Olympics

The Greeks invented athleti contests and held them in honour of their gods. The Isthmos game were stagedevery two years at the Isthmos of Corinth. The Pythian games took place every four years near Delphi. But the most famous games were those at Olympia, a town in south- western Greece. These took place every four years. The ancient Olympics seem to have begun in the early 700 BC, in honour of Zeus. No women were allowed to watch the games. Pottery dating from around 550 BC shows men taking part in the games naked or wearing only a thong.

The games were greatly expanded from a one-day festival of athletics and wrestling to, in 472 BC, five days with many events. The order of the events is not precisely known, but the first day of the festival was devoted to sacrifices. On the second day, the foot-race, the main event of the games, took place in the stadium, an oblong area enclosed by sloping banks of earth. On other days, wrestling, boxing, and the pancratium, a combination of the two, were held. In wrestling, the aim was to throw the opponent to the ground three times. Boxing became more and more brutal; at first the pugilists wound straps of soft leather over their fingers as a means of deadening the blows, but in later times hard leather, sometimes weighted with metal, was used. In the pancratium, the most rigorous of the sports, the contest continued until one or the other of the participants acknowledged defeat. Horse-racing, in which each entrant owned his horse, was confined to the wealthy but was nevertheless a popular attraction. After the horse-racing came the pentathlon, a series of five events: sprinting, long-jumping, javelin-hurling, discus-throwing, and wrestling.