The Oath at Olympia

Athletes swear over the flesh of a boar

Before the Olympic games began, the athletes swore an oath at Olympia. Athletes, their fathers, their brothers and their trainers stood over slices of boar’s flesh. They swore that they would commit no offence against the Olympic games. Their witness was Zeus Horkios, Zeus of Oaths, whose statue stood in the Council Chamber at Olympia.

The travel writer Pausanias picks this statue out from the sanctuary’s many images of Zeus. He says it is the one most likely to terrify a wrongdoer, because the god holds a thunderbolt in each hand. The oath made an athlete’s family and trainer answer for him, standing beside him, before the contest began.

The second oath, and the third

The athletes then swore again, this time to something that could be checked. Pausanias says they swore that for ten successive months they had strictly followed the rules for training.

A third oath belonged to the officials. Some of them examined the boys who entered the boys’ events, and the foals that entered the races. They swore to decide fairly and to take no bribes. They also swore to 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 usually done with the boar afterwards.

The evidence of the fines

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. On it stood bronze statues of Zeus, which the locals called Zanes. They were made from the fines charged to athletes who had wantonly broken the rules of the contests.

The first six went up in the ninety-eighth Olympiad, an Olympiad being the four-year span between one games and the next. That was after Eupolus of Thessaly bribed three boxers, one of them the winner at the previous festival. Pausanias says this was the first time an athlete broke the rules of the games. Two of the statues were the work of Cleon of Sicyon. Pausanias did not know who made the other four.

What the inscriptions said

Four of the six carried elegiac verses, a form of short poem, 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 fining the boxers. The sixth and last warned all the Greeks against buying an Olympic victory.

Excavation at the sanctuary began in 1875 and has not finished. Work in areas next to the old trenches shows that Olympia was considerably larger than had been thought. Parts of it remain completely unexplored.

One system of enforcement

The oath and the Zanes belong to one system of enforcement. Spoken promises bound competitors before the event. Fines turned cheating that was caught into bronze warnings afterwards. Pausanias does not claim that fear ended cheating, and his statues prove the opposite. Olympia made failure public and lasting. Every offender who walked toward the stadium passed statues of Zeus paid for by earlier offenders. The cost of a bought victory had been recast as a warning in metal.

The placing of the statues completed the punishment. A fine did not vanish into the running of the sanctuary. It became an image of the god the athlete had sworn before, set right on the competitor’s route. There it watched the next games begin.