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 […]
