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The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games by Tony Perrottet Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Mettle If you can’t wait for the next Olympiad, go back to basics with Tony Perrottet’s interesting book about the original Games, The Naked Olympics. Rather than a ranking of medals, there’s more about the mettle of the athletes, the culture, and all the surrounding festivities during the Olympics. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 2, “The Greek Sports Craze,” pp. 18-23: To be healthy is the very best thing for anyone in life. —SIM0NIDES, POET, SIXTH CENTURY B.C. As if it weren’t enough for the ancient Greeks to have established the foundations of Western philosophy, geometry, drama, art, and science, we can also thank them for creating our modern passion for sport. “There is no greater glory for any man alive,” writes Homer in The Odyssey, sounding like a TV commentator on a roll, “than that which he wins by his hands and feet.” The.. Greeks’ love of competitive athletics is now securely embedde4 in international culture: not only our modern Olympic Games, revived in 1896 by the French baron Pierre de Coubertin, but the slew of world cups and Super Bowls, our opens and our grand~ slams, hark back to those energetic pagans—as does our correlating obsession with youth and the body beautiful. All of our fad diets and health magazines, our workout machines and Pilates regimes, were anticipated by the harmony-loving Greeks, whose artists devoted their lives to establishing the perfect proportion of thigh to femur. (In their admiration of physical perfection, the ancient Greeks were guiltlessly superficial. Indeed, the most enduring character of Greek mythology today may well be Narcissus.) Sport was the core of every Hellenic education; every provincial city had its gymnasium, its wrestling school, and its municipal athletic games. It was an obsession that mystified other ancient people. “What sort of men have you brought us to fight?” a Persian general asked King Xerxes at the height of the invasion of Greece in 480 B.C. He had just learned that, while only a handful of Spartan soldiers were bravely defending Greece at the pass of Thermopylae, tens of thousands of able-bodied men were actually away at the Olympic Games, watching a wrestling final. When the general learned that the only prize was an olive wreath, he did not hide his contempt. Why did this sports mania take such a deep hold in Greece, rather than in ancient Gaul, say, or in Libya, or Britain? It could be said that athletics combined the two vital currents of Greek life: the love of physical exercise and a rabid, relentless competitiveness. Ancient Greece was the original Land of the Great Outdoors: thanks to the benign climate, Greeks lived en plein air, running through the dizzy crags of their mountainous land, swimming in the rivers and glassy blue depths of the surrounding seas. But the fragmented geography, divided by rugged valleys and inlets, also fostered divisions. Over one thousand independent states grew up around the mainland and islands, each centered on a single city, each proud of its traditions, each vying desperately for the slender natural resources of Greece. National competitiveness plunged the land into endless warfare, and was reflected within each city on a daily basis—not just in the chaotic internal politics of most states, but by the flamboyant individualism of its citizens. As Homer said, Greeks felt a personal mission “to always be the first and surpass everyone else.” Imagine the Wall Street bull pit conducted on the beach in California and you might have an idea of the abrasive male oneupmanship that emerged by the Aegean. Greeks loved to compete over everything—drama, pottery, oratory, poetry reading, sculpture. Travelers held eating races in inns, doctors would vie over their surgery skills and thesis presentations. The first beauty pageants were Greek, for both males and females, as were the first kissing competitions (held in Megara, but for boys only). It was inevitable that Greeks would test one another in their most beloved pastimes. Any excuse was good enough to hold a sports meet. The Greeks held races and athletics at weddings and at funerals. They took wagonloads of athletic equipment with them on military campaigns. And they competed at the myriad religious festivals that punctuated the annual calendar in this era before weekends. The Olympics were born from one of these cult occasions. The details are shrouded in myth: Ancient writers weighed up several contradictory tales involving gods and heroes, with the geographer Strabo wisely concluding that they were too confusing to be of any value. The current consensus of archaeologists is that Olympia had been a religious site dedicated to the Earth goddess Gaea since 1100 B.C. Some time around 1000 B.C., an agrarian festival at Olympia was combined with casual footraces dedicated to Zeus in a village atmosphere. In 776 B.C.