Poems of the Week: The Olympics

It seems appropriate this week to look at the Olympic Games, and some of the poetry that derives from them, or relates to them, one way or another.

The Olympic Games was one of the four great national athletic meetings in ancient Greece, which were open to all Greek men; collectively they were called the Panhellenic Games.

The Olympic Games were held at Olympia (as one might suppose); the Pythian Games were held at Delphi (this name derives from Pytho, the serpent, who was worshipped as god of the Delphic oracle in early times before the introduction of the Olympic deities, after which they were held in honour of Apollo). The Puthian Games were timed, like the Olympics, on a four year cycle; two years after (and two years before) each Olympic Games. They were founded sometime in the 6th Century BCE, and, unlike the Olympic Games, also featured competitions for music and poetry. The music and poetry competitions pre-dated the athletic portion of the games, and were said to have been started by Apollo after he killed Pytho. Otherwise, the athletic events were the same as the Olympic Games, except that there was no four-horse chariot race. It is claimed that women could participate in the Pythian Games.

The games held on the Isthmus of Corinth were called the Isthmian Games, and the fourth Games was held at Nemea. The site of Ancient Nemea lies in an upland valley in the modern Greek province of Korinthia, and in the eastern foothills of the Arkadian mountains. In 573 BCE, Nemea became the location for a biennial Panhellenic Games. By the late 5th Century BCE, the Games had moved from Nemea, perhaps to Argos. The Isthmian Games were held both the year before and the year after the Olympic Games, while the Pythian Games were held in the third year of the Olympiad cycle. The Isthmian Games were held in honour of Poseidon, and were said to have originated around 580 BCE to celebrate the death of the tyrant Kypselos. Another story states that these Games were founded by Theseus.

The Olympic Games in particular were to become famous throughout the Greek world. There are records of the champions at Olympia from 776 BCE to 217 CE. The Games were abolished in 393 CE by the Roman emperor Theodosius I, probably because of their pagan associations. For the first 100 or 200 years, Olympic champions came from a dozen or more Greek cities, the majority from Sparta and Athens, but athletes in the next three centuries were drawn from 100 cities in the Greek empire, and champions in the final 100 years or so before the Games were discontinued came from as far as Antioch, Alexandria, and Sidon.

Although the first Olympic champion listed in the records was one Coroebus of Elis, a cook, who won the sprint race in 776 BCE, it is generally accepted that the Games were probably at least 500 years old at that time. According to one legend they were founded by Heracles, son of the human woman Alcmene and Zeus. The Games, like all Greek games, were an intrinsic part of a religious festival. They were held in honour of Zeus at Olympia in the city-state of Elis, on a track about 32 meters (35 yards) wide. The racing length was one stade, a distance of about 192 meters (210 yards). In the early Olympics a race, called a stade, covered one length of the track. Horse racing, which became part of the ancient games, was held in the hippodrome, south of the stadium.

At the meeting in 776 BCE there was apparently only one event, the stade, but other events were added over the ensuing decades. In 724 BCE a two-length race, diaulos, roughly similar to the 400-metre race, was included, and four years later the dolichos, a long-distance race possibly to be compared to the modern 1,500- or even 5,000-metre event, was added. Wrestling and the pentathlon were introduced in 708 BCE. The latter was an all-around competition consisting of five events—the long jump, javelin throw, discus throw, foot race, and wrestling. Boxing was introduced in 688 BCE, and in 680 a chariot race. In 648 the pancratium (from Greek pankration), a kind of all-strength, or no-holds-barred, wrestling, was included: kicking and hitting were allowed; only biting and gouging (thrusting a finger or thumb into an opponent's eye) were forbidden. Between 632 and 616 BCE events for boys were introduced. And from time to time further events were added, including contests for fully armed soldiers, for heralds, and for trumpeters. The program must have been as varied as that of the modern Olympics, although the athletics (track and field) events were limited; there was no high jumping in any form and no individual field event, except in the pentathlon.

Until the 77th Olympiad (472 BCE) all the contests took place on one day; later they were spread, with perhaps some fluctuation, over four days, with a fifth devoted to the closing-ceremony presentation of prizes and a banquet for the champions. Sources generally agree that women were not allowed as competitors or, except for the priestess of Demeter, as spectators. In most events the athletes participated in the nude.

The prizes for the victors in the Games were wreaths. In the Olympics, the wreath was of wild olive; in the Pythian Games, the wreath was laurel; in the Isthmian Games, the wreath was wild parsley or pine; and in the Nemean Games the wreath was of wild parsley.

The cultural achievement most directly tied to the Olympic Games was poetry commissioned in honor of athletic victors. These poems, called epinicion odes, were written by the most famous poets of the day, including Pindar (518 – c.440 BCE), Bacchylides (c. 520 – 450 BCE), and Simonides (c.556 - 468 BCE), and they were extremely popular. Proof of this is that the playwright Aristophanes portrays an average, not especially literary Athenian man who asks his son to sing a particular forty-year-old epinicion poem composed by Simonides. The poem, and the athlete, lived on in people's memories long after the day of victory. The epinicion odes were written to immortalize the athletic victors, and they have lasted longer than many of the statues and inscriptions which were made for the same purpose.

