Going for Glory: A History of the Ancient Olympics

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Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.

Zoe Goldman: On your mark, get set, go! Because we’re going for gold in this special Olympics bonus episode. [crowd cheers]

[Theme music begins]

Welcome to If Objects Could Talk, a podcast where art and artifacts get to leave the museum vault and tell their side of the story.

Usually.

Child: What?

Zoe: This week we are doing something a little different.

Child: Oh?

Zoe: With the Olympics opening ceremonies happening this week, I wanted to step back in time to learn about the very first Olympics.

[Greek music begins]

Picture this: the year is 776 BCE. That’s almost 3000 years ago. We are in the city of Olympia in southern Greece. That’s actually why the Olympics are called the Olympics, because they began in Olympia.

And it’s summertime, so it’s really hot there. [crowd chatter]

We don’t really know why these first athletes and spectators came together to compete. Olympia was a center for worshiping Zeus, so it might have started as a religious festival, [chanting and gongs] or it could have been related to military exercises. [soldiers march] Or maybe people just liked competitive sports when they weren’t off fighting wars. [crowd claps over battle sounds]

Whatever the reason, these Olympic games became something to celebrate every four years. Thousands of people from across all of the Greek city-states representing different backgrounds, traveled long distances, put aside their differences, paused wars and fighting, and competed. [horse hoofbeats]

In modern times, I love watching people from around the world race and perform and compete on TV, but that’s definitely not how the Greeks experience the Olympics.

For starters, they didn’t even have electricity, [electric sound] let alone international TV broadcasts. [TV news sound]

So when I heard archeologist Shelby Brown knew all about these ancient games, I ran straight to the Getty Villa to hear more. Come with me.

[Footsteps running and heavy breathing]

Oh, hi Shelby. Thanks so much for talking with us today about the ancient Olympics.

Shelby Brown: I’m so happy to be here. I love the Olympics.

Zoe: Awesome. Okay, so first things first. I was just imagining we had traveled back in time to see those early competitions. [Harp sounds play, then cut off with a scratch]

But how would we even know when these Olympics were? When I wanted to learn about the Olympics this year, I just turned to the internet and it was all right there. [Computer typing]

Shelby: Well, it’s very hard for anybody to imagine now that for most of human history, all you could do was talk and write. [marketplace sounds] People always gathered and talked in the city centers about interesting things, and the city government made public announcements [horn blows], and sometimes the city wrote news on a whiteboard. [pen scratch]

But also the Olympic games were major entertainment [crowd cheers] and they were scheduled every four years and everyone knew it. And they lasted about 1100 years from 776 BCE to 386 CE. So there was no doubt they were coming.

Zoe: Wow. That’s a really long time for anything to happen. People must have really loved the Olympics.

Okay, so let’s say we decided to make the trip from our hometown to this big event. What would we see when we got to Olympia?

Shelby: Well, first you’d have to travel to Olympia [percussion music begins] and it would be very hot in the summer and very dusty. Travel was by foot or by donkey or by horse or in a cart, and it was sort of miserable. When you got there, you’d be very sweaty and dusty. [music ends]

Zoe: That sounds like a lot of work. You must really want to go, to go through all of that. And then if we did, if it’s worth it, what are we going to find once we’re in Olympia?

Shelby: Well, the most impressive part of Olympia is the sanctuary to Zeus, [magical poof then mystical music begins] which was amazing, but most people couldn’t stay anywhere near that.

[Nature sounds]

They ended up camping out in fields and in tents, and they were—it was maybe like going to a music festival that would last for days.

Zoe: Who’s doing all of this?

Shelby: It was mostly men who came to the games [group chattering] to compete and also to be important representatives of their cities. Although some women came along to support that sort of caravan atmosphere. But people went because it was just a very special occasion. The same reason we do today.

Zoe: Okay, so let’s say I’m up for a long journey and a little camping in the name of friendly competition. What events are we gonna see though? Anything I’d recognize?

Shelby: At the very first Olympics, you’re going to see one event and it was a foot race.

Announcer: Ready, set, go! [footsteps running]

Zoe: Oh, like the marathon? That one’s Greek, right?

Shelby: That came about later and that’s what we think of as one of the most famous representative races of the Greeks, but this was a sprint, the equivalent of a 200 yard dash.

This event was so important that in addition to using years, the ancient Greeks divided up the calendar into Olympiads, which were the four years between Olympic events.

[Exciting music begins]

They named the Olympiad after the winner of this foot race, [crowd cheers] even after they added chariot racing and boxing and discus and javelin and long jump and all the things that we recognize. This was the most important thing.

So if you won the foot race, Zoe, you might hear somebody reference day 30 of year three of Zoe. [announcing horn]

Zoe: I think I could get used to that. Why was running so popular?

Shelby: Well, we still love the idea of the fastest person on earth, now we say, but the fastest person in ancient Greece was pretty important.

The idea of a single person running [running footsteps and heavy breathing], no equipment and no gear of any sort, just running as fast as possible to the finish line, was very, very, very impressive. And it still is today, thousands of years later.

Zoe: You say no gear, but they had, like, sneakers.

