S09E02

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. In this sequence of episodes, we're hoisting our sail and voyaging to the Mediterranean shores of Ancient Greece, the setting of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. In the game, players go on an epic adventure across the Ancient Greek world in the turbulent time of the Peloponnesian War, when the city-state of Athens struggled for supremacy with the warrior kingdom of Sparta. Along the way, players can immerse themselves in the culture of that world and meet some of the people who have profoundly influenced Western culture forever. Today, we're taking a break from exploring and seeking recreation at Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games. The unrelenting, Grecian sun beats down on your face. Around you, people are filling the stalls that rise up the gentle hilltop. The seats overlook a naturally formed arena, lined with sturdy columns reaching into the sky and adorned with colourful banners. Looking at the other spectators, you feel as if all of Greece is gathered here. People from across the fragmented city-states have come here to Olympia. Far from these quiet fields and groves, war rages. But for a few days in the spirit of peace, you can almost forget that your fellow Spartans are battling against the Athenians. Almost because it's the soldiers from their ranks that you've come to watch compete in the games. And today, you hope that a Spartan will take home the honour of the victor's wreath. The sound of chatter is like the swarming of bees. For the week of the games, Olympia is alive with bustling spectators and people come to sell their wares. In the charged atmosphere before the games begin, you can almost smell the lightning bolt Zeus from atop Mount Olympus, hurled down at the olive grove to create the arena you now gaze upon. It's from those olive trees that the branches used to crown the champion will be cut. And the sacred tree of Zeus himself. A reminder that the games are a celebration of him, the king of gods. You have already laid an offering at his altar, some honey held in a small clay pot, in thanks for a year's good fortune. The crowd roars, their cheers rising like a great wave as two men walk towards each other from across different ends of the arena. From this distance, you can see that both are tall and lean, with dark golden skin that shines with oil in the late afternoon light. You lean towards them in anticipation. The Pankratian is about to begin. Beside you, a man reminds his companion of the rules. Rather, that there are no rules except no biting and no eye gouging, but anything else goes. Like everyone else, you've heard the legendary tales of heroes who have competed in the Pankratian. The sport is the ultimate test of a soldier's strength. In the arena, athletes stand with an achore ring facing each other. They adopt a fighting stance, their weight on the back foot, holding for the call to begin. A hush falls over the spectators. The third man, holding a cane, cries out. He's the umpire. The fight begins. The taller of the men, a Spartan, swings a swift punch at the other's chin. His opponent twists away, just in time to lash out with his foot, placing a firm kick to his attacker's stomach. The sparring continues like this, both men twisting and spinning and swiping at each other, parrying and ducking and lunging, throwing up clouds of dust. The contestants are evenly matched. You hunch forward desperate not to miss a moment of the action that's around you, spectators hiss and cheer while blows are exchanged. The shorter athlete attempts a strike, but the Spartan sidesteps and grasps the inside of the kicking leg from behind the knee. He pulls it up, unbalancing his opponent. He falls backward as the Spartan advances. He rolls onto his front, but the Spartan traps him in a headlock. For a minute, the man on the floor, his face red and panting, raises his index finger, signaling his submission. The Pankration is over. You get to your feet, crowing your arms above your head and cheering with the thousands of others watching. The Spartan has won. He is an Olympic champion. And today, the Ancient Olympic Games were a place where, every four years, people of different states would gather to enjoy watching the greatest athletes test their mettle. But did the ancient games have anything more in common with their modern counterparts? How did such an extraordinary occasion come about? And who was allowed to compete for the greatest prize in sport? To answer these questions and more, I'm joined by Dr Nigel Spivey from the University of Cambridge. His book, The Ancient Olympics, goes beyond the myths to portray the games as they really were, while also looking at the influences they've had on modern culture. Thank you very much for joining us, Nigel. Welcome to Echoes of History. