OLYMPIA
“What time the mid-month moon in golden car flamed back her
light and lit the eye of Evening full, pure judgment of Great
Games did Heracles ordain and fifth year’s festival beside
Alphēus and his holy banks.”
PINDAR.
Whatever may be the final decision of archæologists, it was natural for
Pausanias to identify the reclining figures in the east gable of the
Zeus temple at Olympia as the Alpheus and Cladeus. The right angle made
by the junction of these rivers is in a fertile plain where the Altis,
the sacred enclosure of Olympia, lies at the foot of the Kronos hill.
The Alpheus river is inseparably connected in Greek literature with the
Great Games. For more than one thousand summers successively the full
moon looked down upon the myriads of visitors who came from inland or
from island homes, from Tenedos in the East, or from Sicily in the West.
By the Alpheus they encamped and sank into dreamless sleep after their
journeyings or, it may be, one or another, himself a competitor or an
anxious relative, would be roused up by nightmares and outriders of grim
Taraxippus, the Horse Frightener, whose ghost long held in mortmain the
critical turning point in the Hippodrome. When the contests were ended,
the same moon would silver the weather-beaten columns of the old Heræum
or light up with its benignant splendour the new and stately shafts of
the Zeus temple, the gray-green sacred olive tree, the great wings of
the hovering Victory, the Parian marbles and the burnished bronzes, or
still more beautiful, the naked ivory of the athletes’ limbs. And then,
crowning all, the epinician hymn, newborn from Pindar’s brain, rose up
on the wings of victorious music to the very summit of the Kronos hill.
[Illustration:
OLYMPIA
Kronos Hill. The ruins of the Altis
]
The athletes had not far to journey from their last training place in
Elis. The spectators had come from various directions, some from the
sea-coast, some, as do the majority of modern visitors, from Patras on
the coast of Achæa. But then, as now, the direct artery from the heart
of Greece was the green valley of the Alpheus. The river clamps Arcadia
and Elis together. Down this valley year by year in antiquity pilgrims
journeyed to see the games and to attend the great Fair; here in modern
times bands of tourists still pick their way up and down over smooth
roads and rocky torrent-beds and cross the ford of the swollen stream;
and a projected railroad, connecting (on paper) Megalopolis and Olympia,
also follows the general course of the Alpheus. The river has two main
sources. Its northern branch, the Ladon, draws its water from the rugged
mountains of northern Arcadia. The other branch comes flowing down from
the northwest end of Taygetus, curves through the plain of Megalopolis,
plunges through the ravine of Karytæna and joins the Ladon near the
western border of Arcadia, and the two united make their way through
Elis to the Ionian sea. Nor even there is its end. In pursuit of the
fountain nymph, Arethusa, Alpheus must needs reach Sicily. To the Greeks
the Mediterranean was their highway, not the “salt, estranging sea.”
According to Lucian, as Alpheus enters the sea, Poseidon, brimming over
with curiosity, stops him and enquires: “What’s this, Alpheus? You alone
of all rivers don’t go in for dissipation, and you keep your waters
fresh and free from brine as you hurry on?”
(Alpheus) “It’s a love affair, Poseidon, so don’t cross-question me.
You’ve been in love yourself and often too!”
The sea-god on learning of the object of Alpheus’s passion expresses
much approval. But Alpheus cuts him short: “I am pressed with
engagements. You detain me, Poseidon, by your superfluous questions!”
(Poseidon) “You’re right. Be off to your Beloved. Rise up from the
water, mingle with the fountain and be ye twain one stream.”
Lucian’s contemporary Pausanias is troubled with no doubts, and solemnly
reaffirms the wedlock of Alpheus and Arethusa, although the more
sceptical Strabo in the preceding century had naïvely argued against the
credibility of the popular belief that a cup thrown into the Alpheus
reappears in the fountain at Syracuse. Antigonus Carystus had stoutly
maintained that “when the entrails of the victims are thrown into the
Alpheus the waters of Arethusa in Sicily grow turbid.”
Be all that as it may, Alpheus mingling his waters with the Sicilian
fountain is typical of the stream of competitors who were constantly
returning from the Olympic games to Magna Græcia. Of Pindar’s fourteen
Olympic odes nine were written for Sicilian or Italian victors. In
general one of the most noteworthy facts in the history of the games is
the widespread distribution of the clientèle. The competitors and
visitors converging from Greece; the innumerable votive offerings here
dedicated; the common motives of religion here illustrated in art and
literature generated a centripetal national spirit that could retard
though not destroy the centrifugal individualism of the Greeks.
The only fact more conspicuous than the wide territory represented is
the longevity of the Olympic celebrations. The Great Games were
continued both under Macedonian rule and even for long years after the
Hellenic world, east and west, subjugated, dismembered, and rearranged
like parti-colored bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, had fallen into
place in the imperial pattern of the great Roman mosaic. The splendid
Philippeum at Olympia was witness to the eagerness with which Philip and
Alexander made good their legitimate claim to Hellenic blood. Roman
emperors, like Tiberius and Nero, by their very presence, however
arrogant, gave one more sign of the Greeks’ intellectual suzerainty over
their captors.
Although Elis, even in October after the long hot summer, presents a
contrast to the burnt plains and hills about Athens, yet the traveller
will be best rewarded if he comes to Olympia by the end of February or
early in March. If he comes from Patras and will penetrate a little
inland from the railroad near the river Stimana, the ancient Larisos, he
will find himself in the midst of beautiful woodland scenery. The whole
country, with its fine oak trees, reminded the traveller Mure of “the
wilder parts of Windsor Park.” Even at the little stations are seen
shepherds in their shaggy coats, with conversation-beads and staffs and
flocks of sheep. At Olympia itself the new green of the trees and grass,
the pink of the almond blossoms on the banks of the Alpheus, and all the
awakening of the early spring help to dissipate the melancholy that is
wont to invade the mind in a lonely site amidst ruins which record some
by-gone efflorescence of human activity. This Olympian plain, through
which the Alpheus sweeps down to the sea between fields and vineyards,
offered ample room for the vast throngs of visitors. There was no city
accommodation. They must encamp in the open as they do to-day at many a
modern festival. But the smiling valley was a fit place to worship Zeus,
the god of the open sky. Xenophon, who lived on his estate just beyond
the hills which bound the plain to the south, tells in the “Anabasis”
how the returning Greeks, when they sighted the Euxine sea from the
mountain ridge, held impromptu games and races on an impossible slope
where men and horses tumbled amidst the jeers of the spectators. The
plain of the Alpheus was perfectly adapted both for the games and all
that the festival implied. It is easy to see how contests would become
popular here before they were instituted on the narrow ledges of
Parnassus at Delphi.