Simonides came from Ceos, and is credited with originating the epinicion ode. His epinicion of 520 BCE is the earliest known of the form. (His lines on the Spartan rear guard that held the pass of Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 BCE are a particularly memorable epitaph.) Bacchylides was his nephew, and they both used primarily what is called the dithyrambic form, which is impassioned chanted poetry, with a solo singer and a chorus. Bacchylides called himself ‘The Nightingale of Ceos’.

I have talked about the poetry of Pindar before in these columns, and you may remember that generally the Odes consist of a set of triads; each triad involves three stanzas: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. The strophe and the antistrophe have identical lengths and meter; the epode is slightly different. Subject to this structure, each Ode has its own meter, different from any other Ode. (Got that? Good. There's going to be a test later. -- Ed.)

Pindar wrote fifteen Odes relating to victors at the Olympiads; twelve relating to the Pythian Games; eleven for the Nemean Games; and eight for the Isthmian Games.

The first Poem of the Week this week is the Olympian XIV: for Asopichus of Orchomenus, Winner of the Boys’ Foot-Race. This is a very short Ode, and it is different from the standard form I have described above, in that it consists of only two strophes. The date of the victory and of the Ode is uncertain, but it is thought to date from 488 BCE, when Pindar was thirty years old. If so, it is the earliest of his Olympian Odes. I have also mentioned before about the difficulty of translating poetry. The translation I have chosen to use for the Poem of the Week is by Geoffrey S. Conway (1972). However, I found a very different version on the web:

I
The waters of Kaphisos belong
To the place of fine horses where you dwell,
Queens of song, in sparkling Orchomenos,
Graces, who watch
Over the ancient race of the Minyans,
Hear, when I pray. By your help
All sweet and delightful things
Belong to men; if anyone
Is wise or lovely or famous.
For without the holy Graces
Not even the Gods rule dances or feasts.
They dispose all that is done in Heaven;
Their thrones are set
At the side of Pythian Apollo, the golden-bowed,
And they worship the everlasting glory
Of the Father on Olympos.

II
O Lady Glory, and Mirth, delighting in music,
Children of the most mighty of Gods,
Listen now, and Health, lover of the dance,
Look on the company lightly treading after friendly fortune.
I have come with a song for Asopichos
In the Lydian style with careful art;
For through you the Minyan race
Is victorious at Olympia.
Go now, Echo, to the black walls
Of Persephona's house
And bring the fine news to his father;
See Kleodamos and tell him
How his son
In the famous valleys of Pytho
Has crowned his young hair
With the wings of a glorious triumph.

I have commented before on my opinion of the validity of different translations of some Latin poems, but my knowledge of Greek is virtually zero. The differences are interesting, insofar as they show how one can form an impression of a poet in translation only through the ear of the translator!

So much for the archaic view of the Olympics. The idea of reviving the Olympic Games, in the sense of a national unifying concept had to wait until Greece was once again a nation, and this was in the early years of the nineteenth century. In last week’s piece about Lord Byron I mentioned his involvement with the Greek freedom movement.

After the foundation of the modern Greek state, in the beginning of the 19th century, there were some attempts to revive the Olympic Games. In 1833 the poet Alexandros Soutsos recalled the glorious and peaceful character of the Olympic Games and through his poetry sent the message for their revival. In 1838, the municipality of Letrinoi, an area near ancient Olympia, decided to revive the Olympic Games. According to their plans, the games would take place every four years in the city of Pyrgos. Since no additional information about these games is available, historians believe that they never took place. However, this is an important item of information because it shows that the idea of relating the new Greek state with the ancient Greek culture - an issue that greatly concerned the scholars and politicians of that period - also met with positive response from a large part of the population.

The Greeks continued to attempt to revive the Panhellenic Games concept. They organized the Zappian Games in Athens four times, in 1859, 1870, 1875 and 1889. However, consistent with the original model, these Games were exclusively Greek in character, both with regard to the athletes that participated and the spectators that watched them.

In 1833, the newspaper Helios published a poem by Alexandros Soutsos which referred to the necessity of reviving the Olympic Games. The newspaper was published in Nauplion, the first capital of the new born Greek state, at the Peloponnese. A Cry for the Restoration of the Olympic Games is our second Poem of the Week (again, it is in translation).

A wealthy Greek from Northern Greece, Evangelos Zappas, inspired by Alexandros Soutsos' idea of reviving the ancient Olympics Games, proposed that the Greek government finance the foundation of a Modern Olympics.

A.R. Rangaves, Greek Foreign Minister and classical scholar, objected: "today's spirit is different from the one of ancient times; the actual nations are competing in industry and artifacts, and not in stadiums."

According to Rangaves' opinion, modern Olympic Games should have focused on agricultural and industrial progress, not on athletics. So, he proposed to Zappas a mixed organization including both agricultural/industrial competition and athletic games, in order to amuse the people. In fact the industrial part in the Zappian Olympics was held regularly and got more attention and far more money than the athletics.

