Much more than a sporting event

The Ancient Olympics
by Nigel Spivey
OUP, £17.99, pp. 264, ISBN 0192804332
Olympics in Athens 1896: The Invention of the Modern Olympic Games
by Michael Llewellyn Smith
Profile, £16.99, pp. 290, ISBN 186197342X

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Matthew Parris

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So politics should be kept out of sports? Tell that to the Greeks. Two absorbing new books about the ancient Olympic Games, each crammed with information about the sporting events themselves, abundantly demonstrate that the athletic contexts represented far more than sporting prowess. Stephen Miller’s richly detailed study, beautifully illustrated, is an examination of the whole of Greek culture and the role that athletics, games and festivals played in the moulding of Greek literature, vase painting, democracy and politics. Athletics, performed in homage to the gods, trained body and soul and reminded men of their mortal limitations. The struggle was fierce. There were no team games and there were no medals for coming second, just an olive wreath for the victor. Nigel Spivey’s neat epigram for the Games is ‘war minus the shooting’. But he also reminds us that ‘to gymnify’ — the Greek language included the verb — was a social activity and, since it implied nakedness (gymnos, for ‘unclad’), an erotic one also. The gymnasium, like the agora, or market square, was a civilising place whose function was to provide ‘training or beautiful goodness’ and nurture virtue in the citizenry. ‘Barbarians’ were excluded from participation in the Olympics.

The Athens Olympics of 1896, the first in modern times, were also much more than a sporting event. Since the war of independence in the 1820s, Greece had remained something of a backwater, though Athens itself had grown from a ravaged village of a few hundred mostly roofless houses into a splendid capital city. A Danish dynasty occupied the throne, placed there by the powers who still controlled Greek foreign policy.