Winners at the Olympics were thought to have come as close to a god as any man could. But that did not stop some Greeks wondering whether it was all worth it.
The poet Xenophanes commented that ‘a noble boxer would not make a city better ordered, nor keep its granaries filled’. Diogenes the cynic once met an athlete boasting about how fast he was. Diogenes replied: ‘But not faster than a rabbit or deer, the swiftest of animals, and also the most cowardly.’ Aristotle was not hostile to the games per se — just to the extremes to which they drove people: ‘The athlete’s habit of body does not produce a good condition for the general purposes of life… some exertion is essential but it should be a general exertion, directed to all the activities of a free man.
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