For the Greeks of the classical period the mythical founding of the
games in prehistoric times threw back the first contests into a
conveniently dim perspective. In this penumbra of Greek mythology
like-named replicas of gods, heroes, or mortals now blend together, now
assert their independence. The Cretan Heracles is said to have brought
the infant Zeus from Mount Ida to the Kronos hill in the Golden Age and
to have first instituted the games. Then again it is the national hero
Heracles, himself Zeus-descended, who cleanses the stables of King
Augeas in Elis with the help of the Alpheus and the Cladeus river-gods,
and thereupon founds the games.
To the reverent Greek his mythology was not an entertaining treasury of
mere fairy tales. The stories of two contests were selected with intent
as the theme for the sculptures most prominent of all in the sacred
enclosure. In the east gable of the Zeus temple was represented
Hippodameia, the daughter of Œnomaus. Her father has already in his
swift chariot overtaken and slain many suitors who had failed to
outspeed him while contending for his daughter’s hand. At the side of
Hippodameia stands Pelops just starting to win, by the favour of Zeus
and the treachery of Œnomaus’s charioteer, a prehistoric Olympic
victory.
In the west gable was the contest between the Lapiths and the Centaurs.
The latter are represented as invading the festival at the marriage of
another Hippodameia to Pirithous, whose friend and ally of old was the
hero, Theseus of Athens. The brute Centaurs presumably symbolize the
barbaric power of the Persians, whose defeat by Athens and her allies
was here fittingly celebrated as another Olympic victory. This may be
taken as the official expression, at the supreme moment of Greek
history, of one of the wider meanings of the games.
The first view of the excavations at Olympia is disappointing and
bewildering to the amateur visitor, and a mere topographical survey
hopelessly confounds history. Even a superficial appreciation of the
ruins presupposes a more special preparation than is necessary, for
example, at Pompeii. At Olympia, although it, too, was overwhelmed,
being destroyed by earthquakes and buried in soft earth by the loyal
river-gods, the imagination must concern itself with various epochs: the
prehistoric; the period from the first Olympiad to the Persian wars; the
age of Pericles; the following century; the Macedonian period; and,
finally, that of the Greek world under Roman sway.
All the buildings for the athletes and for the contests—the Palæstra,
the Gymnasium, the Stadium, and the Hippodrome—lay outside of the sacred
enclosure, while the Altis itself was reserved for the real purpose of
this consecrated spot, the worship of Zeus, under all his manifold
activities, and of the other gods who helped to round out and to satisfy
the aspirations, the hopes, and fears of the Greek heart that was “in
all things very religious.” To cover all possible oversights there was
at Olympia, as by the Areopagus of St. Paul’s day, or at Phalerum, an
altar to Unknown Gods. Just as the drama was a religious spectacle, so
the games were conducted by the real Greek in the same spirit. The
athletes went forth from the Altis to the contest, the victors reëntered
it to receive the olive crown, and within it their statues and offerings
were set up in the immediate presence of the gods.
In the Altis the ancient Heræum, with its indications of an earlier
wooden structure, carries back the thought far beyond the first Olympiad
in the eighth century B. C. The new god Zeus was just emerging from the
tutelage of his predecessor on the Kronos hill above. In this early age
he seems hardly more than a Prince Consort by the side of Hera who, in
Pindar’s sixth Olympian, is invoked as the “Maiden” or ever Zeus had led
her to the bridal chamber. One of the least obtrusive ruins in the Altis
marks the site near the Heræum of the great altar of Zeus or, possibly,
the common shrine of Zeus and Hera. Annually the priests kneaded with
water from the Alpheus the ashes of the thighs of victims offered, as in
the Iliad, to the god, and plastered a layer upon this primitive altar.
Only the water of the Alpheus was acceptable to the god in preparing
this clay, and thus year by year was cemented the union between the
visible and the unseen, the beneficent river-god of the land and the
Olympian god whose dome overarched the widespread land of Hellas.
Approaching historic records we read that Iphitus in 793 B. C. or, by
the usual reckoning, in 776 B. C., four hundred and eight years after
the traditional capture of Troy, renewed the games which had been
discontinued for twenty-eight Olympiads after the time of Pelops and
Heracles. The Heræum, until recently known as the most ancient temple in
Greece, certainly existed at this time, although differing in material
and in contents from the temple that Pausanias describes. Both the
ground structure and enough of the lower part of the walls remain to
enable the expert to reconstruct in imagination the whole building up to
the gable upon which rested the terra-cotta acroterion now preserved in
the Museum. At the west end of the cella we see the base of the great
statues of Hera and Zeus. Suitably enough, while Zeus has disappeared
the archaic head of Hera was found and is now in the Museum. And,
prostrate before one of the side niches, just where Pausanias describes
it, was found the Hermes of Praxiteles with the infant Dionysus on his
arm. This beautiful statue alone would have repaid the cost of the whole
excavation. It unites the beauty of the athlete’s body with the Greek
conception of divinity in frank, idealizing anthropomorphism.
The catholicity of Greek polytheism may be illustrated by the rest of
the company within the Heræum as described by Pausanias. It was not that
every god “had his day,” like the rotation in office of the Athenian
prytanes, but there was a precinct and a function for each and every
manifestation of pulsating life, from the humblest Nereid to Olympian
Hera. “Known to each other are all the immortal gods,” as Homer says.
