The Olympics

Imagine living at Highclere 2,000 years ago, battling through the challenges of growing food, of staying warm and simply surviving. Times were brutal and violent, political upheaval commonplace.

Then came the Romans, invading from the south and implementing wide scale changes to the political and social systems, to agriculture, building and lifestyles. They brought new rules but also new languages, new words and amazing stories and histories.

Imagine hearing travellers’ stories about what must have seemed to be the almost unbelievable wonders of another world, especially from the backdrop of a then very backward Britain.

Such tales must have seemed beyond imagination or understanding. Architectural achievements of godlike proportions from the pyramids at Giza, to the lighthouse at Alexandria; the Gardens of Babylon, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Temple of Artemis and the great Statue of Zeus – the wonders of the ancient world although even then one of these had already disappeared – the Colossus of Rhodes – destroyed by an earthquake in c 280 BC.

All of these great buildings were, to an extent, a view of our links with the Gods, of a desire for some sort of lasting impression or immortality. Humans may be the only creature on this earth who contemplate death in advance and search for ways to overcome it.

The immense statue of Zeus, King of the Greek Gods, stood at Olympia, having been commissioned by the custodians of the original Olympic Games. Over 40 foot high and made of gold, it showed the God seated and was the centrepiece of the newly constructed Temple of Zeus. The geographer Strabo noted early in the 1st century BC that the statue gave “the impression that if Zeus arose and stood erect he would unroof the temple.” It was the masterpiece of Phidias, antiquity’s greatest sculptor and such was his skill that the magnetism of the scale and features made it instantly famous.

The painted cedar-wood throne was adorned with gold, precious stones, ebony and ivory, with painted figures and wrought images. The floor in front was paved with black tiles and surrounded by a raised rim of marble to contain a reservoir of perfumed oil which effectively acted as a reflecting pool, doubling the apparent height of the statue.

The Roman historian Livy commented that the Roman general Aemilius Paullus (the victor over Macedon) saw the statue and “was moved to his soul, as if he had seen the god in person”.

Every four years, for a thousand years beginning in 776 BC, people from all over the Greek-speaking world travelled to the site of Olympia to celebrate the ancient Olympic Games. Athletes representing city-states across Greece and its colonies would compete in sports from running, to pentathlons, discus, boxing and chariot racing. Those who succeeded in this ultimate test of physical prowess would be treated as local heroes for centuries to come.

Zeus’s statue was created about 435 BC and survived for nearly 1000 years when it was disassembled and rebuilt in Constantinople where it was later destroyed in a fire. Likewise the Olympic Games disappeared with the fall of the Greek Empire until they were revived in the late 19th century through the efforts of an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Greek.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was inspired to create the International Olympic Committee building on the ideas and work of an Englishman, William Brookes, who, in the 1860’s, had created a National Olympian Association to encourage local sporting competitions in cities across Britain. Coubertin was a romantic who admired the focus on sport on the playing fields of the English schools he visited and saw how “organised sport can create moral and social strength”. A Greek family, the Zappas, then restored a stadium in Greece as a location for the new games which, as of old, would once again take place every four years.

The first of these new Olympic Games took place in Athens in 1896 and featured 280 participants from 12 nations, competing in 43 events. Since then, of course, the Olympic Games have become the world’s preeminent sporting competition.

Coubertin’s motto for the Games was “Citius, Altius, Fortius” – “Faster, Higher, Stronger”. In   2021 a fourth word was added to the motto – “Communiter” – “Together”. It was Coubertin who said that the most important thing in the Olympic Games was not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.

Two thousand years later, the world of the ancient Greeks still permeates so much of our own. Look again, for example, at the statue of George Washington, also known as Enthroned Washington. It is a large marble sculpture by Horatio Greenborough based on the statue of Zeus at Olympia.