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. I guess to start off with, what do we mean when we talk about the Ancient Olympics? I guess what we think about today, we call the modern Olympics. What's the difference between the two, apart from time, I guess? Oh, that's a big question to start with. I mean, when we talk about the Ancient Olympics, we are essentially referring to the continuous and institutionalized meeting of athletes that took place at this place, Olympia, in the Peloponnese area of Greece, from the notional start date of 776 BCE, up until closure under one of the Byzantine emperors, around about 400 AD, or CE, if you prefer. And that's the continuum. But if you ask, how do we know that absolute date of start? The answer is we just have to take the word of the Ancient Greeks, and they didn't have, of course, the chronology that we're calling BC, at least not in the time when they started referring to the beginning of the Olympics. But for them, it was the beginning of history. So they start counting their absolute dates in history from the First Olympiad. And we don't really have a cross-referencing system. I mean, it would be marvelous to go over, let's say, to Ancient Egypt and find some documents in Egypt that said, you know, 776 means this in our pharaonic calendar. But we don't have that. So it's a curious situation to be in chronologically. Yeah, and fascinating that it was obviously considered so important that they literally date the beginning of time from the First Olympiad. Yes, and they don't mean the beginning of time. But if you were to ask them, OK, so what happened before the Olympics started? I think they would go kind of misty-eyed and start talking about, well, that was the time of Theseus, Odysseus, Achilles, Heracles. So they would merge it into mythology. But without the sense that that's all incredible, that they believed that there had been a period before the Olympics when, for want of a better term, gods and superheroes, superhumans, were on the Earth. The way I usually like to present this to students is to remind them of how the Greeks in classical times dealt with finds of dinosaurs. Because they didn't know about dinosaurs. They didn't know about prehistoric megafauna. And you can probably see where this is going. So they thought that when they found enormous fossil fossilized relics of something like Tyrannosaurus or whatever, or Pterodactyl, they took that to be either the remains of some fantastic monster or the bodily remains of one of these heroes, Ajax or Achilles, you know, a bit of a shoulder blade. So they did imagine that there had been this time when these superhumans were on their territory waging battles. And I think this is important for the history of sport, performing acts of strength and speed and agility that far surpassed anything that ordinary mortals were capable of. Yeah, which is a lot like how I feel when I watch the modern Olympics, I guess. So how then did the Olympics emerge? There's lots of kind of myths and legends about how they came into being. And some of those involve the Greek gods and these extreme feats of prowess. Do we have any real sense of what some of those myths are, but how close to reality any of them might be? I mean, I think we have we tend to have a mindset that is distrustful of the fabulous and the mythological. So in that case, we have to rethink ourselves, we have to think ourselves into a more credulous mentality about these things. But of course, the big difference between the Greeks and us in terms of how we have approached Olympia is that since around the last quarter of the 19th century, we have been trying to dig for the evidence of how the Olympics started, amongst other things. So we think we have a story that we can match against the mythology. So mythology, for example, tells you that how do you get the length of the stadium at Olympia? It was paced out by Heracles, their hero, Heracles. So the same Heracles who dispatches monsters, strangles lions, etc., paces out the stage in Olympia. And that's a picturesque way of thinking about it. Of course, the archaeologists are more skeptical and want to find a kind of Bronze Age substratum for what eventually flowers as the institution of Olympics. And to some extent, I think they've been successful. I mean, I think archaeology of Olympia, which is ongoing, by the way, it's a century old plus project and there's still plenty to do. They haven't even started on the Hippodrome at Olympia. But they've established, I think, pretty convincingly that people were meeting at this site. In the Peloponnese before the Olympics got going as an official festival and that some kind of religious worship was happening there and probably associated with that. Now, to put it, it's I mean, the evidence is of lots of very small figurines of animals and some sort of anthropomorphic as well. The animals, the horses, the cattle being dedicated as part of a sort of ritual at this place. You know, some have supposed that what this means is that people are getting together on a kind of regular annual basis to do horse trading, to show off their livestock and such like. And that then you can imagine how that would develop into, you know, my horse is faster than yours. Let's put it to the test and you start to create these competitions. So I think some kind of contest going on that involve tests of strength and speed in a place that is that is numinous. I think even, you know, in the age of mass tourism, people sense in Olympia, it's got quite a dramatic microclimate. There are lots of thunderstorms, it gets very humid. And when you hear a clap of thunder, Zeus rumbling, gathering the clouds. You can imagine how it sort of picked up in the Bronze Age, the sense that something was to be venerated here. Yeah. So you're almost in a spot where you're a bit closer to the gods performing these feats that are sort of are they trying to emulate what they've heard of the gods and the superheroes doing? Are they trying to prove and improve their sporting prowess with a view to emulating those people? I mean, I think the whole cult function of Olympia depends upon they had this institution of hero worship, which is not quite the same