What Distinguished the Olympic Games from other Games of Ancient Greece - Assignment Example

Prestige, Power, and Panhellenism: what distinguished the Olympic Games from other Games of Ancient Greece Competitive games were one of the most important cultural festivals of Ancient Greece. They served a wide variety of purposes; on the personal level, keeping fit was seen as a reflection of good moral standing and character, and defeating others was a way to win pride and prestige not just for one’s self but also for one’s city. But beyond that, athletic games had important religious significance, honoring particular gods or heroes, as well as cultural and artistic importance in both inspiring art and giving venues for art competitions that mirrored the athletic ones going on in the gymnasia. Furthermore, they sometimes served important political or strategic roles, allowing a time for one-upping each other away from the battlefield, negotiating and enacting truces, or simply having some time off from constant warfare. Though all Greek games served these functions to some degree, there were nonetheless significant differences between each individual Greek game. The games modern audiences will probably be most familiar with are the Olympic games, because of the modern athletic competition of the same name. This recognition is well deserved, for, even in ancient times the Olympic game stood head and shoulders above the other games that were such a common part of Hellenic society. The differences between the Olympic games and other games might at first appear to be small or inconsequential – indeed, the games had the same athletes, many of the same events, had the same awards, and even honored the same god as some of the other games. To understand the primacy of the Olympic games, one must enter into a Greek mindset, and understand the fact that the Olympic games were distinguished primarily through various forms of prestige – religious and political, as well as through their importance in several facets of Greek life. In order to truly understand what made the Ancient Olympics different from other comparable games, it might be useful to briefly discuss their similarities, so that those similarities can then be qualified and modified later in this text. The most obvious of these similarities is probably the kinds of athletic activities that were used in each particular game. The Hellenistic world had a surprisingly standardizes sets of athletic competitions, that generally fell into a couple of broad categories: foot races, chariot races, wrestling (up-right and prone forms), and martial competitions such as javelin throwing, discus and so on (Broneer, 1962, 260). The format and rules of all of these games would have been similar across locations and individual games: all competitors would compete in the nude, for instance, women would generally be barred from attending the events, and etiquette and rules would be consistent across different sets of games. The general categories of competition were all broken down into particular events, such as the Stadion foot race, which was a short-distance race to the maximum length of a stadium length, as opposed to a Diaulos which would be twice that distance, or a Hippios which would be twice the distance of a Diaulos (Bentley, 1970, 18). The individual race distances would vary somewhat between games, as each stadium had a length that was not entirely standardized: a Diaulos was 355 meters in the Namea games, whereas the Olympic Diaulos would have been slightly more (Miller, 1989, 43). Despite particularities of size, the physical layouts of all of the stadiums would have been nearly identical, for instance, having stone starting blocks with notches carved for runners to put their feet in (Parke, 1992, 83). Beyond all of these obvious athletic similarities, all Hellenic games served similar cultural and religious purposes. Every set of games was dedicated to a particular god: the Isthmian Games, for instance, were dedicated to Poseidon, while the Pythian games were dedicated to Apollo (Broneer, 1962, 17). All sets of games were associated with religious festivities, and often also cultural activities such as art competitions (Swaddling, 1980, 103). All games served as an outlet for young, vigorous men to compete with each other through a means other than violence – an alternative form of warfare that allowed ancient Greek men to seek honor through combat without having to actually meet on a battle field. This provides bravado and glory for the men themselves and for their cities (Spivey, 2004, 73), and forms a kind of “positive strife” which makes all the participants better, which is contrasted with “negative strife,” which harms each participant and makes it more difficult for them to compete in the future (Spivey, 2004, 4). The Greek poet Hesiod, recognized these different forms of strife, or “eris,” and recognizes that athletic competition through the form of frequent games served as an example of the best kinds of strife. Finally, all the games served the necessary societal role of festival and entertainment. With all of these similarities, then, how did the Olympic Games stand out from the other games that were held throughout the Hellenic world? One of the main differences between the Olympic games and other, more minor games such as the Panathenaic games was that it was one of a select group of four Panhellenic games. The Panathenaic games, as the name implies, were games that were confined to the city of Athens and its catchment, and other territories it controlled (Thompson, 1961, 227). These types of games were common amongst city-states; nearly all of them had their own games of this sort at least once every four years, and sometimes much more frequently than that. The Olympics, on the other hand, were one of a group of four Panhellenic games, which, while held in the same cities every year, drew participants from all across the Hellenic world, including Greek colonies in Asia Minor, or as far flung as Spain and the coast of Italy (Phillips and Pritchard, 2003, 116). The other three games that, along with the Olympics, made up the Panhellenic games were the Pythian Games, held in Delphi to honor Apollo, the Nemean