They were all entered in their Almanach de Gotha and could upon occasion
live in harmony, except when some Eris threw her apple of discord in
their midst or “golden” Aphrodite struggled in the Council of the Gods
for precedence over the mere bigness of the Colossus of Rhodes. At any
rate, in Hera’s temple were placed statues of the Seasons and of Themis,
their mother, personifying orderly and unchanging Law; the five
Hesperides, stimulating the eager Hellenic mind to reach out after the
unknown; Athena, goddess in peace and war; the Maid and Demeter,
embodying the fruitful beneficence of nature and the mysteries of the
unseen; Apollo and Artemis, welcomed or feared by turns for their arrows
of light or shafts of destruction; Latona, their mother, whose Delian
refuge was firmly moored to every other sacred shrine in Greece. Here
too was Fortune, who had a not insignificant rôle in Greek as in Roman
life, and Dionysus, god of Tragedy and of Comedy, was represented as
accompanied by a winged Victory.
The Prytaneum of the Eleans, trustees of the land and of the games, was
enclosed within the Altis at the northwest corner of the Heræum. It was
built over in Roman times, but the Greek structure beneath seems to have
been of very early date. Here were sung ancient songs in the Doric
dialect, and here, in the banquet-hall, the Olympic victors were
feasted.
Next in historic order come the remains of a row of twelve treasuries,
ranged along close to the Kronos hill from the Heræum to the Stadium
entrance. They are ascribed to the sixth century B. C. or, in the case
of part of the most easterly one, to the beginning of the fifth century.
These little buildings are of great architectonic and historic import.
Half of them were dedicated by communities from over the seas; five by
Italian and Sicilian Greeks. The fragments from the treasury of Selinus
recall at once the archaic temples and sculpture on the shore of Sicily
that faces Carthage. The Syracusan Treasury was re-named “Carthaginian”
by reason of spoils, taken by the Syracusans from their Punic enemies in
the battle of Himera and placed here to unite at this common shrine the
victors of Salamis with their brothers in the west.
In the fifth century B. C. the flush of victory at Salamis not only lit
up the Acropolis at Athens but spread to this green valley in Elis. The
great Zeus temple was built. Its pediments, as we have already seen,
were adorned with sculptured myths appealing at once to local pride and
to wider Hellenic patriotism. In the eastern gable Zeus stood upright as
arbiter in the chariot contest of Pelops; in the western gable the
archaic yet majestic Apollo appeared as the defender against the
Centaurs, the barbarian invaders. To emphasize the honour due to Athens
there was painted on the throne within the temple a representation of
Pirithöus, the bridegroom of Hippodameia, and his friend, the Athenian
Theseus. The victories over the Persians were again symbolized by the
contest between Theseus and the Amazons wrought upon the footstool of
the seated god, and, as if to put the meaning beyond all doubt, here too
were Greece and Salamis personified, the latter holding in her hand the
figurehead of a ship. The metope sculptures represented the labours of
Heracles who, as founder of the games, typified to patriot and athlete
bodily powers and indomitable will. The cella of the temple was reserved
for the great gold-ivory statue of Zeus, who was seated while others
stood. Phidias established his workshop by the sacred enclosure and
wrought. And the result of his handiwork was a world’s wonder for long
centuries. Into his creation were breathed Homeric dignity, Attic
beauty, and Hellenic pride. Dio Chrysostom in the first century of the
Christian era could say of it: “Methinks that if any one who is
heavy-laden in mind, who has drained the cup of misfortunes and sorrows
in life, and whom sweet sleep visits no more, were to stand before this
image, he would forget all the griefs and troubles that are incidental
to the life of man.”
Time and earthquakes and plunderers have worked almost utter ruin. But
the ground plan of the temple remains to tell a detailed story, and some
of the great shafts lie prostrate where they fell. In the Museum is
preserved, more or less complete, the major part of the gable
sculptures, fortunately including the very noble figure of Apollo, and
the mutilated but beautiful metopes. The gold-ivory statue has
disappeared long since. It is possible that it may have been destroyed
when the temple was burnt in the reign of Theodosius II, but a Byzantine
historian claims that the statue was still standing in a palace at
Constantinople when it was consumed by fire in 475 A. D. In front of the
Zeus temple are still to be seen some blocks of the lofty triangular
column over which Pæonius caused his winged Nike to hover. The statue
itself, in large part intact, is set up in the Museum and belongs to the
more beautiful of our inheritances from antiquity.
If now we add, in imagination, the great council hall, possibly lying
southeast from the temple, and the older colonnade bounding the east
side of the Altis, and if we add the pentagonal Pelopion and the minor
sanctuaries, and fill in the forest of statues of athletes and of gods,
we shall have the more salient features of the sacred enclosure down
through the great period immediately following the Persian wars. To the
beginning of the fourth century is attributed the little temple of the
Mother of the Gods east of the Heræum. Running in a line from this up to
the very entrance of the Stadium is a long row of pedestals. Upon these
stood the Zanes, or bronze statues of Zeus, which were erected from
fines imposed upon offenders against the rules of the games. They stood
where the contestants must see them just as they passed from the Altis
into the Stadium. It is significant that the first recorded serious
violation of athletic honour did not occur until 388 B. C., only a half
century before free Greece was crushed at Chæronea, and that the next
occasion was in the 112th Olympiad, six years after Macedonian rule was
established. This second time it was an Athenian who had bribed his
competitors, and the Athenians, like some modern sympathizers with
athletic criminals, were shameless enough to press the Eleans to remit
the fine. But the god at Delphi compelled the Athenians to submit.
Standing before the Opisthodomus, the rear porch of the Zeus temple,
from which poet, historian, and philosopher were wont to utter high
words on noble themes, the crowd may have looked up at the great Apollo
with his hand outstretched and imagined him dictating the inscription
placed, on a similar occasion, upon the base of one of the Zanes: “An
Olympic victory is to be gained not by money but by fleetness of foot
and strength of body.”