as our more metaphorical application of this. And it was possible for a mortal to gain immortality if they had a bit of divine blood in their creation, like like Heracles. So they were already kind of half, half immortal. But the nearest thing with a mortal could do in terms of aspiring to be immortal, to be a god, was to try and approximate to the power and the astonishing sort of potency of these gods. And of course, because the gods were anthropomorphically conceived. So Zeus is just like a very powerful old man, but he is, as we would say, he's ripped. And he never ages, of course, because he's a god. You think of Apollo, the image of Apollo is basically the image of the perfect Greek athlete, young man in the prime and able to move faster than is conceivable. It can be anywhere at any time. The point about hero worship is that some mortals could sort of become interstitial. So you know, that that boundary between the mortal and the immortal, you could sort of ascend some notches towards immortality. And what kind of immortality was it? Well, you might have a statue erected in your honor that you hoped being made of bronze or marble. It might stay in that place forever. It didn't, but that's another story. Or someone might write a poem about you, about your victory. And that would become studied as a classic. Well, that has happened. You know, so we've got poems by the likes of Pindar and Bacchylides that celebrate named athletes who won at Olympia. And if you study those poems, you will, as it were, get to know the athletes who live on in the memory, even today. So it's almost as if the fame of winning some of these events was a version of immortality that mortal men could try and achieve. They could try and achieve it. And if they were perceived to be successful, they gained the kind of talismanic power. And it may sound preposterous to us, but you know, there's evidence from antiquity that, you would want to touch an athlete to get some of their power, get some of it. I mean, maybe they had luck as well. The gods had sort of favored them with the victory. If you could just get close to them, absorb some of their kudos and their kleos, which is the word for their sort of fame that carried all sorts of privileges and benefits with it. That was good. And the next best thing, of course, was if there was a statue of them, touch the statue. Some of their power might come to you and you worship them in the sense that you make offerings to them, drink their health. If they've passed on, you imagine them being somewhere in an afterlife that is to be coveted. And just to think about the place a little bit more, are there specific reasons why Olympia was chosen as the site for this to take place? Well, Olympia, as I said, it's one of those Bronze Age sites in the Peloponnese. There was a burial mound there, a tumulus. Now, the Greeks would not have thought of excavating it because in a sense they still, they recognized its power as a burial place and it would have been a sort of sacrilege. But one can imagine them making offerings around this tumulus to the hero. And they thought the hero who was buried there was someone that they called Pelops. And they constructed a whole set of stories around Pelops about how he arrives at Olympia in search of, or this area, he arrives in search of a bride. And eventually there's a sort of chariot contest between him and the father of his potential bride, which goes not horribly wrong. It goes well for Pelops, but it goes wrong in the sense that the king in this kind of Freudian way gets dispatched, but there's a curse involved. And the curse is a curse not on Pelops directly, but upon all his successors. And this is the family genealogy that we call the House of Atreus. And basically it inflicts bad luck on that family whose members include, for example, Agamemnon, Iphigenia. I mean, lots of Greek tragedy is connected to what happened at Olympia in this kind of primal chariot race between Pelops and this local king. And does Pelops give his name to the Peloponnese region? Is that why we call it that? Eventually, yes. And you mentioned that there's lots of archaeology going on there. Could you give us a sense of what that place might have looked like during this period? We've got a pretty good idea of how Olympia developed as a site. I think the first thing to say is that we have to rid ourselves of the notion that once upon a time it was an idyllic experience to go to Olympia. The opposite is true. Slaves in the Roman world could be threatened by their masters. If you don't behave, I'm going to send you to the Olympics because it required quite a lot of stamina and commitment from the spectators, not to mention the athletes. In the earliest instantiation at Olympia, so back in the 7th, 6th centuries BCE, there were no facilities really for the athletes. There was space to compete in, but they had to just either sleep rough or bring their intents. The water supplies were not great. And to cap it, they held the festival in August, September, which is a time you don't really want to be in that part of the Peloponnese. Or if you do, you want to be by the seaside. It's humid. There are these thunderstorms. I mean, eventually the site gets malarial. So in mosquitoes or around the rivers were silking up in late antiquity. So it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience. There must have been a lot of dysentery in the site and such like. So you had to be pretty tough just to be present at the thing. Yeah, nothing like the athletes' villages we see today. Well, actually, it sounds rather corny to say this, but what do the Romans do for the Olympics? They smarten the whole place up a lot. So they provide some proper accommodation for guests and presumably for athletes as well. Water supplies, stereotypically Roman thing, get some fresh water this site, get some sanitation to it. And certain Roman emperors, the one that comes to mind is the much maligned Nero, who for all his psycho pathological faults, was quite very enthusiastic about athletics. He famously competed at Olympia and guess what? He won the chariot race. Who would have thought it? Who would have thought? Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, the Romans, I think, made it a much more habitable space. But in a sense, you know, it's happening once every four years. There will be other festivals to I mean, the primary deity there is Zeus. But, you know, all sorts of deities can be worshipped within the space. And of course, the more it attracted athletes and spectators, participants, the more money came into the sanctuary and the local managers of the sanctuary were very adroit at, as it were, giving extra reasons for pilgrimage, to make a pilgrimage to Olympia. Well, you know, in from the fifth century onwards, you could see probably the most spectacular sculpture to be seen in that part of the ancient world, which is the the Chris Elephantine image of Zeus, which Chris Elephantine means it's a lot of ivory, a lot of gold created by Thaidias, who's also associated with the Parthenon. You go and see that in the temple. And if that wasn't enough, you just had a kind of forest of statues of these successful athletes. Now, this is what has been a bit sort of a disappointment about the archaeology in the sense that back in the 18th century, antiquarians could dream of finding this place Olympia and all the treasures that would come to light because they read descriptions of how many very successful athletes had been commemorated with statues and memorials there. But most of them were in bronze and a lot of those bronzes were destroyed. And so the archaeologists have come up with a rather pathetic, but I think rather moving set of detritus, eyelids, toenails, noses, just bits and pieces, tantalising bits and pieces of this this array of heroes that was on display. Must have been quite hard to actually walk through the sanctuary because they just so clustered with these memorials. And I guess their ultimate disappointment would be that those statues haven't survived, that they're not still, you know, they're being venerated and revered for their achievements. There are these basements, inscribed basements, you know, that making the claims, I was the great boxer of such and such a year. And all we've got are these sort of the marks where the feet were in the base, which is, yeah, nothing. Yeah, just shadows of their achievements. Do we have any sense when the Olympics are taking place in the ancient world? Do they last for a fixed period? So do we have a kind of two week Olympics like we might recognise today or is it a longer or shorter festival than that? It's surprisingly brief as a festival. I think five days is usually reckoned to be the extent. And unlike the modern Olympics, I mean, the programme was pretty well fixed by about the sixth, the end of the sixth century. And they didn't have, you know, one might call new fangled sports coming in, no team sports, really apart possibly from a relay race. I can't remember if that was in the programme as well. But Olympia was was part of a circuit of festivals. So although it happened only once every four years, and it was relatively brief as a meeting, if you were a successful athlete, you could do Olympia and then you could go on to Athens or Nomea or as the Romans expand this whole kind of world of athletics, you could go over to Asia Minor or to the Bay of Naples and you could you know, you could travel around the Mediterranean and eventually there were professional athletes who did this. Olympia was always the that was the big that was the big crown to win. Yeah, that was the gold mark that they wanted. Yeah. And you didn't really get no hopers turning up outsiders. You know, I mean, it's it's it's part of the Olympic, the ancient Olympic tradition that when the Romans, as it were, take it over. So the Romans are conquered Greece pretty much by the second century. BCG, they sponsor the games that they're happy for them to that they essentially share the same credence for them. It's Jupiter, not Zeus, but you know, it's the same, essentially the same. And of course, Roman citizenship being enlarged progressively means that by the by the second century, you know, so let's say at a time of the Unprohedrian, you've got athletes coming to Olympia from North Africa, Asia Minor, the Black Sea and such like. And they're successful. Because we have, you know, a record of the winners and we can see demographically over time how the patterns of success are moving around the Mediterranean. After Dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal is a podcast that delves into the dark side of history. Expect murder and conspiracy, ghosts and witches. I'm Anthony Delaney. And I'm Maddie Pelling. We're historians and the hosts of After Dark from History Hit, where every Monday and Thursday, we enter the shadows of the past. We set sail on Victorian ghost ships, learn the truth about the Knights Templar and walk the grimy streets of Victorian London in search of a serial killer. Discover the