The Nemean Games

A child dead in the grass

The Nemean Games began with a funeral. The Seven against Thebes, the band of champions marching on Thebes, halted in the valley of Nemea and looked for water. Nemea was the kingdom of Lycurgus, and his son Opheltes, the child of Lycurgus and Eurydice, was still an infant. The boy’s nurse was Hypsipyle, a woman from the island of Lemnos who had been sold into slavery in the king’s house. She showed the army the way to a spring, and she laid the boy down in the grass while she did it. A serpent killed him. Adrastus and his party came up, killed the serpent and buried the child. Amphiaraus, the seer among the Seven, told them the sign pointed at what was coming to the army, and they gave the dead boy a second name: Archemorus, the beginning of doom.

The first field was the Seven themselves

Then they held games in his honour. Apollodorus wrote the Library, a handbook that retells the Greek myths. In his account the competitors at those first games were the champions themselves, and the record of them is a list of who won what. Adrastus took the horse race, Eteoclus the footrace, Tydeus the boxing, Amphiaraus the leaping and quoit-throwing, Laodocus the javelin, Polynices the wrestling and Parthenopaeus the archery. Seven contests, one to each man. No crown and no prize appear in the account.

From a local festival to the circuit

Control of the sanctuary, the enclosed ground of a god, belonged first to Kleonai, the neighbouring town, and the god here was Zeus under the title of Nemean Zeus. The festival Kleonai ran was a local affair. In 573 BC the games entered the schedule of the four great festivals open to every Greek, beside Olympia, Delphi and Isthmia, and from then they were held every other year.

Argos then took the festival over. By the middle of the fifth century BC the Argives presided, and in the first half of the fourth century the games appear to have been moved to Argos itself. Aratos of Sikyon tried to bring them back to the Nemea river in 235 BC and failed.

What Pausanias found and what Argos still did

Centuries later the travel writer Pausanias walked to Nemea from Cleonae. He found the temple of Nemean Zeus with its roof fallen in and no cult image left standing inside it. Around the temple he was shown a grove of cypress trees as the place where the nurse had laid Opheltes in the grass. The grave of the child was there, fenced with stones, with altars standing inside the enclosure, and a mound of earth nearby was said to be the tomb of his father Lycurgus.

Argos meanwhile kept the rites running. The Argives offered burnt sacrifices to Zeus at Nemea, elected the priest of Nemean Zeus, and put up a prize for a race in armour at the winter celebration.

A crown of the lion’s herb

The poet Pindar wrote odes for victors at the four festivals, and he names what a winner at Nemea was given: the herb of the Nemean lion. In the same ode he sets the victory below the mountains of Phlius, a neighbouring town. The lion was on the road to the games as well as in the prize. Walking in from Cleonae, Pausanias was shown the cave where it had lived before he was shown the grove and the grave of the child the festival was founded for.

The tunnel, the changing room and the track

Athletes dressed in a changing room whose roof tiles carry stamps naming its architect: Sosikles, an official from Argos. From there they entered the stadium through a vaulted tunnel just over 36 metres long, among the earliest vaults attested in Greece. Several dozen graffiti are scratched into its walls. One records the name TELESTAS, and in a different hand the word NIKO, the verb for winning. The track was 600 feet long, the unit of length the word stadion names, and it was kept in repair so that the measure held.

The temple and the hero’s mound

The temple Pausanias found ruined was the fourth-century building, raised over a sixth-century predecessor and carrying 32 columns. Nine stand today. Three never fell. Six were put back up from 2002: two on the north side beside the three, and four at the northeast corner. The museum of the site stands inside the sanctuary, was given to the Greek state in 1984, and one ticket covers the museum, the site and the stadium.

Excavation of the hero shrine of Opheltes, in the southwest corner of the sanctuary, ran from 2010 to 2012. It showed that the mound over the grave was built rather than natural. The earliest builders filled in an old drainage channel, moved great quantities of soil to raise it, then laid stone surfaces and retaining walls to keep the flood-prone Nemea river off it. More than 30 whole pots came out of the shrine, vessels for drinking and pouring, along with black-figure pottery from Attica, a terracotta mounted warrior and a coin from Aegina. A later shrine was built over the first. From its enclosure the mound continues north as an embankment traced for more than 100 metres, and its far end has not been found.

The games revived

The games are run again in the ancient stadium. The revival grew out of the long excavation of the sanctuary and out of local residents who felt that their personal ties to Nemea could contribute something to the present day. The society behind it set out its purpose on 30 December 1994: anyone may enter, no records are kept and no medals are awarded, the races are organised by gender and age, and runners go barefoot over the same stones and soil the ancient runners crossed. The seventh edition was held on 24 to 26 June 2022, and the eighth, called the Eighth Nemead, on 28 to 30 June 2024.