Olympia

The modern Olympics present themselves as a revival, and the most useful thing to know about the ancient festival is how little it resembled a sports meeting.

It was a religious festival for Zeus. The competitions were held within it, not the other way round. A sacred truce was proclaimed so that competitors and spectators could travel through warring territories, and the central event of the five days was not a race but the sacrifice of a hundred oxen on the altar of Zeus, followed by a feast. Winners dedicated their victories, and their prize was a wreath of wild olive cut from a sacred tree, the material rewards came later and at home.

The altar itself makes the point better than any text. It was not built. It was a mound of ash from previous sacrifices, mixed with river water and packed, growing year on year for centuries until it stood several metres high. The sanctuary's holiest object was the accumulated residue of everything that had been offered on it.

The statue. The temple of Zeus housed Pheidias's seated figure of the god in gold and ivory, some twelve metres high, counted among the wonders of the world. Ancient visitors describe an effect closer to awe than to admiration. It was taken to Constantinople and destroyed there. Pheidias's workshop at Olympia was identified in excavation and confirmed by a cup found in it inscribed with his name, about as direct a link between a named ancient artist and a surviving building as archaeology offers.

The end came with Theodosius I's suppression of public pagan worship at the close of the fourth century AD, after a run of something over a thousand years.

One modern practice should be labelled as modern. The lighting of a flame at Olympia by parabolic mirror and its relay to the host city is not an ancient rite and has no ancient precedent. It was devised for the Berlin games of 1936, by the organisers of those games, and has been performed ever since as though it were inherited. German excavation at the site, incidentally, began in 1875 under Ernst Curtius on terms that left the finds in Greece, unusual for the period, and the reason the temple sculpture is at Olympia rather than in Berlin.

Olympia once housed a statue of Zeus so large it reportedly nearly touched the roof of its own temple, a wonder of the ancient world that no longer exists in any form.

A god almost too big for his temple

Inside the Temple of Zeus, the sculptor Phidias created a massive seated statue of Zeus using gold and ivory over a wooden frame, a work counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world and reportedly so tall that, according to ancient descriptions, the god's head nearly grazed the temple's ceiling, appearing as though he would rise through the roof were he to stand. The statue was later removed to Constantinople and destroyed, likely by fire, with no verified fragment surviving today.

Banned by imperial decree

The ancient Olympic Games, tied throughout their history to religious sacrifice at Olympia, were ended under Theodosius I's decrees against pagan practice in 393 CE, and further imperial orders under Theodosius II in the following decades led to the destruction of the sanctuary's temples, formally closing a religious and athletic institution that had run continuously for well over a thousand years.

As this entry's companion article covers

The way ancient sources and modern scholarship both frame the games themselves as a form of religious sacrifice to Zeus rather than as a secular sporting event separate from Olympia's cultic function is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.