The Mystique of the Ancient Greek Olympics

The ancient Greeks had a passion for athletics that makes our own enthusiasm for sports seem lukewarm by comparison. Typically, they staged their games in their most hallowed sacred spaces; some of their most successful athletes were literally worshipped hundreds of years after their deaths at purpose-built shrines; and ultimately they even came to measure the passage of time itself by the stately sequence of quadrennial Olympiads. How, then can we explain the extraordinary force and resonance of sports in Greek culture? My paper will attempt to answer this question by investigating the beginnings of organized athletics at ancient Olympia.

Professor Anderson is a specialist in the history of ancient Greece. He is a graduate of the universities of Newcastle and London in his native Britain, and holds M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in Classics from Yale University.

Professor Anderson's primary area of interest is political culture in Greek city-states during the archaic (700-480 BC) and classical (480-320 BC) periods. His work explores the dynamic interplay between politics and other key realms of human experience, especially art and architecture, cult, warfare, memory, and identity. His first book, The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 BC (University of Michigan Press, 2003), rethinks the beginnings of democracy and civic order in ancient Athens. To date, he has nine other scholarly pieces in print or in press. Their topics range from the origins of the ancient Olympic games to social memory formation in classical Athens. Professor Anderson's principal current project is a second book, provisionally entitled The Invention of Citizenship, which reexamines patterns of early political development across the Greek world as a whole. Its ultimate aim is to offer a new way of looking at the creation of the world's first citizen-states.

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by Dr. Greg Anderson
Assistant Professor of History, Ohio State University