The Zappian Games took place first in 1859; here is a description:

As the renovation of the ancient Stadium was not yet completed, the Games of 1859 took place in Loudovicos' Square (today's Omonoia Square, at the center of Athens). All the official representatives - the Royal Family, the members of the Government, Military and Public Authorities - and many thousands of people attended. As it was one of the first mass gatherings, neither the people nor the police had any previous experience of keeping the necessary order for the event. The fact that it was a new experience makes the event a very interesting case-study for the first mass gathering in the new era of the modern societies.

The athletic competition had more game-like than sportive character: as there were not athletes at that time, the Organizing Committee accepted the participation of workers, porters, etc., who were attracted by the monetary prizes of the games. According to the press of the time, many anecdotes took place during the games: a policeman who was there keeping the order, left his post and participated in the races. Even a beggar, who pretended to be blind, participated in the races as well!

The following day, the press criticized the games, but the ideal of the athletic competition was generally accepted, and this was the beginning of the whole process of the Olympic Games.

As is clear both from Soutsos and Byron, in what we might call the Western World the general awakening described as the ‘Century of Light’ and the demands of people for national independence and self determination had brought the eternal values of the classical Greek spirit once again to the foreground. Amongst these was faith in the concurrent development of the body and the mind and the ideals of sport as expressed in its finest form in the Olympic Games of antiquity.

It is in this light that the efforts made during the 18th century, and chiefly at the beginning of the 19th century, can be explained. Many times, however, these efforts did not have a purely athletic nature. Various European countries such as Poland in 1830 and Sweden in 1839 organized so-called “Greek Games” for professional athletes. Such events took place until the last decade of the 19th century - and not only in Europe!

In 1834 and in 1836 a Pan-Scandinavian Olympic Games was organized, and in 1844 a Traveling Olympic Games took place in Germany. From 1862 to 1864 the Liverpool Athletic Club in England organized three Olympic Games - events which the Great Britain Athletic Union copied in 1866 and 1867 when they organized Olympic Festivals in Wales. Approximately 25 years later in 1893, San Francisco in the United States staged the Greco-Roman Games.

However, it is generally agreed that the architect of the modern Olympics was Pierre, Baron de Coubertin. Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, was born in Paris on New Year’s Day in 1863. His family originated in Normandy where he spent many of his summers in the family Château de Mirville, near Le Havre. He refused the military career planned for him by his family, as well as renouncing a promising political career. By the age of 24 he had already decided the aim of his life: he would help bring back the noble spirit of France by reforming its old-fashioned and unimaginative education system.

Coubertin, whose father was an artist and mother a musician, was raised in cultivated and aristocratic surroundings. He had always been deeply interested in questions of education. For him, education was the key to the future of society, and he sought the means to make France rise once more after its defeat in the war in 1870. As a young man he was intensely interested in literature and in education and sociology. Family tradition pointed to an army career or possibly politics, but at the age of 24 Coubertin decided that his future lay in education. At the same time, he had the idea of reviving the Olympic Games, and he propounded his desire for a new era in international sport when on November 25, 1892, at a meeting of the Union des Sports Athlétiques in Paris, he said:

“Let us export our oarsmen, our runners, our fencers into other lands. That is the true Free Trade of the future; and the day it is introduced into Europe the cause of Peace will have received a new and strong ally. It inspires me to touch upon another step I now propose and in it I shall ask that the help you have given me hitherto you will extend again, so that together we may attempt to realize, upon a basis suitable to the conditions of our modern life, the splendid and beneficent task of reviving the Olympic Games.”

The speech did not produce any appreciable activity, but Coubertin was not fainthearted. At a conference on international sport in Paris in June 1894, at which Coubertin raised the possibility of the revival of the Olympic Games, there were 79 delegates representing 49 organizations from nine countries. Coubertin himself wrote that except for his coworkers Dimítrios Vikélas of Greece, who was to be the first president of the International Olympic Committee, and Professor William M. Sloane of the United States, from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), no one had real interest in the revival of the Games. Nevertheless, and to quote Coubertin again, “a unanimous vote in favor of revival was rendered at the end of the Congress chiefly to please me.”

It was at first agreed that the Games should be held in Paris in 1900. Six years seemed a long time to wait, however, and it was decided to change the venue—what better site than Athens, the capital of Greece—and the date, to April 1896. A great deal of indifference, if not opposition, had to be overcome, including a refusal by Athens to stage the Games at all. But Coubertin and his newly elected International Olympic Committee of 14 members won through, and the Games were opened by the king of Greece in the first week of April 1896.

So there we are. It seems sad, on the whole, that the idea of having the games include cultural matters seems to have vanished: the structure of the Celtic celebrations, such as the Welsh Eisteddfod, which involve poetry and singing, would seem to have something to share.

It is also sad, perhaps, that the Byronic concept of the athlete/poet does not seem to be in the mainstream any more – but whose fault is that?

My last Poem of the Week is by John Betjeman (1906 – 1984). It is entitled The Olympic Girl, but (as you will see) it doesn’t do too much to restore the image of the scholar/athlete.

Hope you find all this entertaining!