For months now, we have been enthusiastically putting together this special issue on the ancient Olympics—celebrating the return of the games to their country of origin: Greece.
The Olympic Games were held between 776 B.C. and 393 A.D. During this 1,200-year period, these competitions—along with other festivals at Delphi, Isthmia and Nemea—represented a human striving for perfection: Olympic champions demonstrated not only athletic skill but also the aesthetic ideal of controlled motion and strength bound by grace, and the moral ideal of a balanced, refined and disciplined character. To the ancient Greeks, these were the qualities that made Olympians pleasing to the gods and accounted for their victories.
But the Olympics had mysterious aspects, too, associated with darker regions of human existence. The Olympic festival, for instance, was also a religious-funerary ritual involving the sacrifice of 100 bulls to the god Zeus. The ancient sources are full of stories of the mutilation and death of athletes, which seem to have been a regular part of the Greek games. Moreover, the games were put to an end because the emperor Theodosius, who ruled the eastern empire from 379 to 395 A.D., thought them a threat to his Christian beliefs.
What seems universal about the ancient games is not only their association with the perfection of life but also their association with disorder, corruption and death. This is one of the things the modern Olympic Games, first revived in Athens in 1896, have in common with the ancient games.
Although most people attribute the modern games to the French baron Pierre de Courbertin, the idea of reviving the ancient festival was first suggested in the 1830s by a young Greek poet named Panagiotis Soutsos. Greece had recently achieved its freedom from the Ottoman Empire, and Soutsos believed that reviving the Olympic Games would revive the Greek soul.
The modern games, then, have from the beginning been colored by political and social conflicts. In 1900, to the dismay of Greek nationalists, the games were held in Paris—and since then they have become permanently international. (Even in the 1896 Athens games, most events were won by Americans.) In 1936 the German Nazi party tried, and failed, to make them a demonstration of “Aryan” supremacy. In 1968, at Mexico City, black Americans protested civil rights abuses by lifting black gloves in the air on the victory podium. In 1980 the U.S. boycotted the Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—and the Soviet Union reciprocated four years later.
And, of course, who does not recall with horror the events in Munich of September 5, 1972, when 11 Israeli athletes and one German policeman were shot by terrorists?
Now we face the prospect of a troubled Olympics in Athens. It is not certain that several of the athletic venues will be completed in time, and construction crews are racing to finish the airport, roads and hotels. There are also serious concerns about security, especially after the bombing of the British consulate in Istanbul last November and the bombings in Athens on May 5. The fear that the games might not even come off has prompted the International Olympic Committee to take out $170 million in insurance for the full or partial cancellation of the events—the first time this has been done.
Human striving, failure, violence, grandeur, idealism, cynicism, corruption, perseverance—all these are as much a part of the Olympics, ancient and modern, as the “thrill of victory and agony of defeat.”
For months now, we have been enthusiastically putting together this special issue on the ancient Olympics—celebrating the return of the games to their country of origin: Greece. The Olympic Games were held between 776 B.C. and 393 A.D. During this 1,200-year period, these competitions—along with other festivals at Delphi, Isthmia and Nemea—represented a human striving for perfection: Olympic champions demonstrated not only athletic skill but also the aesthetic ideal of controlled motion and strength bound by grace, and the moral ideal of a balanced, refined and disciplined character. To the ancient Greeks, these were the qualities that made Olympians […]
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