Shelby: So no equipment means absolutely no equipment: naked, [person gasps] no shoes, [another gasps] nothing. [low voice says “whoa”] The only preparation they made was to coat their bodies in oil [squishy oil sounds] and probably a little sand and dust [rubbing sand] before they started running.

Zoe: [record scratch] Wait, no. Why are they naked? Why are they covered in oil? [laughs]

Shelby: The Greeks weren’t embarrassed about nakedness in, let’s be clear, an athletic context. They did not walk around the city naked. [voice says “phew”] One ancient author named Pausanias much later, looking back through time, says that the story is that one of the runners [crowd and race sounds begin] lost his loin cloth [crowd gasps] back in the days when they actually wore the equivalent of shorts [crowd says “oh no!”] and still won.

Pausanias suspects that he did it to gain speed, but at any rate, that is a theoretical origin story for how it all happened.

Zoe: Okay, so no clothes—clothes slow you down. What’s with the oil?

Shelby: Oil was an ordinary daily life hygiene and cleansing thing that the Greeks used all the time. And when they were going to exercise, they would oil [splashing oil] their bodies and then put a little dust or sand on them to make them less slippery. Maybe that was a sort of a sunscreen that people used. And basically used oil as soap both before and after running or exercising.

Zoe: If there’s no soap, how do they get the oil off?

Shelby: There’s a special tool called a strigil, a curved metal tool, [metal sound] and you pull it along your skin and it brings up all the dirt and the oil that you have on you. [“crowd says yuck”] And it sort of sits in the tool. And you can flick it away, or you can flick it into a jar, [metal chime] which some people did because athletes’ sweaty oil was considered medicinal. [angelic sound]

Zoe: Okay, so after all this, I think that there are some things I would recognize and some things I definitely would not if we showed up today at the ancient Olympics. I’m also not hearing a lot of winter sports here. Were there Winter Olympics back then too?

Shelby: There were absolutely no Winter Olympics. That was a ridiculous idea to an ancient Greek. [people say “no” and “as if”] It was already hard enough to travel to the Olympics in the summer. [Cold winds blow] Coming to some place where there was no heat and no convenience in the winter, in the snow, and then doing sports events in the snow? That’s just crazy.

Zoe: Not a great place to be naked, I guess. [person says “ooh, it’s cold”]

Shelby: And not a great place to be naked. Absolutely not.

Zoe: Okay, so these Winter Olympics are a modern invention. How do we get from the ancient Olympics [triumphant horn] to now? [more elaborate horn with drums]

Shelby: You have to make a big jump from 386 CE, about 1500 years, to 1894. [triumphant music begins] When it was decided to revive the ancient style Olympics as summer games and with men. And over time, people, they wanted more. It wasn’t enough. They kept adding events as you notice, if you watch the Olympics, and they decided to add Winter Olympics about a hundred years ago in 1924. [skier speeds past] And women were eventually allowed to participate too in 1900.

Zoe: So overall then, these ancient Olympics and the modern Olympics that we know today are pretty different.

But they still won awards, right? Like this is a competition. Were there gold medals? [cheering and victorious horns]

Shelby: There were no gold medals. The award at Olympia was an olive wreath [peaceful music begins] in honor of Zeus. That was a pretty big deal. And when you got home. In most cases, cities were so pleased as we are today that their athletes won, they would give them things like free lunch for life and a stipend to live on and help them get into politics and so on. So it really wasn’t that it was completely just for the honor and glory. The glory led places.

One of the weird things that happened, from our perspective, is that an award could be that your city or your family would commission a poet to write a song about you and then people would sing it in public at a performance in your honor.

[Energetic Greek music begins]

Reader: Olympian 14, by Pindar.

And bring the fine news to his father;
See Kleodamos and tell him
How his son,
In the famous valleys of Pytho,
Has crowned his young hair
With the wings of glorious triumph.

Zoe: So is that how we know all this stuff about a competition that happened thousands of years ago?

Shelby: Yes! We have lots of writings about the Olympics and lots of images on art, which are really helpful, because people often who when they’re writing down something in their own time, don’t think that something isn’t obvious. They think, oh, I know this. Everybody else will. But you know, 2000, 3000 years later, you don’t know what on earth they’re talking about.

So it’s really nice to see art that clarifies how an event was run or how you stood. But there’s a ton that we don’t know. I mean, over thousands of years, so much information got lost. But archeologists are still digging up evidence for ancient games and special events like these. [sounds of digging] So we’ll keep learning more.

Zoe: Shelby, this was so great. Thank you for teaching us so much about the ancient Olympics.

I have one more question for you. What event are you most excited for this year?

Shelby: Well, it’s Winter Olympics, so I like something the Greeks would’ve been completely astonished about, which is ice skating. [sparkling and skates sliding]

Zoe: I love it. Thank you again.

Shelby: Bye. See you next Olympics.

[Theme music begins]

Zoe: If you liked this episode, leave us a review and let us know your favorite Olympic sport. Have something you’re dying to ask about the ancient Olympics? Write to us at podteam at getty dot edu.

This episode was produced by me, Zoe Goldman. Special thanks to Shelby Brown for speaking with us. Christopher Sprinkle is executive producer. Music and Sound Design by Alexandra Kalinowski.

Catch you next time.