secrets of the darker side of history twice a week, every week on After Dark from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. What do we know about the events that took place? You mentioned that they didn't tend to bring in lots of new events. So was it a fairly settled programme? And do we know what those events were? Yeah, we got we got a good idea of what the programme consisted of. Some of the events, in a sense, would, I think, strike us as not particularly akin to modern athletics. So, I mean, the chariot racing was a big deal at the Olympics. And that's almost like having Formula One at the modern Olympics. It was very fast and very dangerous, but very spectacular to watch. The sprint racing was it was like the nominative element of the games. And what I mean by that is that the games would be marked as such in such and such a year, or such and such an Olympiad, as they would have said, since every four years. So and so won the stadium race, which is a dash, basically, up to the stadium and back. So that would be the sort of equivalent of our 100 metres. And then you would you would name the games by the winner of that that dash. But the programme otherwise was combat sports, wrestling, boxing, the pentathlon. I think that's probably the one that comes to mind most of all when we think of the ancient Olympics, because that comprised, you know, these five different tests of throwing, jumping, running and wrestling or boxing. Now, I can't remember now, but it tested your kind of all round ability at an athlete. And I think probably if we have a stereotypical view of what does an ancient Greek athlete look like in terms of the ones that have commemorated as the sort of classical body of, you know, that six pack and the arrangement of muscles in a body. I think the pentathlete is the one who most answers that kind of all round athleticism. But there were no long distance races. So there was no marathon. And people are surprised that because the marathon sounds like it's going to be something to do with ancient Greeks. And it has got something to do with ancient Greece, but they didn't have long distance races because one of the professions in ancient Greece was that you could be a runner taking messages. And that was rather a servile thing to do. And it wasn't what gentlemen sort of citizens would think. Forgive me if I'm displaying some ignorance here, but did the athletes compete naked? That's something I've heard plenty of times. Yeah, I mean, there was a tradition that the Greeks recognized as being a weird tradition that they did compete naked. And whether that continued with the Roman control of the site is still debated. I mean, there are pros and cons, I think, to competing in various events without any clothes on. They as usual, they concocted story about how someone had they were running in loincloths. One of the athletes lost his loincloth and he won. So maybe there was less sort of air resistance or something anyway. But they were aware that it was a weird cultural habit and that not everyone was happy with this. But I think you can extend that consideration by remembering that our word gymnasium relates to a Greek word, gymnos or gynos, which means a state of nudity. So when you go to work out, you should take all your clothes off. But it also has the association that you've got no weapons. And for anyone who's sort of trying to do a bit of armchair psychology about this and think, you know, what is going on with all this devotion to sport in antiquity, those who want to think of it as a kind of drive discharge for those who, you know, want to sort of give a sociological bit of psycho, sociological explanation of why put yourself through this agony. You know, one of the explanations is that the Greeks recognized that humans were innately aggressive. And I had a sort of sense that this was a drive discharge and that they were getting a kind of aggression out of the system in a sort of cathartic way, you know, purging themselves of it, or at least expressing it in a way that it does do some damage. I mean, the boxing was done with things that were more like knuckle dusters than protective gloves and plenty of bones got broken, no doubt in wrestling as well. But they weren't carrying knives, they weren't carrying weapons. And I think the nudity was that kind of statement. Look, you know, this is just me. And it probably also was a way of assimilating to the deities, because the deities don't really need clothes either. So if you're going to be a hero, you know, get everything out on display and forget any inhibitions. Yeah, that makes me wonder the idea that they wanted to display that they weren't armed or anything like that. Were there any rules or punishments around cheating? So, you know, modern Olympics today will have routine drug testing and things like that, and people get banned. Were there cases that we know of people cheating in the Olympics? Well, a lot was at stake in winning. And so there were cases where, you know, a pair of boxers might actually do a deal between themselves, you know, people are betting on us, I'm gonna, you know, I'll make sure I go down when you hit me that way. So that kind of cheating we know went on. Doping, I'm not so sure they were aware of that or whether they would have thought about it as they might have thought you were quite cunning if you've got some special dietary regime or special preparation. But actually, one of the things that's been revealed by the archaeologists is that the excavation of the stadium