Games held in Nemea, and like the Olympics honored Zeus, and the Isthmian Games, held in Corinth to honor Poseidon (Broneer, 1962, 263). All of these games were similarly more prestigious than the individual city games, and allowed for larger-scale religious celebrations and also contact opportunities for the leaders of different cities to meet, negotiate and announce alliances and so on. All of these games thus served many of the same cultural, political and religious roles, yet even amongst the Panhellenic games, the Olympics had a significant amount of primacy. This primacy was obviously not based on any particular material advantage that the Olympia games held over the other three Panhellenic games – so this begs the question why the games at Olympia were more important than any of the other ones. The simple answer is, that like all competitions, and many other cultural hierarchies, the Olympic games were more prestigious than the other ones. When talking about Greek religion, John Gould says that understanding such an incredibly different mindset requires a great degree of “tact and imagination” (1984, 1), and this idea also holds true when trying to understand other somewhat inscrutable aspects of Greek culture, such as the placement of prestige and importance on some institutions more culturally significant than other ones. To understand the fundamental difference between the games at Olympia and the games elsewhere in the Greek world, one must delve into what was important to Hellenistic peoples, and thus why the Olympic Games were more prominent than any of the other games that were so similar. One thing that grants prestige in a variety of cultures – with Greece being no exception – is age. Some would argue that age is less of an aspect of prestige in ancient Greek culture than in many others – in Greek religion, for example, the gods themselves were acknowledged as being children f older beings who had usurped and entombed their forebears (Carteledge, 1984, 103), so clearly, age alone was not necessarily the primary measurement of power or prestige. Despite this fact, however, Ancient Greeks did look back to a heroic age previous to their own, where Gods and men interacted more closely, and the primary Greek heroes lived (Gould, 1984, 28). Thus age still had a role to play in Greek understandings of prestige – older institutions were closer to the heroic era that was so important to Greek identity. And Ancient Greeks themselves, along with modern historians, all acknowledge that the Olympic games were the oldest games of their kind, and that in fact all other games were merely reflections and copies of the Olympics. The age was the Olympic Games served as an important reason they were held in primacy over all of the other very similar Panhellenic games. Absolute age, however, is far from the most important aspect of prestige. Far more important is the idea of the Olympics’ mythological age. The Greek people felt an intense connection to their Gods and to the founding myths of their civilizations (Kyle, 2007, 99), and the mythological origins of the Olympic games constituted an important connection of that type because of its foundational myths. The Olympic Games have a number of foundational myths that tangle together in a weave of ancient histories, and it is incredibly difficult to pull each myth apart, or to know exactly who and exactly when each myth had prominence (Kyle, 2007, 101). This is not incredibly important, however, because each myth fundamentally rooted the games with the Gods, so whichever foundational myth was believed would pay significant amounts of prestige to the games at Olympia. Each origin myth also demonstrates that the games were an essential connection between the Gods and the Greek people, which both formed an important part of Greek identity while also heaping a great deal of prestige on the Olympic Games. The first myth indicates that Herakles, a dactyl, (not Herakles, son of Zeus) held a race at the foot of Olympus and was crowned with a laurel wreath for his efforts, which caused annual sets of games in which the Gods would also compete (Kyle, 2007, 101). Under this myth, ancient Greek people would see themselves as following in the footsteps of the Gods by continuing this practice, engaging in the same kinds of competitions that their gods did. A second myth, which appears to have originated somewhat later than the first, indicates that the demi-God Herakles, son of Zeus, intitiated the Olympic Games as a competition after finishing his various labours (Kyle, 2007, 102), during which a hero, Pelops, with the help of Poseidon, cheated in a chariot race to win the sought-after daughter of a local King, Hippodamia (Kyle, 2007, 102). This myth also reinforces the connection the games generate between gods and men: firstly through their foundation by Herakles, the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the connection between gods and men (being of both kindred), and second through the collusion of Pelops and Poseidon, which demonstrated that in these bygone years humans and gods had a closer working relationship. This myth indicates that the Olympic Games had always been a part of Greek life, but were suspended for a lengthy period of time (Kyle, 2007, 103), which indicated a break from the Gods and traditional ways of life (Spivey, 2005, 229). The oracle of Delphi then encouraged rulers of the major cities to re-instate the games, in order to please the Gods and reiterate humanity’s devotion to them, and to return to an older and more pure form of Greek culture (Spivey, 2005, 230). When the games resumed, an era of chaos and famine ended, replaced by an era of relative peace and prosperity, indicating that the Gods were pleased by humans re-stating this connection to them (Spivey, 2005, 231). This final myth is the most obvious in its use of the games serving as a connection between the Gods and men, as it is based on the games serving that purpose as a premise of its story. Each of the Olympic Game’s foundational myths clearly imagined the games as a physical and historical representation of the deep connections between the Hellenistic gods and the Hellenistic peoples, which led to the Olympics being an incredibly