The Ancient Olympic Games

One length of the stadium

The runner crosses one length of Olympia’s stadium. For the first fourteen recorded Olympiads, Pausanias says, that stadion race was the whole competitive programme. The festival did not begin with the crowded list of events now associated with it. It accumulated them.

Pausanias gives the sequence as a chronology. A two-length race was restored at the fourteenth Olympiad, the long race at the fifteenth, wrestling and the pentathlon at the eighteenth, boxing at the twenty-third and the four-horse chariot race at the twenty-fifth. He calls some events restorations because his account begins with stories of older games, forgotten and renewed. The record is useful precisely because he does not pretend that one settled programme existed from the start.

The official account of the ancient games agrees on the modest beginning: for the first fourteen Olympiads, it says, the single stadion race covered 192.28 metres. At the festival’s Hellenistic extent, the programme contained sixteen events. Running remained in the stadium, with wrestling, boxing, pankration and the pentathlon. Equestrian contests belonged to the hippodrome rather than the stadium.

A festival inside Zeus’s sanctuary

This was a festival of Zeus before it was an athletics timetable. The Altis was his sacred grove, filled with altars, temples and offerings. The stadium first lay beside the altar of Zeus, a placement that made the contest’s religious setting explicit. From the sixth century BC it moved progressively eastwards and took on a more monumental form, but competitors still entered it from the sanctuary.

The terrain divided the festival into recognisable places. The Bouleuterion was where athletes registered, lots were drawn, the programme was announced and alleged offences were heard. The stadium held every event except the equestrian contests. Its stone starting and finishing lines stood 192.28 metres apart. The judges, the Hellanodikai, sat on a platform on the south side.

Several beginnings, not one

Pausanias’s oldest story gives the place more than one founder. He records the local claim that the Idaean Heracles arranged a race among his brothers and crowned the winner with wild olive. He then turns to Pelops, who held games for Zeus on a grander scale, and to later founders and renewers. His account is a set of competing traditions, not a single recoverable opening ceremony.

The first recorded festival was associated with Iphitus of Elis. Pausanias says Coroebus, an Elean, won the stadion race, but also admits that no statue of him stood at Olympia in his time. The official chronology places that recorded victory in 776 BC. That date begins the numbered Olympiads; it does not prove that worship or competition at Olympia began in that year.

The prize was a crown from the sacred wild olive. Pausanias was shown the tree behind the temple of Zeus and records the Elean name for it, kallistephanos, the tree of beautiful crowns. The victor’s honour consequently came from material rooted inside the god’s precinct.

What belongs to the neighbouring entries

Two neighbouring subjects belong outside this account. The Heraia was a separate festival for Hera, administered by the Sixteen Women and run by unmarried girls over a shortened course. The oath before Zeus Horkios was the rule-bound threshold crossed by athletes, families and trainers. This entry concerns the larger festival: its gradual programme, its buildings and its place within Zeus’s sanctuary.

Olympia therefore does not preserve an ancient version of a modern sports ground. It preserves a sacred landscape through which competitors moved: registration and judgement in the Bouleuterion, contests in the stadium and hippodrome, sacrifice and offerings in the Altis. The games grew across that landscape one event at a time.