This past week, our family has been talking about the Olympics. Although our three daughters are grown, they are still athletic. The youngest lifts weights, our middle daughter is a runner, and our oldest daughter is also a runner and a cyclist. So, sports are important in our family.
But while we all love sports, we don’t always agree who is the best, what sport teams we prefer, and so on. We certainly did not agree on what the opening ceremonies of the Olympics were about, in particular the feast scene of Dionysius. We each drew different conclusions based upon the information that we thought we knew.
So, I thought a return to the original ancient Olympics might add to the conversation for my family and for yours.
The Olympics began in 776 BC. It’s an important date because it is the first fixed date in Greek history. We label this period as Archaic Greece. It was the age when Homer’s poem The Iliad and Odyssey was first performed, and it was just preceding the age of the pre-Socratic scientists and philosophers.
You may be surprised to learn that the first Greek athletic contests were not the Olympic games. Athletic games go back much further in time. Only the good Lord knows when the first agones (contests) began; experts say back in the 12th century. If you wondered whether agones was related to our word “agony,” you would be correct. I will explain that shortly.
To understand the context of the ancient Olympics, it is important to understand the Greek mindset in the Archaic period.
The first point is that the Olympics were games held in honor of Zeus at Mt. Olympus. So, the games were performed as part of a religious festival.
What was the connection between sporting contests, religious ritual and belief?
Simply this. Man was created by the gods and showed his honor for the gods through developing both his mind and body. To the Greeks, physical fitness was an essential part of education. Every polis (city state) had its own gymnasium, just as it had a theater and an agora (marketplace). Every polis worshipped a patron deity and built a temple to house that deity.
So, physical exercise was viewed not only as strengthening the muscles of the body, but also training and disciplining the mind. This led to arete or excellence. *
So, the Greek man of the Archaic age viewed the body and mind as one. The Archaic Greek man did not see the soul as separate from the body. Famed classicist, H. D. F. Kitto in The Greeks, writes, “That the body is the tomb of the soul is indeed an idea we meet in certain Greek mystery religions, [also] Plato, with his doctrine of immortality, necessarily distinguished sharply between body and soul; but for all that, it [was] not a Greek idea.”
The next point is the importance of human reason in this time.
That Reason was a vital concept in Archaic Greece becomes clearer when reading Homer. For example, Achilles starts out as a sullen angry man but becomes the hero of the story because he takes responsibility for his actions.
The ancient poet shows that an honorable man is not an animal because he possesses reason and can control his behavior. His use of reason creates predictability. Men could understand one another and therefore establish codes of conduct that would smooth rocky human relationships. Homer attempted to teach through his poem that happiness came to men when they used their reason and made wise decisions. Man was not simply a victim of unknown forces.
‘’He is no madman, no blind brute…” Zeus explains to the other gods on Mt. Olympus when he predicts that Achilles will listen to reason and grant the old king of Troy’s request for the return of his son’s body, Hector.
Conversely, men without reason are depicted in The Iliad as no better than animals.
Even Homer devoted most of a chapter of The Iliad to athletic contests. In this case, these were funeral games held in honor of Achilles's best friend Patroclus whom the crown prince of Troy, Hector, had killed. Homer's characters conduct themselves in these agones with time (honor) and arete (excellence).
So, the third point is that while reason was important, there was another side to the Greeks’ practice of religious rites. Hardly reflected in The Iliad but known from other sources were mystery religions.
The most important of these was the cult of Dionysius (Bacchus) who was the god of wine, revelry, and theater. This was the god who was depicted in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Paris, a tableau that many believed echoed the Last Supper of Leonardo Da Vinci.
Last week, The Orthodox Times quoted Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens’s disapproval on this issue. The archbishop stated, “All this is worthy of absolute contempt.”
To understand the insult that Christians feel in this portrayal, it might be helpful to look at it from an ancient Greek perspective.
In Euripides’s play, The Bacchae, Dionysius is the venerated god. Grown women worship him and are called Bacchants. In the story during his festival, these grown women run off to the mountains, get drunk and have wild parties and dances. In the climax of the play, the women work themselves into a frenzy and end up murdering their king who ruled Thebes. The king had denounced the worship of Dionysius for all the right reasons. He disapproved of drunken lewd irrational behavior and women running off to do these very things. Yet, what these women were doing piqued his curiosity so much that he disguised himself as a woman to go spy on their festivities, but as fate and Dionysius would have it, he was caught, and ceremoniously beheaded.
As a sidenote, we performed this play when I was a student at Rice. We spoke in ancient Greek and provided the audience with an English synopsis. We did two performances in Hammond Hall and over 300 people attended each night. My professor played the king’s mother. I played the leader of the Greek chorus, one of the bacchants.
Looking back, the fact that we had such a large attendance was amazing, considering the challenge of watching a 2-hour play in an ancient tongue.