Macedon also left its records. When Philip had defeated the Greeks at
Chæronea in 338 B. C., his first care was to prove that he was Hellene
and not the barbarian that Demosthenes considered him. The Philippeum
was dedicated, and in it were erected gold-ivory statues of Philip’s
father Amyntas, of Philip, of the mother and grandmother of Alexander,
and of Alexander himself. Alexander’s right to contend at the games was
vindicated. In this period also was added on the eastern side of the
Altis the beautiful Echo colonnade with its sevenfold echo.
When Greece came under Roman rule, no longer could free-born Greeks
boast of exclusive right to participate at Olympia. Champions from all
parts of the empire, Tiberius and Nero among them, took part in the
games. Pausanias speaks of a statue of Augustus, made of amber, and a
statue of Trajan, dedicated by the Greek nation, and also of one of
Hadrian set up by the Achæan confederacy. Nero, who contended both in
the Olympic and Pythian games, dedicated four crowns in the Zeus temple.
Under the Antonines the external splendour of the Altis and the comfort
of the visiting throngs were enhanced by the public-spirited Herodes
Atticus, a Greek from Marathon and the preceptor of the emperor Marcus
Aurelius. Lucian, who was repeatedly at the Games, gives in his “Life’s
End of Peregrinus” a vivid picture of one of the quadrennial
celebrations in the time of the Antonines. In place of the deserted
ruins of to-day we can see the temples, statues, marble exedra, the echo
colonnade, the athletes, and the thronging crowds gossiping, wrangling,
gaping after novelty. As the Cynic partisan harangues the people from
the pulpit of the Opisthodomus we realize how for centuries Greek life
had focused in these gatherings. The festival had become a Greek
Exchange. Here, if we are to believe Lucian, Herodotus first gave to the
public his history, the great epinician epic that recounted the triumphs
of the Greek over the barbarian. Among his audience would be some whose
brothers or fathers had fought at Thermopylæ, and all would hear with
pride how Xerxes asked: “What are the Greeks doing?” and how he was
answered: “They are holding the Olympic games, seeing the athletic
sports and the chariot races;” and then, when Xerxes was told that the
prize was a mere olive wreath, how a Persian exclaimed: “What manner of
men are these who contend with one another not for money but for
honour!” Brain and brawn were alike praised at Olympia. The sophist
Hippias was Elis-born, and the statue of Gorgias from Sicily was erected
among those of the athletes. And here rhetoricians from Gorgias to
Lucian delivered their epideictic speeches; artists, painters, and
musicians appealed to the eye or the ear; philosophies new or old were
hotly debated.
But no Roman patronage could galvanize into real life the dying spirit
of freedom. Professionalism grew apace. Christianity, established in the
eastern empire, extinguished the fire on the ancient altar of Zeus. The
fitful return to polytheism under Julian the Apostate only served to
show its decadence, and in 393 A. D. the emperor Theodosius finally
suppressed the Olympic games. When the “truce” of the Olympic god no
longer interposed a defence, the Altis itself became a Byzantine
fortress and the monuments were partially destroyed to build its walls.
Amongst the ruins of the Palæstra and the Workshop of Phidias can be
seen the remains of a Byzantine church. Earthquakes in the sixth century
threw down the Zeus temple, and in this and the following century the
Cladeus and the Alpheus, the only gods who still retained their power,
united in preserving under deep layers of earth the mutilated monuments
for a kindlier age to uncover and to honour. After this destruction and
burial, for more than one thousand years the summer moons waxed and
waned above the desolated valley disturbed only by the hoof-beats of the
horses ridden by the vassal bands of the Dukes of the Morea. Here, as
elsewhere in Greece, temples robbed of their acolytes and statues, no
longer symbols of a living religion, forgot the incense of a happy past
and could look forward to no festal renascence. Sterling, in his
“Dædalus,” pictures these orphaned children of Olympus in a loneliness
only less pathetic than their irksome imprisonment within unsympathetic
Museum walls:—
“Statues, bend your heads in sorrow,
Ye that glance ’mid ruins old,
That know not a past nor expect a morrow,
On many a moonlit Grecian wold.”
In 1875 the German government subsidized the systematic excavations that
restored to the modern world some of its most valued treasures and laid
bare the greater part of the ruined Altis, the adjacent buildings and
the entrance to the Stadium.
The remains excavated outside the Altis bring us to the contests
themselves. Close to the western wall of the Altis were the elaborate
Palæstra and Gymnasium, where the athletes could keep themselves in form
for the contests. From the northeastern corner of the sacred enclosure
leads the covered way into the Stadium, which has been only partially
excavated at the two ends. To the south, or possibly east, of the
Stadium lay the Hippodrome by the bank of the Alpheus. Frazer, contrary
to the usual belief, thinks it possible that it may still be intact
north of the new bed of the river. From Pausanias, who fortunately
described the Hippodrome minutely, we can in imagination reconstruct the
scene: the rising tiers of spectators; the bronze turning-posts, on
which respectively stood statues of Pelops and of Hippodameia, at each
end of the course around which the chariots drove twelve times; the
umpires at the goal; the chariots waiting ready for the signal given at
the hoisting of the bronze eagle and the dropping of the dolphin. For a
typical chariot race of the best period we may turn to the “Electra” of
Sophocles, although the scene of the race is laid at Delphi, not at
Olympia. Sophocles, who himself embodied the Greek perfection of manly
beauty, knew how to give essential details to critical hearers. The
danger involved and the skill required on the race track made the owner
of the victorious team, provided he was his own charioteer, a worthy
recipient of Olympic honours. There are ten contestants in all, two of
them Libyan Greeks. They draw lots for the assignment of inner and outer
tracks and take their stations at command of the judges, and then—
“At the bronze trumpet’s signal forth they shot: the men
Urged on their horses and with both hands loosed the reins.
Now on a sudden all the race course filled with din
Of rattling chariots. Up aloft the dust cloud flew,
Enwrapping all together. Spared they not the goad
That one might pass the others’ horses snorting foam
For horses, breathing neck and neck, now smote with flecks,
Blown backwards, rivals’ flanks and fellies of the wheels.
