Players, patriotism, and politics at the ancient Olympic Games

For starters, you think it’s the taking part that counts, rather than the winning? Well, in ancient Greece even just turning up was politically influential. The ruling classes of Greek cities sought to attend the major athletic contests not only to watch the games, but also to engage in politics at a personal or state level. The attendance, and above all the wealth, of each city’s official delegation served as propaganda for community identity and interstate rivalry.

For example, after his election as general in Athens, prominent Athenian statesman Alcibiades attended the 416 bce Olympic Games with the richest delegation so far. He also rented seven charioteers and entered all his seven quadrigas in the chariot race of the Olympic Games, winning the three first prizes and breaking the Spartan domination of the event. A few months later, Alcibiades exploited his Olympic victories politically in the Athenian popular assembly to gain support for his views in favour of the expedition against the powerful city of Syracuse in Sicily.

There were also cases, however, in which a resplendent official representation achieved exactly the opposite of what it was intended to do. In seeking to increase his fame among all the Greeks, the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius I, sent a brilliant delegation to Olympia, including “rhapsodes” to give public readings of his poems in order to win glory as a poet. At first, this glamorous presence aroused the curiosity and admiration of the spectators. But as soon as the rhapsodes began to read Dionysius’s very bad poetry, the audience began to laugh and mock him. The Athenian orator Lysias urged the crowd not to accept the emissaries of a tyrant, whereupon many of the spectators drove the Syracusans from Olympia.

Another very powerful means of exercising political influence at the Olympic Games was via the emergence of victors. This need, however, often led ancient cities to use methods that were not entirely legitimate.

The athletes from Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy, won twelve victories out of twenty-seven Olympiads in the most important contest, the speed race. Modern scholars have tried to interpret this phenomenon as “manufacturing winners” by using advanced diet and training methods, like East Germany in the modern period. Others, however, see strong circumstantial evidence that these Western Greeks recruited athletes from other cities and paid them handsomely.

The great desire for victory occasionally led the athletes themselves to indulge in illegitimate practices. In 332 bce, the pentathlete Callippus was caught bribing his opponents. The Athenians, refusing to pay the exorbitant fine, reacted by using a measure that resembles events at the modern Olympiads of Moscow and Los Angeles: they threatened to boycott the games and not send any athletes.

The games also played an important political role in the recognition of “Greekness”, since only Greeks originally had the right to take part. For example, at the beginning of the fifth century, King Alexander I of Macedonia decided to take part in the Olympic Games. Some of his rivals sought to exclude him, arguing that only Greek athletes, not barbarians, were allowed to enter. Alexander was able to prove that he was Greek through tracing his genealogy back to Heracles, and was allowed to participate. This was of great political significance, since this instance was the first time that Macedonia was accepted as part of the Greek world. Now that Macedonia was established as part of Greece, Alexander the Great set about disseminating Greek culture by starting athletic contests in all the lands he conquered.

The Romans, on the other hand, looked upon athletic contests, with the exception of chariot races, as an inferior activity. Several emperors supported the games, however, realising that one of the best ways to control the various peoples in their vast empire was develop existing institutions of a cohesive character.

In 212 bce, for example, Roman citizenship was granted to all inhabitants of the empire. This meant that all the great athletes of the Mediterranean acquired the right to compete at the Olympics, investing the games with a new, very important value: ecumenism.

As you can see, the Olympic Games have had an intense political character throughout their 1200 year long history. After all, there is a reason the games is the longest living institution of civilization in the history of mankind!