The Heraia at Olympia

A festival for Hera with its own races

The Heraia was a festival at Olympia for the goddess Hera, with games of its own. The travel writer Pausanias is the only writer who describes it at length, and he records it in the present tense of his own day. Every fourth year, a body called the Sixteen Women weaves a robe for Hera and runs the foot races called the Heraia. This was a separate festival for the goddess. It was not a women’s heat added to the men’s Olympic programme.

The races were for maidens, unmarried girls, in three age groups. The youngest girls run first, the middle group follows, and the oldest maidens take the stadium last.

How the girls ran

Pausanias describes how they ran. Their hair hangs down. A tunic reaches to a little above the knee. They bare the right shoulder as far as the breast.

The Olympic stadium is set aside for these races too, and the course is shortened for them by about one sixth of its length. The winners take a crown of olive and a portion of the cow sacrificed to Hera. They are also allowed to dedicate statues with their names inscribed on them. Like the presidents of the men’s games, the women who administer to the Sixteen are married.

Two accounts of the Sixteen Women

The first account of the Sixteen Women is a myth. It takes the games back to the founding marriage of the place. Hippodameia is grateful to Hera for her marriage to Pelops. So she gathers the Sixteen Women, and with them she starts the Heraea. Pausanias adds one winner’s name from the old days: Chloris, the only surviving daughter of the house of Amphion. He also notes the version in which one of her brothers survived with her.

The second account is local political history, with nothing mythical in it. Damophon, tyrant of Pisa, did grievous harm to the Eleans, the people of Elis. When he died, the people of Pisa refused to answer as a people for their tyrant’s wrongs, and the Eleans were ready to let the grievance go. So a woman was chosen from each of the sixteen cities of Elis that were still inhabited. Each was the oldest, the most noble and the most respected in her city. These women settled the quarrel between Pisa and Elis. Only afterwards were they given charge of the Heraean games and the weaving of the robe.

The dances and the tribes

Pausanias reports both accounts and reconciles neither. He adds that the Sixteen Women also arrange two choral dances, one named for Physcoa and one for Hippodameia. Physcoa mated with the god Dionysus and bore Narcaeus. She and her son were said to have been the first to worship that god in Elis. By his own time the system had been overtaken by the constitution. The Eleans were divided into eight tribes and chose two women from each. They kept the number and lost the cities.

Washing first, and Hera’s temple

No rite was performed before the people performing it had been cleansed. Pausanias writes that whatever ritual falls to the Sixteen Women or to the Elean umpires, they do not perform it before purifying themselves. They use a pig fit for purification, and water. The purification takes place at the spring Piera, which is reached along the flat road from Olympia to Elis.

The temple the robe was woven for stood beside all of this, and Pausanias describes it just before the games. The Elean account made the builders the people of Scillus in Triphylia, working about eight years after Oxylus came to the throne of Elis. It was Doric, with pillars all round. One of the two pillars in the rear chamber was of oak. It measured one hundred and sixty-nine feet by sixty-three, and stood not short of fifty feet high. Who the architect was, Pausanias says, they do not relate. Excavation at Olympia began in 1875, and the Heraion’s fallen columns were raised again after 1900. The surviving temple shows where the cycle ended: a robe woven by sixteen women and carried to Hera’s house after runners had crossed her shortened course.