Posted on 07/23/2004 6:33:12 AM PDT by presidio9
From spectacular chariot races to bloody wrestling bouts, the Ancient Olympics offered the ultimate pagan entertainment package.
Competitors had to swear an oath on a slice of boar's meat that they had not used magic to boost their performances.
Runners making a false start were thrashed by the official whip bearer.
Wrestlers could tear out their opponent's intestines -- but eye-gouging was banned.
Prostitutes made a year's wages in five days at the Greek spectacular. Married women were forbidden to attend the GamesA where all athletes performed naked.
That gave writer Tony Perrottet the perfect title for his entertaining look at the Ancient Olympics, a sporting, religious and showbusiness extravaganza that ran for 1,200 years.
"In terms of audience satisfaction, our own revived Olympic Games can hardly compare -- unless they were to be combined with the carnival in Rio, Easter Mass at the Vatican and a tour of Universal Studios," he writes in "The Naked Olympics".
The slim volume of popular history is a time machine -- in graphic detail, the reader is transported back to taste the blood, sweat and tears at Olympia.
The start of the Games was pure Hollywood -- 40 chariots hurtling round the tight turns of a deadly course offering non-stop thrills and spills.
"This was a dramatic and lethal affair whose details Hollywood, for once, has not exaggerated," Perrottet writes.
"Movie epics like Ben Hur give quite an accurate idea of a chariot race's delirious start, the confusion that would grow with each lap and above all the sudden violence of the accidents."
BLOOD-STAINED CORPSE
Sophocles, showing what a dab hand he could have been as an ancient sports writer, graphically described one of many Olympic accidents.
"As the crowd saw the driver somersault, there rose a wail of pity for the youth as he was bounced into the ground, then flung head over heels into the sky," he wrote.
"When his companions caught the runaway team and freed the blood-stained corpse from his rig, he was disfigured and marred past the recognition of his best friend."
Boxing and wrestling sated even the most blood-thirsty spectator in Olympia, permanent home for 293 successive Olympics until 392 AD.
Boxers had no ring, there were no rounds and the match kept going until one boxer was knocked senseless. Body blows were banned. Punches were always aimed at the head.
Pankration was a deadly mix of wrestling and kick-boxing. Maximum pain was the goal in this savage all-out brawl with legs twisted from sockets, shoulders dislocated and ribs broken.
The 40,000 spectators crammed into the Olympic stadium had to be devoted sports fans ready to put up with logistical nightmares.
The water supply and sanitation rapidly deteriorated. In the searing sun, many died from dehydration and fever.
"Nobody bathed for days. The sharp odour of sweat did battle with Olympia's fragrant forests and wild flowers," said New York-based Australian Perrottet.
NAKED GLORY
Nobody beat the athletes for pure exhibitionism as they paraded in all their naked glory for a society that mirrored the 21st-century obsession with youth and the body beautiful.
"Competing nude was a time-honoured tradition of ancient Greek athletes as much a part of Hellenic culture as drinking wine, discussing Homer or worshipping Apollo," Perrottet said.
Locker-room libido reigned supreme with sex and athletics intertwined in the ancient Greek gymnasiums which invariably boasted a statue of Eros.
"For the Greeks, it was almost a social duty for adult males to take adolescent boys as lovers," Perrottet said.
Olympic winners were garlanded with olive wreaths and showered with gifts that ranged from lifetime seats at the local amphitheatre to generous pensions.
And the ancient heroes were larger than life.
In the sixth century BC, teenage wrestler Milo of Croton developed his own rustic weight-training programme down on the farm in southern Italy.
He lifted a young bull calf every day until the mighty beast was full grown.
Lifting that real-life dumb-bell worked wonders.
The original Italian stallion ended up the greatest Olympic wrestler of all time, winning the boys' event and then five successive Olympics.
Competitors had to swear an oath on a slice of boar's meat that they had not used magic to boost their performances.
Prostitutes made a year's wages in five days at the Greek spectacular.
The start of the Games was pure Hollywood -- 40 chariots hurtling round the tight turns of a deadly course offering non-stop thrills and spills.
were?!?
"Today's youth loves luxury, has bad manners, disregards authority and has no respect whatsoever for age. -Socrates (cir) 390BC
"Wrestlers could tear out their opponent's intestines..."
Sounds like a little poetic license.
The buttsex crowd loves "outing" historical figures who are unable to defend themselves.
"Today's youth loves luxury, has bad manners, disregards authority and has no respect whatsoever for age. -Socrates (cir) 390BC
It happened, but it has been exaggerated. Many Greeks did not engage in this sort of practice, and actively disapproved of it (Pericles comes to mind.) Aristophanes' comedies show characters ridiculing "boylovers" and "effeminate" men.
Oddly enough, it seems to have been more characteristic of "less developed" parts of Greece like Sparta and Boiotia than of Athens.
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