includes the revelation of the sort of tunnel going from the temple sanctuary through to the stadium. And as you approach that tunnel, you go past a series of statue bases. Now these statues are no longer there, but the bases make it quite clear that these actually commemorate athletes who were caught cheating and who were punished for that. And it was like a cautionary thing, you run the gauntlet of the the villains. So they're heroes in the sanctuary, but they're also the villains, the ones who who resorted to underhand strategies to get their victory. And I think it was intended to intimidate those who were thinking, you know, it's fascinating that you were you are aiming to be immortalized for your achievements, but the flip side of that the punishment was to be immortalized as a cheat so that everyone would then know forever that you were a cheat. Yeah, yeah. And I think there was a sense that, you know, Zeus present, yeah, he could see what was going on. So, you know, it was it was a sacrilegious thing. I mean, having said that, within the bounds of fair play, and I'm not sure there was an ancient Greek term for fair play, I think it's it's that that has come in, in a post antique world, you could there was quite a lot of latitude for what you could do, there was a thing called the Pankration, which literally means all in fighting. And I don't think you were you weren't supposed to bite people. But pretty much anything else went. And I imagine that, you know, the real bruises were to be seen amongst the Pankrationists. And you wouldn't have wanted to meet them, as they say, on a dark night. Yeah, it's like a battle royale at the Olympics. And do we know whether did women take part in in events at the Olympics? Not with the men. So there was a festival, there's attestations of a festival, appropriately enough, in honor of the wife of Zeus, here, whose temple is temple to here. It's one of the oldest temples there at Olympia. And it seems like it was a festival for women separately, but not on the same scale. And women were not supposed to be spectators at the main Olympics. There are stories of one or two coming in disguised, they could sponsor a chariot, they didn't have to ride the chariot themselves, but they could actually be part of the training. So there is a record of a woman, I think from Sparta, who, who is considered to be a winner of the chariot race, even though she's not actually holding holding the ranks. Yeah, fascinating. Are there any particularly famous ancient athletes who are commemorated, either in writing or the base of a statue? Are there, is there a Usain Bolt that stands out from ancient Olympic tradition? I think the honest answer to that would be that, I mean, theoretically, and if one did a full kind of canvas of all the statue bases, and the, you know, bits of parchment have been found in the deserts of Egypt with lists of Olympic, successful Olympic athletes. So you could say, yeah, they're all, they're all famous. But I think for me, the obvious one who comes to mind is a fellow called Milo, or Milan, I think would have been his original name, who was five or six times winner of the wrestling at Olympia. And he's a fascinating figure, not just as a multiple victor, but because he's connected with a mysterious philosopher, mysterious, but also very well known Pythagoras. So it's the same Pythagoras we know from mathematics, same Pythagoras, who was a sort of pioneer of vegetarianism. And he also appears to have been a bit of a whiz at training athletes. Now he's training them in the city of Croton down in the, in the sort of boot heel of Italy, what is now Italy, it's a Greek colony there. And Milo evidently made the journey, you know, actually, it's quite a short transit by sea from Croton to Olympia. He's the one who allegedly went into battle, dressed up as, as Heracles, so wearing a lion's skin, carrying a club. And apparently the mere sight of this, this Olympic victor at the head of the ranks was enough to turn the battle in his way. So lots of stories are told about him. I suspect he also gathers anecdotes that really should have been attached to other athletes that come on to him. But as they say, larger than life, and Pythagoras may have been vegetarian himself, but Milo is one of the stories is about how he trained by carrying a young calf on his shoulders. And as it grew bigger and bigger, he still is able to, you know, walk around with it on his shoulders and lift it up. So he's doing progressive weightlifting, basically. And guess what? At the end, he sits down and eats the whole thing, you know, so it's the sort of gargantuan sort of reputation of this, of this mighty wrestler, Milo of Croton. And there was a statue allegedly of him at Olympia. Yeah, I was kind of going to ask whether the Olympics had a place in wider Greek culture and politics. And it sounds like it's almost a form of diplomacy. It's almost a form of combat to establish who is the most powerful nation. If you've got the winner of the Olympics in your army, it's going to make people think twice about fighting you. But does it have kind of wider implications for society and culture in ancient Greece too? There are those historians of sports who would say that what is going on with the Olympics and these other athletic festivals in this world in terms of their formation is it is also in tandem with democracy, where, you know, you enter a contest knowing that there is a possibility of defeat. It's not sort of, I don't know, I'm not saying that there's a kind of, you