The Olympic Games – now and then 

Most of what we know about the ancient Olympics comes from Pausanias, a geographer born in Asia minor in the second century AD. He travelled around mainland Greece for between ten and twenty years. Then, not later than AD 175, he wrote his Descriptio Graecae (Periêgêsis tês Hellados; Guide to Greece / Description of Greece). Greece was then a Roman province. Pausanias aimed to describe ‘all things Greek’, for which Olympia was a showcase. He used earlier written accounts that have since perished, oral accounts and the evidence of his own travels, such as inscriptions on statues which no longer exist.  

There’s a clear break between the ancient Olympic Games, practised at Olympia for eight centuries, and the modern Olympic Games which started in Paris in 1896. The ancient Olympic Games inspired the modern ones; that is all. But when we look at them, we find some similarities as well as some startling differences.  

Unlike the modern Olympics, the ancient ones were always held at Olympia. They began primarily as local sports. After the first fifty years, they attracted competitors from further afield: from elsewhere in Peloponnesus, especially Sparta, with a few victors from Corinth, Athens, Sicily, and in Asia Minor. From the early sixth century BC they were truly Panhellenic.  

The range of competitions diversified over time, in the ancient Olympics as for the modern ones. At first the only race was the stadium, a run of 200 metres. Gradually running 400 and then also 2,400 metres or so were added, followed by wrestling, the pentathlon (jumping, running, quoit, javelin, wrestling), boxing, chariot races for four and for two horses and for colts respectively, horse, colt and mule races, contests for heralds and trumpeters, and pancration for boys. Some were enduring features, while others were discontinued after one or more trials.  

As in the modern games, there were different competitions for different categories of people. Within the main Olympics, the two clear categories were men and boys. Young women had their own races every four years, the Heraea. A striking element differentiating the ancient games from the modern was that married women were barred from watching the Olympics, under pain of death by being hurled from a mountain.  

Cheating, regrettably, was known in ancient Greece as it is today. Athletes, trainers and judges all had to swear to do nothing to bring the Games into disrepute, and to be fair and to spurn bribes. Nonetheless, early in the fourth century BC, the Thessalian boxer Eupolos, was caught offering bribes to his opponents. They all had to pay a fine. “Victory is to be achieved by speed of feet and strength of body, not with cash”, the statues erected with the money so raised noted severely. Cheating could take horrendous forms. A regulation from the late sixth century BC forbade deliberately injuring one’s opponents’ fingers. This did not stop one Sicilian wrestler, Leontiskos, from winning consistently by bending the fingers of his adversaries.  

Alongside bald descriptions Pausanias wryly relates numerous anecdotes. The following makes clear that the ancient Olympics, like their modern counterparts, had their dramatic moments:  

“There were other men afterwards who were fined by Elis, one of whom was an Alexandrian boxer fined in the two hundred and eighteenth Olympics [AD 93]; his name was Apollonios by his nickname was Sprinkler: nicknames are a sort of local tradition in Alexandria. This man was the first Egyptian tried and convicted by Elis, not for giving or taking a bribe, but for dishonouring the games in the following way. He failed to arrive at the stated time and as a result the Eleans followed the law and barred him from the games; Herakleides, who was another Alexandrian, proved that his excuse, that contrary winds had held him up in the Cyclades, was a lie: he was really late through collecting prizes from the games in Ionia. So the Eleans expelled Apollonios and any other boxer who failed to turn up on the agreed day from the games, and awarded Herakleides the wreath without a fight. At this point Apollonios tied up his hands in leather thongs for boxing, and ran in and hit Herakleides, who was already wearing the wild olive and had then taken refuge with the Greek arbiters. Apollonios’s lack of common sense was very expensive to him.”  

(Pausanias, Guide to Greece, translated by Peter Levi, vol. 2 (Penguin, 1971), p. 262)  

Whether after the blow Herakleides thought his easy victory was worth it, we shall never know.  

The sixteenth century was the most prolific time for printed editions of Pausanias’s Greek guide, starting with an Aldine edition in Greek from 1516. This was the first full printed version, although ‘Attica’ had been printed independently at the turn of the century. Senate House Library is lucky to hold the Italian translation from 1594: the first translation into a vernacular language. Complete translations into other vernaculars – French, German, and English – would not follow until the eighteenth century, from 1731, 1766 and 1794 respectively. Pages from the Italian and the earliest English translation are shown here. You might expect them to come from the library of the classical historian George Grote, who referred to Pausanias in his History of Greece and who bequeathed his library to the University of London in 1871. He did own a couple of editions, in Greek and Latin, but we owe the copies featured to the London Institution, a subscription library in Finsbury Circus which closed in 1912.