek poets have also mentioned these competitions in their work, with the Homeric poems comprising the first written evidence of athletic contests in the Greek world. In his epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, Homer includes vivid descriptions of the athletic contests held either as a part of funeral ceremonies in honour of the dead hero, Patroclus or, on other occasions.
All free Greek men were allowed to take part in these Games but women were forbidden and married women were not admitted even as spectators, let alone as competitors on pain of death. The Greeks believed that the presence of wives at Olympia would defile Greece’s oldest religious shrine, although young girls were allowed in. Ironically, the religious shrine the men were preserving was dedicated to a female, the goddess Rhea mother of the supreme god, Zeus. The penalty for women who broke the rule was to be thrown from a nearby cliff.
The sole event at the very first Ancient Games was a race of around 192 metres, and Coroebus, a cook won it, making him the first Olympic champion in written history. Initially there were competitions of foot races only and boxing was added in about 688BC. It was soon followed by Discus, Javelin, long jump and wrestling.
A truce or ekecheiria, literally meaning ‘holding of hands’, was put in place before and during each of the Ancient Olympic Games. As a result, one could travel safely to Olympia as wars were suspended, armies were banned, legal disputes were put on hold, and no death penalties were carried out during this time. Messengers known as spondorophoroi, carried the word of the truce and the date for the Games right across the known Greek world.
In 393BC, the Roman emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, abolished the Games because of their pagan influences. But thanks to the efforts of Pierre de Coubertin the Olympic Games were revived after nearly 1,500 years in 1896, in Athens of course.
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