know, very fixed alignment between that, because obviously, you know, things change under the Romans and in 776, you know, democracy has yet to be invented. But this kind of development of combative rhetoric and a sense of, you know, what is at stake here? I could win, I could lose. I'm going to risk it. What can I prove of myself? I think that does transfer across from the world of Greek politics into athletics. Nietzsche was very keen on this idea that the Greeks had an agonistic spirit that manifested itself, not just in, you know, in the boxing ring or whatever, but that was a mentality that went much, much wider. Yeah, it's a really fascinating parallel that I hadn't particularly thought about before. So it's really interesting to consider that implication for the wider Greek outlook on life and the way that they approached a lot of those things. We've talked a lot about the athletes and the participants and the events they took place in. How much, if anything, do we know about the spectators? Was this the elite or was this a working man's event to go and see? What were the spectators like? I guess each athlete would have brought along family supporters, possibly people who'd been involved in training. So imagine, in a Greek city state, if it's a city that's worth the name of city, it will have a gymnasium or it will have several gymnasium. And this is where you breed your athletes. That's where they do that, their training. And so they would, those athletes would come to Olympia with, you know, their, not their managers, but their, you know, their supporters within a sort of family and friends. By the same token, of course, they've got to have time to train. And so I think we couldn't, this discussion of ancient Greek sport would not be complete without mentioning that it's a slave economy. And the citizens have slaves who do the hard work, largely speaking. And the work, the boring work, the tedious work, but it does mean, I mean, the citizens have got to keep themselves ready for battle. So they've got to be fit. Socrates like to say, you know, why do you want to run fast? Because you might have to run fast away from the enemy. But there's that obligation. But they do have time to spend training. So they can be full time athletes really, for a certain period. So in that sense, you know, the spectators are coming along really as part of the sort of almost like a civic delegation, if you like, pilgrims as well to the site, because they want to see not just their athletes competing, but they just want this experience of being at this amazing place. So yeah, how much spectator involvement, I think, is open to the imagination. But yeah, let's not forget, it was not easy to be a spectator. You know, you had to be able to put up with the Peloponnese in a particularly hot and humid time of the year. Yeah, yeah. So it's a trial just to go and watch it never mind to take part. You mentioned that the athletes that won would have a degree of fame and prestige that went with that. Were there more tangible rewards in everyday life as well? Were there kind of prizes, something meaningful that you could win beyond the fame? At Olympia, the prize is a wreath of olive leaves. And you will think what's so special about that? And of course, in a sense, apart from its symbolic value, it would seem to be quite a modest reward. But it's the associated prestige, which does can bring material benefits. So there's some evidence that successful athletes, when they get back home, have basically got a pension for life and benefits for their family, could be front seats at the theatre for the rest of their lives, or, you know, endless supplies of olive oil or cash benefits that the athletes bring with them. And of course, eventually, when the circuit of athletics develop, prize money at stake, and they can collect, obviously not sponsorship, that doesn't yet exist as such. But yeah, I think they could, you could buy, certainly by the time of the Roman Empire, you could make a good living as an athlete. Yeah, yeah. Interesting that there's all of those associated things that, I guess we associate with athletes today, you know, you get the, we would call it sponsorship, and all the perks of fame and all of those kind of things. Interesting that that's still going on in the ancient world, too. And you mentioned that the games ran from kind of the eighth century BCE to fourth century, fifth century AD. Do we have a sense of why they end? The question about how the Olympics end is, in a sense, quite simple to answer. It's not so much that as the Roman Empire became Christian, there was a particular Christian disapproval of the practice of athletics as such. And in fact, being quite a lot of studies done about how, in the writings of Paul, you know, he's using the metaphor of athletics to describe the experience of becoming a Christian, a good Christian. It's more the practice of animal sacrifice, which, of course, was a hugely important, if not the most important element of being at Olympia, was to worship Zeus. And the big celebration at the end of the festival was animal sacrifice on a very large scale. So you just have to imagine an enormous barbecue for all the athletes and their supporters. The bits that get given to the gods of the sacrifice are the bones and the the awful and the bits that nobody wants to eat. And over time, a sort of great mountain of this awful built up at Olympia or burned remains of. So it must have been very smelly and hugely sort of attractive to flies and added to the