The Ancient Olympic Games

One length of the stadium

The ancient Olympic Games were a festival of the god Zeus, held at his sanctuary, or holy ground, at Olympia. The festivals were counted in a numbered list, and each one is called an Olympiad.

At first the Games had a single event. A runner covered one length of the stadium, a race called the stadion. The ancient writer Pausanias says that for the first 14 recorded Olympiads, this race was the whole contest. The festival did not begin with the long list of events now linked with it. It gathered them over time.

The beginning was small in distance as well. For those first 14 Olympiads, the single stadion race covered 192.28 metres.

How the programme grew

Pausanias sets out the order in which events were added. A race of two lengths was restored at the fourteenth Olympiad, and the long race came at the fifteenth. Wrestling and the pentathlon, a contest of five events, came at the eighteenth. Boxing came at the twenty-third, and the chariot race for four horses at the twenty-fifth.

He calls some events restorations because his account begins with stories of older games that were forgotten and then renewed. His record is useful because he does not claim that one fixed programme existed from the start.

At its largest, in the Hellenistic period, the programme had 16 events. Running stayed in the stadium, with wrestling, boxing, the pankration, an all-in fighting contest, and the pentathlon. The horse races belonged to the hippodrome, the course for horses, and not to the stadium.

A festival inside the sanctuary of Zeus

The Games were a festival of Zeus before they were a timetable of sport. The Altis was his sacred grove, full of altars, temples and offerings. The stadium first lay beside the altar of Zeus, which made the religious setting of the contest plain. From the sixth century BC it moved step by step to the east and became grander. Competitors still entered it from the sanctuary.

The ground split the festival into separate places. In the Bouleuterion, the Council Chamber, athletes registered, lots were drawn, the programme was announced and alleged offences were heard. The stadium held every event except the horse races. Its stone starting and finishing lines stood 192.28 metres apart. The judges, called the Hellanodikai, sat on a platform on the south side.

Several beginnings

Pausanias gives the place more than one founder. His oldest story is a local claim that the Idaean Heracles, a Heracles from Mount Ida, held a race among his brothers. He crowned the winner with wild olive. Pausanias then turns to the hero Pelops, who held games for Zeus on a grander scale, and to later founders and renewers. His account is a set of competing stories rather than one opening ceremony that can be recovered.

The first recorded festival was linked with Iphitus of Elis. Pausanias says Coroebus, a man of Elis, won the stadion race, but he also admits that no statue of Coroebus stood at Olympia in his own day. That recorded victory is dated to 776 BC. That date begins the numbered Olympiads. It does not prove that worship or contests at Olympia began in that year.

The olive crown and the sacred ground

The prize was a crown cut from the sacred wild olive. Pausanias was shown the tree behind the temple of Zeus. He records the name the people of Elis gave it, kallistephanos, the tree of beautiful crowns. So the winner’s honour came from a tree rooted inside the god’s sacred ground.

Two other rites at Olympia stood apart from the Games. The Heraia was a separate festival for the goddess Hera. The Sixteen Women ran it, and unmarried girls raced in it over a shorter course. The oath before Zeus Horkios, Zeus of oaths, was a sworn step that athletes, their families and their trainers had to take.

The Games themselves moved across the whole site. Athletes registered and were judged in the Bouleuterion. Contests took place in the stadium and the hippodrome. Sacrifices and offerings were made in the Altis. The Games grew across that sacred ground one event at a time.