—at least this was the date accepted by ancient tradition—the first official sports meeting was instituted at the sanctuary. We do not know precisely why Olympia’s prestige grew so rapidly—it was probably thanks to Zeus’s oracle there, believed to predict the result of wars—but by the sixth century B.C., the Olympic Games were regarded as the ultimate festival, towering in popularity over all other events. Held every four years to coincide with the second full moon after the summer solstice, they “attracted the best of the best, and the most celebrated of the celebrated.” A Barbarian in the Gym A few of the more sophisticated Greeks could imagine how peculiar their sports craze might seem to outsiders like Xerxes and his general. There is a hilarious dialogue written in the second century by the prolific satirist Lucian, subtitled On Physical Exercises. In it, a fictional barbarian prince named Anacharsis is being given a sightseeing tour of the Lyceum, one of the four great gymnasiums of Athens. As mentioned, Lucian was an inveterate sports fan—he went to the Olympic Games at least four times—but as a writer he had the unusual ability to observe his own culture with critical distance. Anacharsis—a self-confessed “good-natured barbarian”—is the original Noble Savage, and his bemused reactions might echo our own if we were somehow teleported to classical Athens. (A similar skit today might involve a Yanomamo Indian visiting a gym in New York City.) “I’d love to know what the point of all this is,” the visitor says, after he is led into the famous riverside gymnasium, where dozens of naked young men are in a courtyard, running on the spot, kicking the air or jumping back and forth to warm up. “To me, it looks like madness—these maniacs should all be locked up.” As he is escorted on, more shocking scenes unfold, involving the contact sports that were the core of the Greek phys ed curriculum. Wrestlers are murderously tossing and strangling one another, while boxers are knocking out one another’s teeth. “Why are your young men behaving so violently?” Anacharsis asks his guide, the Greek law-giver Solon. “Some of them are grappling and tripping each other—some have their hands around one another’s throats—others are wallowing in pools of mud, writhing together like a herd of pigs. But the first thing the boys did when they stripped naked, I noticed, was to oil and scrape each other’s bodies quite amiably, as if they were actually the best of friends. Then, something came over them—I don’t know what. They put their heads down and began to push, crashing their foreheads together like angry rams. “Look there! That young man has lifted the other one right off his legs, then dropped him on the ground like a log. “Why doesn’t the official in charge put an end to this brutality? Instead, the villain seems to be encouraging them—even congratulating the one who threw the blow!” The Greek simply chuckles condescendingly: “What is going on is called athletics,” he explains. Perhaps it does look a little rough, Solon admits. But wouldn’t Anacharsis rather be one of these strapping young athletes, grimy, bloody-nosed, and sunburned as they are, than a sickly, pasty-skinned bookworm—one of the sorry wretches whose bodies are “marshmallow soft, with thin blood withdrawing to the interior of the body”? It’s a question that echoes through history—reworked by Charles Atlas in advertisements, many centuries later, about the sunken-chested “90 pound weaklings” of America who have sand kicked in their faces. Indeed, the remark that helped start physical culture in the 1950S was eerily presaged by the author Philostratus in the third century A.D.: “I contend that a sunken chest should not be seen,” he writes, “let alone exercised.” The Ancient Workout: A User’s Guide What was it like to exercise at an ancient gymnasium? It’s safe to say that at every step of the way, the experience was quite different from that of the average modern health club. In fact, the Greek gymnasium, despite the name, bears only a hazy relationship to a contemporary gym. It was less a specific building than a public sports ground, the signature feature of which was a running track. This large, open-air space was enclosed by column-lined arcades, including a covered running track for use in bad weather; it was usually placed near a river where athletes could swim, and always attached to a palaestra, or wrestling school. What’s more, sports was only one aspect of this complex’s function. The gymnasium was the ultimate Greek social center—and an exclusive male domain (only in Sparta and some other progressive Greek cities were young women given separate physical training). It was the lungs, heart, and brain of every polis: many had elegant gardens, parks, libraries, even, in one case in Athens, a museum of natural science. The gymnasium was where young ‘boys of all social classes came for their primary education, where teenagers of the upper classes remained for military training, and where they generally had their first love affairs, with older men who acted as mentors. The testosterone-fueled ambiance remained addictive for older Greek men: authors often joked about “codgers” becoming figures of fun for trying to wrestle with golden-haired youngsters or join the dance classes that were a key part of education. We can piece together the routine of an Athenian athlete preparing for the Olympics—let’s call him Hippothales, a twenty-five-year-old wrestler in the mid—first century B.C. Like all Olympic hopefuls, he was obliged by the official regulations to devote himself to a training schedule in his home gymnasium for a full ten months before the start of the Games. Using the literary and archaeological evidence, we can follow Hippothales arriving at the Lyceum, the same gymnasium toured by the fictional Anarchasis. The Naked Olympics presents a witty description of the original games, Greek life at the time, and some drawings that are, of course, illustrative. Steve Hopkins, November 26, 2004
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