The Oath at Olympia

Athletes swear over the flesh of a boar

Athletes, fathers, brothers and trainers stand over slices of boar’s flesh and swear that they will commit no offence against the Olympic games. The witness is Zeus Horkios, Zeus of Oaths, in Olympia’s Council Chamber. Pausanias singles his image out from the sanctuary’s many statues of Zeus because it is the one most likely to terrify a wrongdoer: the god holds a thunderbolt in each hand. The oath makes an athlete’s household and trainer answer beside him before competition begins.

The second oath, and the one nobody remembers

The athletes then swore again, to something checkable. Pausanias says they undertook that for ten successive months they had strictly followed the regulations for training. A third oath belonged to the officials. Those who examined the boys entering the boys’ events, and the foals entering the races, swore that they would decide fairly and take no bribes, and that they would keep secret what they learned about a candidate, whether he was accepted or not. Pausanias adds one of his rare admissions: he forgot to ask what was customarily done with the boar afterwards.

The evidence of the fines

The proof that the oath was broken stood on the way to the stadium. Along the road from the Metroum, at the foot of Mount Cronius, Pausanias found a stone platform carrying bronze images of Zeus which the locals called Zanes. They had been made from the fines levied on athletes who had wantonly broken the rules of the contests. The first six went up in the ninety-eighth Olympiad, after Eupolus of Thessaly bribed three boxers, one of them the winner of the previous festival. Pausanias says this was the first time an athlete violated the rules of the games. Two of the images were the work of Cleon of Sicyon, and he did not know who made the other four.

What the inscriptions said

Four of the six carried elegiac verses, and their subject was not the god. The first made plain that an Olympic victory is won by swiftness of foot and strength of body and not by money. The second declared that the image stood to the glory of the deity, through the piety of the Eleans, and to be a terror to law-breaking athletes. The fifth praised the Eleans for having fined the boxers. The sixth and last was a warning to all the Greeks against buying an Olympic victory. German excavation at the sanctuary began in 1875 and has not finished: the institute’s own account says recent work in areas next to the old trenches shows that Olympia was considerably larger than had been thought, and that parts of it remain completely unexplored.

The oath and the Zanes belong to one enforcement system. Spoken promises bind competitors before the event; fines turn detected violations into bronze warnings afterward. Pausanias does not claim that fear ended cheating—his statues prove the opposite. Olympia made failure public and durable. Every offender who walked toward the stadium passed Zeus figures paid for by earlier offenders, with the cost of a purchased victory recast as a warning in metal.

The placement completed the punishment. A fine did not disappear into administration; it became the god an athlete had sworn before, set directly on the competitor’s route. Broken words acquired a body and watched the next games begin.