prestigious, not to mention culturally and religiously important, event. The foundational myths of the Olympic Games were not their only link to the Greek Gods, however. One of the most important factors was the Olympic’s location at the foot of Mount Olympia, where Greeks believed the Gods to live. The Greeks even called the pantheon they worshipped the “Olympian Gods” perhaps contrasting them with other Gods known to have been worshiped by different groups (Finley and Plecket, 1976, 63), or the other divine being from the primordial era such as Chronos, Gaia or the Titans whom the Olympian Gods overthrew and entombed in order to rise to prominence in the world. The Olympic Games’ presence at the foot of Mount Olympus thus not only served as yet another connection between humans and the Greek Gods, but gave the Games a kind of natural pre-eminence among the Panhellenic games, as they take place in what was possibly the most revered place in the world (Nifj, 1999, 177). The age, mythical origins and location of the Olympic Games gave them prestige over all of the other Panhellenic games, but in what ways and to what extent did this prestige transfer into real-world differences between the Olympic games and other Panhellenic games? The most obvious real-world effect was the degree to which Olympic athletes, especially victorious ones, were honoured and rewarded. Though officially the only prize for winning an Olympic event was a laurel wreath, as having purely nominal, honorary rewards was supposed to be an important part of the Olympic spirit of competition for the sake of competition (Nifj, 2011, 311), in reality, winning athletes received significant perks. These came in several forms, such as simple honour, which was of great value in and of itself, to significant financial and status rewards. Some athletes, such as Cynisca of Sparta, who was the first woman to have been recorded the victor of an Olympic event (as the owner and trainer of a chariot team), for instance, won great praise, including statues and engravings throughout her homeland honouring her achievements (Carteledge, 2003, 184). Many names of Greek people come down to the modern times purely based on their victories at the Olympics. Beyond this, however, city-states frequently gave material perks to victors in order to encourage and reward their performance. A wide variety of city-states would exempt victors from taxes, or award money to them directly in recompense for their services or other perks. Athens, for instance, awarded its victors 500 dracha, a small fortune, along with granting them unlimited use of a large house for one year, a house which was usually reserved for visiting dignitaries (Finley and Plecket, 1976, 83). So the prestige of the games had a direct impact on fame, honour and recompense of the athletes. More importantly than this, however, the Olympic Games served very real and important political roles solely because of their prestige. The Greek city-states were perhaps historically unique in being simultaneously all parts of the same general culture, and thus sharing a national identity of sorts, incredibly inter-reliant through trade and alliance formation (especially in the face of outside enemies, such as the Persians), while nearly perpetually engaging with warfare amongst one another (Spivey, 2004, 73). The Olympic Games served important political functions, because their religious and cultural significance allowed the formation and maintenance of a “sacred truce” for their duration, in which it was unlawful, and even heretical, to conduct warfare against another Greek city-state (Parke, 1992, 89 ). Smaller Panhellenic games had similar truces associated with them, but these truces usually only extended to the hosting city – if Corinth, for instance, was at war with Athens during the Isthmian games, that conflict would be suspended, but if Athens and Sparta were at war with each-other, that conflict would continue throughout the games, outside of Corinth’s control. The Olympic Games were different – their prestige made it anathema to continue a conflict throughout their duration, and thus there were very few instances when the sacred truth was actually broken, because any aggression would be likely to solidify alliances for the opponent of the aggressor. This meant that there was at least one occasion every four years when alliances, trade agreements and so on could be negotiated by all of the members of the Greek states. This truce served incredibly important politically during many stages in Greek history, especially during the Peloponnesian Wars between Sparta and Athens (Jona, 2010, 28). This truce allowed, and in fact demanded meeting between Greek leaders, served as a time to announce truces, and helped keep warfare as civil as it can possibly be by ensuring consistent communication. The ancient Olympic Games were, on their surface, very similar to other games held throughout the Greek world. Like games held in nearly every city-state, they honoured gods, served religious as well as cultural and athletic roles, allowed for healthy competition that was supposed to be good for the competitors, and even had the same events and similar prizes. Unlike all these other games, the Olympics were Panhellenic, featuring the best from every part of the Greek world, but even this did not make them unique, as there were three other important Panhellenic games. To truly understand why the Olympic Games were different, one has to enter the mind of an ancient Greek person, and understand the different elements of the Olympic Game’s prestige: their renown for being the oldest games of that kind, mythological origin, location, and the important role they served as a connection between the Greek Gods and the Greek peoples. This prestige allowed them to function on a different plane from the other games, rewarding their athletes much more generously, making and breaking both personal and civic reputations, along with serving an important political role as a time of mandatory peace every four years. Works Cited Bentley J.D. 1970. The Ancient Olympic Games. Amersham. Broneer, O 1962. The Isthmian Victory Crown. AJA 66, pp. 259-263. 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