But he, just grazing past the post each time, would urge
The trace-horse on the right and curb the left inside.
Now thus far all the chariots had fared upright,
But here the Ænianian’s colts the curb refused,
Ran off with violence and, swerving from the course,
(’Twas now the sixth round ended or the seventh now)
Full on the frontlets of the Libyan’s team they crashed.
From this mischancing first another and then one
Fouled with his neighbour, crushing him, till all the course
Crisæan filled with wreckage of the chariot teams.
This noticing, the skilled Athenian charioteer
Held in and swerved to safer offing to pass by
The surge of chariot billows wallowing in the midst.
Last came Orestes driving, holding back his colts,
Placing his confidence upon the final heat.
But when he sees the man from Athens left alone
He stings his swift colts’ ears and whistled shrill the whip
Pursuing. Now abreast the chariots twain drove on,
First one team, then the other leading by a neck.
Now he through all the other laps unscathed had come,
Ill fated, upright on the upright chariot board,
But as the horses doubled now the final turn
He loosed the left rein, recked not of the column’s edge
And struck upon it full the shivering axle-nave.
Over the chariot rim he lurched. The severing straps
Coiled round him. As he fell to earth the colts ran wild
Along the race course wide. The people, seeing him
Thus fallen from the team, raise outcries loud and high
At what the youth had done and then this evil hap.
Now borne along the ground, now high again upflung
His legs gleam white, until the charioteers the colts
Had checked, no easy task, and disentangled him
So covered o’er with blood that never had a friend,
Seeing that ruined form, have known him as his own.”
Both the Olympic and Pythian games were held every four years. The
Nemean and Isthmian came every two years. In all four the prize was
similar: the wreath of wild olive at Olympia; of mountain bay at Delphi;
of parsley or of native pine at Nemea; of parsley at Corinth. We are,
indeed, justified in emphasizing, until the period of decadence, the
absence of professionalism. The athlete, after undergoing the severest
training, contested, with no degradation of gate-money, merely to win
the honour of a simple wreath. But we need not shut our eyes to the fact
that the honour did not fade with the wreath. It belonged to the
athlete’s native place and to all his fellow-citizens. Thinking of the
evanescent glory of the Isthmian parsley and with the long race in the
stadium of Eternity in mind, the apostle Paul might indeed point the
contrast for his hearers between a “corruptible crown” and “one that
fadeth not away;” yet for the shorter race-course of life the emoluments
of honour and preferment were secure. And, in addition to all these
honours, an Olympian victor had a post-mortem value. He might be
worshipped as a divinity and his statue might heal diseases, like the
bones of a mediæval saint. Thus Lucian’s Momus, the god of critics,
reminds Zeus that their own prestige is endangered by these new
faith-cures: “Actually,” he says, “the statues of the athlete Polydamas
at Olympia and of Theagenes at Thasus are curing fever-stricken
patients.”
The athlete’s ambition might issue in a selfish “opportunism,” or it
might be of the nobler kind to which Pindar, thinking perhaps of the
altar dedicated in the Altis to the god “Opportunity” (καιρός), would
lift the contestant’s ideal in his second Olympian:—
“Winning the contest setteth free the essayer from its care and pain,
and wealth embroidered o’er with virtues bringeth opportunity for this
and that, inspiring mood that broodeth deeply upon earnest themes.”
There was a sacred truce from hostilities amongst all Greeks for a
month, to allow time for distant competitors and visitors to go and come
in safety. The games were held in summer at the time of a full moon,
whether in July or August is uncertain. The September full moon, in
fact, has been suggested as the date in the even Olympiads. At this
later moon the heat might be almost as great as at the summer solstice,
but it may be that the earlier date, with the longer day, was in vogue
as long as the contests were all held upon one day. At any rate, the
longest midsummer day was too short for the increasing number of events,
and after 472 B. C. we hear of five days. The order of the contests is
uncertain. At first, it would appear, the foot-races had been the only
event. Later it seems probable that the foot-races, the long race, the
short race, and the double course, came upon one day; on a second day,
the wrestling, boxing, and pancratium. The chariot-races and the
pentathlum came on one and the same day. The pentathlum was justly
popular as calculated to secure an all-round development of the human
form. It included leaping, the foot-race, discus-throwing,
javelin-throwing, and wrestling. The Spartans, who were never charged
with being effeminate, were said to favour it while discountenancing the
more brutal pancratium. We certainly are not much attracted by the
license of the latter, evidently considered legitimate, as we read of
two athletes habitually winning this event by bending back their
antagonists’ fingers. One of them, Sostratus, was surnamed
“Finger-bender.” But the judges presided with absolute authority and
enforced severe penalties against violations of the rules.
Women were prohibited under pain of death from even crossing the river
and entering the sacred precinct during the time of the games. Pausanias
records one violation. Kallipateira, or Pherenike (“Victoria”), the
daughter of Diagoras, the Rhodian victor immortalized by Pindar, anxious
to see her son compete, disguised herself as a trainer. In her
exultation at her son’s success she betrayed her sex. The penalty
attached was to be hurled from the Typæum rock on a mountain south of
the Alpheus. In deference to the victories won by her father, her
brothers, and her son, she was pardoned, but thereafter the trainers
were compelled to enter naked like the athletes themselves.
The priestess of Demeter, however, was present _ex officio_, and
Pausanias expressly states that virgins also were admitted as
spectators. This statement is usually rejected, but it may have been
true for certain times under the influence of Sparta, whose customs
threw the sanction of public sentiment around the athletic contests of
their maidens, the future mothers of their fighting men.
Although the modern reader is apt to think of the chariot-races in
connection with Sicilian tyrants, they were, as we have seen from
Sophocles, an integral part of Greek life. Herodotus, in the midst of
his account of the battle of Marathon, calmly suspends hostilities while
he tells how Cimon, father of Miltiades, won three successive Olympic
victories with the same mares and, as fitting climax, adds that the
mares were buried on the stately avenue of Athenian tombs, facing the
grave of Cimon himself. If Herodotus really read this at Olympia the
incident would not have seemed to his audience an intrusive digression.
