The games of democratic Athens were as great as the Ancient Olympics

Opinion piece by Dr David Pritchard, Associate Professor of Greek History at The University of Queensland. These are excerpts from a public lecture that he will soon be delivering at the Brisbane Greek Festival.

The Olympic Games immediately spring to mind when people think about sport in ancient Greece. This is easy to understand because these games are what has inspired our modern Olympics. The ancient Greeks celebrated their Olympics for a truly staggering 1,000 years. Their games attracted sportsmen from the 1,000 Greek microstates of the Mediterranean basin. Those Olympics, like ours, were the world’s largest event.

Our focus on this four-yearly festival in honor of Zeus, who was the ruler of the gods, is thus perfectly understandable.

Yet what most people do not realize is that the Olympics were only one aspect of sport in ancient Greece. Often overlooked is that these games were part of a periodos or circuit of four international sporting festivals. The other three games in this circuit took place at Corinth, Nemea and Delphi. Each of Greece’s 1,000 microstates also staged their own sporting festivals. We know of many hundreds of these local games.

Traditional education also included classes for the events that were common to all games. Therefore, ancient Greek sport was both a competitive and educational activity.

By far the largest local games of ancient Greece was the Great Panathenaea. Ancient democratic Athens staged this sporting festival every four years in honor of its chief deity, Athena, who was a daughter of Zeus. Local as it was, the Great Panathenaea was, in important ways, as great as the Olympics.

The heyday of both games was the 4th century BC. During that century, Athens spent an incredible 650 kilograms of silver on each Great Panathenaea. That explains why it actually had twice as many contests as those at the Olympics and lasted twice as long. The Athenians also celebrated their Panathenaic Games for a staggering 1,000 years.

Yet there were also three big differences between the games at Olympia and Athens. The first difference was the prizes. Those at the Olympics were purely symbolic: wreaths of olive leaves. The Athenians, by contrast, handed out storage pots, which were commissioned for each games. Such an amphora depicted Athena on one side and a sporting event on the other (Figure 1). Panathenaic amphorae have been discovered right around the Mediterranean basin. This shows that the sportsmen at this festival were as international as those at the Olympics.

Beautiful as they are, it is easy to think that these pots were the prizes. But the real prize was what they stored: olive oil. The Athenians gave victors and placegetters an amazing quantity of such oil. At each games, they awarded 2,100 storage pots as prizes, filling each one with 36 liters. Filling them all would have required more than 75,000 liters of olive oil.

What motivated them to dispense so much oil was their myth about how Athena had become their chief goddess. According to this story, she had competed with her uncle, Poseidon, to be their city-protecting deity. As part of this contest, Poseidon created a salty spring on the Acropolis, while Athena made the world’s first olive tree appear there. Because Zeus, understandably, judged such a tree more useful than undrinkable water, Athena was declared the winner.

The myth also accounts for the Athenian boast that they had given Greece the olive tree.

The same myth made out that many of Attica’s olive trees had been cuttings from this first tree. Initially, the Athenians got the oil for the festival only from these purported sacred trees. But, by the 4th century, they were getting it from a biannual tax of 3 liters of oil on each olive tree in Attica. This points to Attica possessing at least 12,500 olive trees, which was one for every three citizens at the time.

The Olympics and the Great Panathenaea included the common events of ancient Greek sport. There was a stadion or sprint race as well as three or four other footraces. Sportsmen could compete in wrestling, boxing and the pankration, which was like our kickboxing. The pentathlon at both had the same five events: stadion, javelin, long jump, discus and wrestling. The two festivals had the full suite of races for horse-drawn chariots, racehorses and mule carts.

But events also represented the second big difference between these two games. Two events at the Great Panathenaea were completely unique. The first was a race for a charioteer and a passenger, which was called the apobates (Figure 2). This contest required the passenger, who was armed as a soldier, to jump on and off a speeding chariot. The second unique event was the purrhikhe, which was a dancing contest. Each troupe in this contest carried spears and shields (Figure 3).

We used to think that the Great Panathenaea was a birthday party for the goddess. But it is now clear that the Athenians had a different origin story for their games. This myth accounts for these two unique events that it had. When Zeus became the ruler of the gods, he was forced to fight the Giants, who were an earlier generation of unruly gods. In doing so, he relied on Athena, who was the best of his warriors, to lead the Olympian gods in the battle.

The story explained that the Great Panathenaea started as the celebration of the victory to which Athena had led them. She had done so by fighting as a soldier, who had jumped on and off a chariot. Consequently, the apobates race saw mounted soldiers mimic how their cherished goddess had once fought. The purrhikhe was the spontaneous dance that Athena invented in celebration of her smashing victory. It is this that she is always depicted dancing on Panathenaic amphorae (Figure 1).

Sport and war were closely linked together in ancient Greece. A clear example is the footrace-in-armor that was an event that the Olympics and the Great Panathenaea shared.

Nevertheless, the third big difference between the two games was that those at Athens were even more about war. The Great Panathenaea had many contests for members of the cavalry corps. There were also team events for the Athenian armed forces. The anthippasia saw cavalry units charge each other (figure 4). There was also a race of warships and a team event in euandria or manly courage.

War was also put on display in the pompe or procession of the Great Panathenaea, which was depicted on the Parthenon frieze. It included cavalrymen and soldiers in their thousands, with hundreds more bearing weapons as gifts for Athena.

The Athenians boldly asserted that they were the children of Athena. Such an origin is paradoxical because their goddess was, of course, a well-armed virgin. A third myth of theirs about Hephaestus, who was a brother of Athena, resolved this paradox.

To put it politely, this story saw Hephaestus develop feelings that a brother should never have for a sister. The result was that he accidentally spilt his seed on Athena’s leg. In disgust, she wiped herself clean with a tissue, which she promptly discarded. From the wet spot on the earth where her tissue fell, Erichthonius, the first Athenian, was born.

This myth accounts for the striking military content of the Great Panathenaea. Including this content was a bold assertion of the Athenians that they were indeed the children of a great warrior. Like their divine mother, they were the best warriors, who, with her help, would always be victorious.