general challenge, I think, of being at Olympia. But it was a sign of their veneration of Zeus. And that's what specifically antagonized the Christian emperors. In Byzantium, when the Roman emperor had shifted eastwards. Yeah, it's interesting, because early Christianity was so good at absorbing and morphing some of those old traditions into something that was acceptable to Christianity. It may be surprising that something that's been going so long and is considered so prestigious is cast aside. And there's not that effort to sort of mould it into a Christian festival instead. Yeah, I think there were also associated problems at the site. So there are two rivers that flow close to Olympia. They were silting up. So you're getting stagnant water, mosquitoes, and that area around that part of the Peloponnese became malarial, probably by late antiquity and depopulated. And so this the actual site of Olympia, it gets lost for several centuries and more. Nobody really knows where it is. There are earthquakes, the people go to the site now, and they see lots of columns pushed over or toppled over on the ground. And they will, if they take a close look, you'll see the sort of tenon joints where the column drums were associated to the Peloponnese. They're missing the metal joints that once there. And so as well as earthquakes, it's likely that local people were just pulling down the temples to get the metal inside the column drums. And the metal of the statues, of course, was very attractive and melted down. So it was vandalized in that respect. And they're not really rediscovered until I think it was an Oxford Don, Richard Chandler, who was one of the first to located on a map. And then and then the archaeologists start to start to do their thing. Yeah, fascinating. And is it a site that the public can visit today? You know, could we go and walk amongst these statue bases and imagine what it looked like a couple of thousand years ago? Oh, look, I mean, Olympia, every time I've been there, it struck me how irresistible it is to old and young alike, actually, that in your in the stadium, you know, there's always someone having a run up and down the length of it, despite whatever guards might do to inhibit them. But there's an excellent museum with such sculptures as have been retrieved. And the ones from the temple are pretty spectacular. That's true. But yeah, I think it's, you know, it should be the objective of pilgrimage for for anyone interested in the genesis of sport. And the way in which very broadly, one can admit that humans are, as some scholars like to define as homo ludens, we are a playful species, we like to imaginatively sort of do things. And, you know, even if it's taking the fall metaphorically of combat without fatal risk, as the justification. But what you see at Olympia is all the sort of, you know, the relics of the structures that were set in place to make that happen. So for example, starting, you know, actually, these have not survived Olympia, but other Greek sanctuaries, they have starting gates. So, you know, that everyone all the smaller runners start at the same point, you make sure that's fair, start from the same point. The boxing, I mean, that wasn't done in a ring. But, you know, you've got plenty of images of boxers doing their things and stories about all sorts of ways in which, you know, sports were practiced in a way that, you know, there were rules, but, you know, you could plan your way around them. I mean, my favorite is the story of the boxer, because there were no, there were no timed bouts, you know, they just slugged away at each other until one of them either gave up or was knocked out cold. But the story of a boxer, I can't remember his name now, who rather like Muhammad Ali was very nimble on his feet. And he just danced until his opponent got so weary of trying to chase him around. But yeah, I mean, it's Olympia was a place that, apart from providing the sort of radical basis of all Greek tragedy, almost Greek tragedy, and a generator of a lot of stories about how far athletes, how far human beings were prepared to go to prove themselves to be the fastest, the strongest, the toughest in the wrestling and the combat events. Yeah, the kind of enduring human need to prove that you're the best. Yeah, there's also something I think, which I think they sensed that it is, for all its transferable value, it is also gloriously pointless to throw a discus further. What does that prove? I mean, it's sort of, you know, you just know, from my own limited experience, you can just get fascinated in the technicalities of seeing what you can do in such and such a discipline. Yeah, I mean, incredible to think that you can go and visit that spot where this was happening two, two and a half thousand years ago. And obviously, for Assassin's Creed Odyssey players, they can they can visit these places in the game and explore them and climb around these places and perhaps see what they might have looked like in their absolute splendor. So thank you so much for joining us, Nigel, to talk a little bit more about the origins of the ancient Olympics, but absolutely fascinating. Thank you. Cheers. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Next time, we'll get spiritual as we investigate the pantheon of ancient Greek gods and uncover the history of arguably the most famous temple in the world, the Parthenon. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're enjoying it, you can leave us a review too. I'll see you next time amongst the Echoes of History.