In addition to the four-horse and two-horse chariot-races there was the
race with mules—no mean animals in Greece and the Orient. Pindar
repeatedly celebrates them in his Olympian odes. There was also the
single race-horse ridden by a jockey. One horse from Syracuse,
Pherenicus (“Victor”), was celebrated in song both by Pindar and
Bacchylides. Pindar tells how he “ran the course, his body by the goad
unurged” and brought victory to Hieron. Bacchylides, reminding us that
the horse-races opened the events of the day, exclaims:—
“The Dawn, who touches earth with gold, saw Pherenicus, wind-swift
sorrel steed, victorious beside Alpheus eddying wide, and saw him,
too, victorious at Pytho the divine. And I lay hand on earth and
swear: Not yet has dust-cloud raised by horses in the lead e’er
touched him in the race-course as he hastened to the goal.
“Now sing of Zeus, the Kronos son, Olympian ruler of the gods and of
unwearièd Alpheus. Sing of mighty Pelops and of Pisa too, where famèd
Pherenicus won with hurrying feet the victory and came back to the
ramparts firm of Syracuse and brought to Hieron the (olive) leaf of
fortune fair.”
Pausanias tells of a Corinthian race-horse, Aura (“Breeze”), perhaps one
of the famous “Koppa”[38] breed, sired by Pegasus. The jockey was thrown
at the beginning of the race, but the mare continued without breaking
form, rounded the turning stake, quickened her pace at the sound of the
trumpet, reached the umpires first, knew that she had won, and stopped.
The owner of the riderless horse was proclaimed victor.
Footnote 38:
The old letters Koppa (ϙ) and Sampi (ϡ) were used to brand the
haunches of blooded horses. The letter ϙ, used as an abbreviation for
Korinthos, when obsolete in many parts of Greece, was retained in the
Corinthian alphabet. It had been carried to Italy by the early Greek
colonists and so passed into our alphabet as the letter Q.
Young Phidippides in the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes had plunged his
father into debt by his race-track operations and had in his stables a
racer of this Koppa breed bought with money borrowed from the usurer
Pasias.
It would be very unsafe to assert that the eager Greeks, if called back
to our own age of ingenious mechanisms, would turn uninterested from the
vicarious competition by motor-cars, or feel nothing but disgust at
human forms crooked into the semblance of brutes over a flying bicycle,
but it is safe to emphasize that all their contests, whether exhibiting
the development of the perfect human body or the beauty of the horse,
ministered to that sure sense of form and proportion which they demanded
and obtained from poet, painter, and musician, sculptor, architect, and
athlete. But horse and chariot-racing involved certain special
temptations. As time went on, the “anything to win” spirit was sure, now
and then, to assert itself. The legend of the lynch-pin withdrawn from
the chariot of Œnomaus by the bribery of Pelops must have called for
strenuous casuistry from the priests of Zeus when it was necessary to
punish offenders for shady practices towards rivals. Pindar
magnificently ignores the thought of treachery. With him it is a god
that—
“glorified him with the gift of golden chariot and winged untiring
steeds: mighty Œnomaus he overtook and won the maiden for his bride.”
Although in later times the peripatetic professional developed and could
claim as precedent the victories repeatedly won at various centres by
the athletes of old, yet, at least for their own times, Pindar and
Bacchylides were justified in assuming, alike for their Sicilian princes
or for their boyish winners in the foot-race, the genuine amateur spirit
of athletic rivalry. In the fourth century B. C. a Cretan, victor in the
long race, was bribed to transfer his citizenship to Ephesus. The
Olympian athlete had not then become, like the modern base-ball pitcher,
a legitimate commodity of interstate commerce, and the Cretans with
justifiable indignation pronounced the sentence of perpetual exile
against Sotades the offender.
For Pindar, indeed, it was necessary that every song should rise above
the sordid, either in belief or practice. He was at once a supreme
artist and a herald of the ideal. He even expurgates canonical mythology
to infuse into his odes some deeper, nobler lesson suggested by the
external and physical victory. And this, although several of his odes
were addressed to rich tyrants like Hieron of Syracuse, at whose court
were welcomed and honoured Æschylus, Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides and
many more. “He was to them in some measure what Augustus was to Virgil
and Horace, what Lorenzo de’ Medici was to the members of the Florentine
Academy.”[39] Pindar honestly regarded him as the patron of letters and
as a bulwark against the barbarians. He had fought under Gelon against
the Carthaginians, and, soon after the battles of Himera and Salamis,
the Etruscans, who were also threatening Greek supremacy, were, in 474
B. C., defeated by him. Early in the nineteenth century, from a partial
excavation at Olympia, a bronze helmet of Etruscan make found its way to
the British Museum. On it is the inscription: “Hieron, son of
Deinomenes, and the Syracusans (dedicated) to Zeus these Tyrrhene spoils
from Cumæ.” It tantalizes with the sequence of historic associations.
From lips within this helmet came words of war in the dead Etruscan
tongue that still baffles linguistic classification; on it were
inscribed Greek words in the dialect of the proud Greek colonists in
Sicily; mingled Greek dialects greeted it when dedicated in the sacred
centre of the motherland; and now it is again held as spoils by another
and mightier island folk.
Footnote 39:
Compare Jebb’s _Bacchylides_, p. 200.
Pindar could not prophesy the fatal conflict between the tyrants of the
west and the greedy imperialism of Athenian demagogues. He could not
peer into the stone quarries at Syracuse and see the legatees of Salamis
scorched under the lidless eye of a Sicilian sun. He could not foresee a
Macedonian ruling over Hellas nor forecast the Greek world under Roman
sway. He could not have understood how even Plato, with the additional
perspective of another half century, crowded with disturbing shifts of
value both in literature and government, would seek relief from the
spectre of tyranny not in democracy but by converting the baser metal of
the despot into the pure gold of the philosophic King. Yet Pindar is not
without his misgivings. In words none too vague he warns the ruler,
whose gold called forth his songs, of the dangers inherent in power. In
the first Olympian he tells Hieron:—
“A man erreth if he thinketh that in doing aught he shall escape God’s
eyes.... Man’s greatness is of many kinds; the highest is to be
achieved by Kings. Crane not thy neck for more. And be it thine to
walk life’s path with lofty tread.”
