The Heraia at Olympia

The youngest girls run first

The youngest girls run first, the middle group follows, and the oldest maidens take the stadium last. Pausanias records the order in the present tense of his own day. Every fourth year, the Sixteen Women weave a robe for Hera and administer the foot races called the Heraia. This is a separate festival for the goddess, not a women’s heat added to the men’s Olympic programme.

He 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 reserved 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, and they are permitted to dedicate statues with their names inscribed on them. The women who administer to the Sixteen are, like the presidents of the men’s games, married.

Where the Sixteen Women came from, twice

The first account is mythical and puts the games back to the founding marriage of the place. Hippodameia, out of gratitude to Hera for her marriage with Pelops, assembles the Sixteen Women and inaugurates the Heraea with them. Pausanias adds one victor’s name from the old time: Chloris, the only surviving daughter of the house of Amphion, though he notes the version in which one of her brothers survived with her.

The second account is a piece of local political history and has nothing mythical in it. Damophon, tyrant of Pisa, did the Eleans grievous harm; when he died, the people of Pisa refused to answer as a people for their tyrant’s sins, and the Eleans were ready to let the grievance go. So a woman was chosen from each of the sixteen cities of Elis still inhabited, in each case the oldest, the most noble and the most respected, and these women settled the difference between Pisa and Elis. Only afterwards were they entrusted with the Heraean games and with the weaving of the robe.

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

What came before any of it

Nothing was performed until it had been washed. Whatever ritual falls to the Sixteen Women or to the Elean umpires, Pausanias writes, they do not perform it before purifying themselves with a pig fit for purification and with water, and 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. The German Archaeological Institute, which has dug at Olympia since 1875, photographed the Heraion in 1900 before its columns were raised again. The surviving temple fixes the cycle’s destination: a robe woven by sixteen women carried to Hera’s house after runners had crossed her shortened course.