But I don’t think I fully appreciated the message of Euripides at the time. Sometimes, it takes a lifetime of experience to understand the implications of decisions and actions from long ago.
If asked today, I doubt as a Christian that I could perform this play. I realize now that I had no idea what I was truly portraying. These women abandoned their families and were selfishly indulgent murderesses. Back then, I thought we were bringing the Greek classics to life. While that may be true, there is another layer of learning now.
Euripides's play shows us the tragic consequences of the loss of reason and the nihilism of a culture that worships the god of wine and revelry. Furthermore, consider the murder of the king was Dionysius’s revenge, all because the king rightly saw the Bacchants’ rituals as a threat to the orderliness of society. What message does that have for us today as we consider our society?
This mystery worship stands in stark contrast to the spirit of the ancient and modern Olympic games.
If Homer were alive today, given his distaste for Dionysian mystery cults, he no doubt would have echoed the Archbishop of Athens’s disapproval and condemned the Dionysian scene at this year’s Olympics as well.
So, Dionysius had no place at any athletic event in the ancient world because what he stood for was the opposite of the concept of arete and agones.
Of course, there were other agones besides the Olympics. The Pythian games were held in honor of Apollo, the Lord of Light; the Panathenaic Games were held in honor of Athena, the goddess of Wisdom, the Nemean Games in Corinth, were held in honor of Zeus, the king of all gods. But no agones were held in honor of Dionysius.
All these agones were held within the sacred precinct of the temple. According to Dr. Kitto, the athletes were chosen for arete (excellence). Arete was one of the highest Greek virtues. Not only does it mean excellence, but it also means possessing virtue, goodness, and being morally sound and just. They believed that arete was a worthy offering.
One contest was not even athletic. In the Pythian games there was a lyre playing contest as Apollo was also god of the lyre.
The usual events of the ancient Olympics were the 200-yard sprint, a one-and-a-half-mile foot race, a race wearing armor, discus throwing, javelin throwing, wrestling, a dangerous kind of boxing, and the long jump. The highlight was the Pentathlon where the athlete would perform five (penta) of these events: a foot race, long-jump, discus and javelin throwing, and wrestling.
In case you wondered, the Greeks never heard of running a Marathon. Dr. Kitto said they would have considered a marathon a “monstrosity.”
Winners in the ancient Olympics received special honors. They were considered heroes and at public expense, the polis would provide the victor dinner for life.
Additional honors were poems written in their honor. Poets such as Pindar are known for their “victory odes,” poems dedicated to the victor’s “god-given splendor.”
The whole concept of agones was the belief that the struggle of a contest revealed the man. Isn’t that one reason we watch sports to this day? In winning, the victor received time (honor) which we usually translate as honor often but also means value or price. So, the victor paid the price in his struggle to win the agon. Now the English meaning of agony may be clearer. We also derive the word “estimate” from time.
During the time of the ancient Olympics, city-states called temporary truces among the quarreling poleis. Safe harbor was granted to athletes and spectators alike going to the festival and returning home. The Olympics lasted five days and attracted athletes from everywhere.
The Olympics ended in the fourth century AD, almost 1200 years after they first began.
What started as an effort to recognize human excellence as a worthy offering to the gods ended in mystery and controversy.
One story is that the Roman Emperor Theodosius who was the Christian leader who outlawed pagan ceremonies and cults also outlawed the Olympics in his edict of 393 AD.
There is also evidence that the Olympics continued after Theodosius’s edict but may have ended when an earthquake destroyed the temple at Olympus. The beautiful statue of Zeus, carved at the famed workshop of Phidias, and considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was carted off to Constantinople.
Another story is that the Olympics ended during the reign of Theodosius II, the grandson of Theodosius I. In his papers was found an anonymous note that stated, “Since the Temple of Olympian Zeus had caught fire both the Elean festival and the Olympic Games came to an end.”
A final theory was offered by Sofie Remijen who argues that the Olympics ended for financial reasons. Costs had spiraled out of control, and no one could afford to sponsor them. They just became too expensive.
So sometime between AD 393 and 420, either an edict, an earthquake, a fire, or exorbitant costs, possibly, a combination of the above, snuffed out the Olympic flame of excellence (arete) for 1500 years.
So, what are we to conclude from this?
Excellence is noble and admirable. Reason and athletic abilities are gifts that must be cultivated with arduous work, oftentimes “agony.” In contrast, the Dionysiac mystery cults did not elevate the human spirit.
They ruined it.
This is my problem with the Dionysiac scene opening ceremonies, whether you are a Christian or not, you cannot say this was in keeping with the spirit of the original Olympics. This depiction demeans both arete (excellence) and time (honor).
George Orwell wrote in 1984, "He who controls the past controls the future."
Understanding the past is the key to the present.
*All italicized words are ancient Greek words that have been transliterated into English.
Kathryn van der Pol taught Latin and Greek for 24 years in Houston, Texas and was a summer fellow at the American Academy in Rome.