With better right and greater force Æschylus, himself warrior of
Marathon and Salamis, in the “Agamemnon” covertly warns his Athenian
contemporaries, then engaged in imperial schemes of expansion in Egypt
and elsewhere, against the haughty spirit that goeth before a fall. His
words easily connect themselves with this Pindaric ode because the
return of the Greek host from Troy brings out on Clytemnestra’s lips the
metaphor drawn from the double racecourse—the δίαυλος. Ilium is but the
turning-post at the farther end; Argos is both the starting-point and
the goal; the stadium is the Ægean sea:—
“But beware lest some desire
May fall upon our men, succumbing to their greed,
To ravage what they should not: they for safe return
Unto their homes must bend them back again, adown
The double race-track’s other leg.”
To make selections from Pindar is to pry out jewels from an antique
setting. But his Olympic odes give the best interpretation of the best
meaning of the games. Some were impromptu odes crystallized under the
stress of the victory and sung in the Altis while the full moon shone
upon the hero of the day. Some were longer and written at leisure for
the supplementary celebration at the victor’s home. But in any case the
thought was not impromptu. The Theban eagle soared habitually and paused
for a moment only at Olympia, sent by—
“the Hours, circling in the dance to music of the lyre’s changing
notes, to be a witness to the greatest of all games.”
Yet with all his soaring Pindar never forgot the gracious beauty of
human life. The Graces are ever near. Victory, he tells us, by the
Graces’ aid is won, and the charioteers—
“Charis transfigures with the beauty of their fame, as they drive
foremost in the twelfth round of the race.”
Pindar calls his song “a writing tally of the Muses.” Not he that runs
may read, but whoever will be at pains to wrap the Greek scroll around
the tally-stick can read the cypher and can find the clue to lead him
safely through “the sounding labyrinths of song.”[40] Pindar could
presuppose an acquaintance with mythology at least as familiar as was to
every child of a generation ago the knowledge of the Old Testament.
Conflicting myths lived side by side in the popular consciousness. The
sculptor and the poet could choose or reject at will. However recondite
may seem at times the application of the myth to the Olympic victor in
question, the pages of Pindar are constantly illuminated by some
flash-light that photographs upon the particular a glimpse of the
universal. From Olympia in Elis we are transported to Olympus. Heracles
brought from Olympus the charter for the games; there, too, is both the
starting-line and finish of the poet’s courser: “Pegasus is stabled in
Olympus.” Pindar does not belittle the mysteries of the unseen. When the
fame of Theron of Acragas (Girgenti) is said to over-pass Sicily and to
touch the pillars of Heracles, the thought of the pathless ocean
suggests a wider and uncharted Cosmos. His search-light projects for a
moment its stare into infinity, but it is forthwith checked with
characteristic restraint:—
“What lies beyond nor foot of wise man nor unwise has
ever trod. I will not follow on. My quest were vain.”
Footnote 40:
_Olympian Odes_, i, translated by E. Myers.
Pindar’s description of the ancient consecration of the Altis may serve
to justify the Labours of Heracles carved upon the Zeus temple:—
“Heracles there measured off a sacred grove unto the sovereign father
and he ordained the plain around for rest and feasting. He honoured
the Alpheus stream together with the twelve lord gods and he gave
utterance to the name of Kronos hill, till then unnamed.”
His praise of the discus victor comes to mind when we see a copy of
Myron’s Discobolus or the graceful throw of a contemporary Greek in the
Stadium of modern Athens:—
“In distance passing all, Enikeus hurled the stone with circling hand
and from his warrior mates a mighty cheer swept by.”
And we seem ourselves to share in the evening celebration in the Altis
when—
“the lovely shining of the fair-faced moon illumined it and all the
precinct rang with song and festal mirth.”
We can share too in the undertone of pathos in Pindar’s reference to the
dead father of a young athlete. Asopichus is winner in the boys’
footrace, and the news of his victory is sent to his father in Hades.
The Arcadian nymph Echo is the messenger:—
“Fly, Echo, to the dark-walled palace of Persephone and to his father
bear the tidings glorious. Seek Cleodamus, tell him how for him his
son hath crowned his boyish hair with wreaths of th’ ennobling games
in famous Pisa’s vale.”
Perhaps the most radiant picture of “festal mirth” is called up by
Pindar’s seventh Olympian, written for Diagoras of Rhodes. Diagoras’s
two sons and his grandson were also Olympic victors. This acted, on at
least two occasions, as a family prophylactic. His daughter, as we have
seen, was pardoned by reason of this for her intrusion in disguise at
the Olympic games, and Dorieus, his son, when captured by the Athenians
in a sea-fight, escaped the only alternatives usual in the case of a
prisoner of war. He was neither put to death nor forced to pay a ransom,
but set free, just as Balaustion, the Rhodian girl, was set free by the
Syracusans because she delighted her captors by repeating a new drama of
Euripides. And the Rhodians wrote up Pindar’s ode in letters of gold in
the Athena temple on the acropolis of Lindus. The modern visitor to this
enchanting island climbs up the lofty headland that rises abruptly
between the shining water of the two indenting bays, and, before he
passes through the ruins of the ancient propylæa and the still imposing
portals of the fortress of the Knights of St. John, he sees upon the
solid rock the after part of a huge trireme with the steering-oar and
the rippling water carved in stone. He can imagine a trireme of a former
day entering the harbour below with triumphal sweep of oars, bringing
Diagoras and his victory back to his townsfolk in this far-off corner of
the Greek world. He can picture the procession of Lindians to Athena’s
temple; the brilliant colouring of robes and chitons; the choral music;
the exultation in their townsman’s physical prowess and their
intoxication of delight because the greatest of lyric poets is reaching
out to them, as to the bridegroom at a wedding-feast, a chalice of pure
gold resplendent, brimming with the “distilled nectar” of his song.
But Pindar soars beyond the pride of life even as he universalizes the
individual experience. It was not only St. Paul’s idealism that
perceived the great contest in which humanity is forever engaged. In
Pindar’s second Olympian the athlete’s triumph suggests the victory over
Death, and the Kronos hill becomes the “tower of Kronos” to which the
victor travels over “the highway of Olympian Zeus.” So the arch-idealist
Plato, in closing his great constructive vision of the Ideal State, can
find no more fitting comparison for him that overcometh than by likening
him to the victors in the Games: “If we take my advice, believing that
the soul is immortal, we shall ever hold to that upward pathway and at
every turn shall practice justice joined to intelligence that we may be
at once friends of ourselves and of the gods and may fare well ... both
while we abide here and when, like the prize-winners, we come to gather
in the prizes of the games.”
But aside from lofty thoughts like these, native to the greater
interpretative intelligences of Greece, the recently discovered poems of
Bacchylides tell us much of the actual spirit of the games. Bacchylides
was nephew of Simonides, the poet-laureate of the nation from Thermopylæ
to Platæa, and he was also the grandson and namesake of a famous
athlete. He was qualified to sing both the Games and the Graces. And the
native of the little island of Ceos did not hesitate to enter the
contest with the splendidly arrogant Theban who could compare his
inferior rivals to “crows that chatter against the divine bird of
Zeus.”[41]
Footnote 41:
Pindar, _Olympian Odes_, ii, translated by E. Myers.
Of the twelve epinician odes of Bacchylides three were addressed to
Hieron, at whose court he enjoyed especial favour. Two Olympic odes were
written for Lachon, a young athlete from the poet’s native island. One
of these is a short serenade sung before the victor’s own house by his
fellow-citizens. Nothing could better illustrate the intensity of local
pride and enthusiasm. Now the victorious athlete is praised, now his
very identity is merged in the personification of his native land. It is
Ceos herself that has won the boxing and the foot-race. Lachon, as the
ode reminds us, has already been greeted by the impromptu choral sung at
Olympia on the evening of his triumph. Now he is welcomed at home by
another choral for which there has been ample time to make ready.
Bacchylides may well have written this little serenade not as a paid
commission but as a spontaneous outburst of patriotic pride and
affection for his country and his fellow countrymen. We should prefer to
have it so. In any case we feel a human interest in the young athlete
whose strong body and swift feet have won the prize:—
“Lachon has lot of such renown
From Zeus most-high as yet had none,
Enhancing fame with feet that run
Beside Alphēus flowing down.
For which e’er this with hair wreath-bound
Olympic youths sang songs around
How Ceos, with her vineyards crowned,
The boxing and the foot-race won.
“Thee now song-queen Urania’s hymn
Ennobles—O thou wind-fleet one,
Of Aristomenes the son—
Thy praise as victor homeward bringing
And here before thy lintel singing
How thou, thy course through stade-race winging,
Brought Ceos fame no time shall dim.”
From little Ceos, the second in order of those bright stepping-stones
that dot the Ægean from Attica to Rhodes, we may quickly cross to the
mainland and find our way to Marathon. From there to Athens we trace
that greatest of all ancient race-courses over which the Greek runner
ran in full armour to give with his dying breath the warning and the
news of victory, and to win a memorial beside which the olive-wreath
might well turn pale.[42]
Footnote 42:
For this story see chapter vii, p. 159, and note.
When the modern Athenians revived the Olympic Games the chariot-races
were beyond their resources. Contests of personal, physical strength and
skill constitute the fitting nucleus of the games held in the old
Stadium, now newly covered with marble from the “mountain that looks on
Marathon.” And it was a happy and natural thought to add as the closing
event the great Marathon race. While perpetuating the glory of the
Athenians it reënforces the loyalty of all the Greeks to their national
capital. In this race centres the chief ambition of the Greeks. The
other events are of secondary importance. If fanciful critics demand any
further excuse for the change of venue from Olympia to Athens, it may be
enough to remind them that Heracles (according to one tradition) brought
in the first place from the banks of the Ilissus the original graft of
the sacred olive-tree from which, at Olympia, the victor’s crown was cut
with the golden sickle. With graceful sentiment, however, the olive
sprigs are now in turn brought to Athens from Olympia.
Despite all the modern barnacles that encrust the ancient torso, the
student of old Greek life can find much to stimulate him in the revival
of contests inherited, or directly developed, from ancient times—such as
the foot-race, short and long distance; javelin-throwing; leaping; and,
chief of all, the discus-throw in the ancient style. The interest of the
Greeks to-day in this latter event is second only to that in the
Marathon race.
A modern, seated in the Stadium at Athens, has cause for meditation.
Behind the gaudy hats and parasols of women, the more sombre clothing of
men, or the brilliant uniforms of officials gleams Pentelic marble. Over
many tens of thousands of spectators, gathered from all Greece and
Europe and from beyond the Atlantic, float the flags of powerful
nations: of Turkey; of the lands that look upon the northern seas; of
the mighty spawn of the Anglo-Roman; and of the New Atlantis. None of
these nations had emerged from barbarism when this same choir of
encircling hills sang together the triumph song of Salamis. Prometheus,
the incarnation of human self-assertion, rebel to the rule of Zeus,
pinioned on a crag overlooking those same northern seas, is made by the
Greek prophet to utter the pessimistic cry: “New gods rule Olympus.”
Now, as a modern Greek remarked to an American visitor, “the old gods
have migrated to a new Olympus.”
But although the gold-ivory statue of Zeus cannot reappear from the
ruins of Olympia, yet “the godhead of supernal song” remains in the
literature of the Greeks, interpreting and interpreted by the
contributions of the archæologists. Swinburne’s words are not mere
poetic license:—
“Dead the great chryselephantine god, as dew last evening shed;
Dust of earth and foam of ocean is the symbol of his head:
Earth and ocean shall be shadows when Prometheus shall be dead.”