Greek Olympic Games
The temple of Hera in Olympia, Elis, Greece
Once every four years, men from all over Greece
came to compete in a great athletic festival in Elis, in western Greece
(Women were not allowed to compete). This was called the Olympic games
because the place was called Olympia. It was a religious festival to
honor the Greek gods Zeus and Hera.
We don't know when men first began celebrating the Olympic Games, but
they were certainly already doing it in the time of Homer,
by 776 BC. And they were celebrated from
then on, every four years without fail, until people converted to Christianity
and the Roman Emperor Theodosius
banned the games in 393 AD. That's more than a thousand years! The games
were so regular that people used them to date by. They would say, I
was born in the second year of the twenty-fourth Olympiad (starting
from 776 BC). Can you figure out what year that would be in our reckoning?
When it was time for the games, the rulers
of Elis sent out messengers all over Greece and to the Greek
colonies around the Black Sea
and the Mediterranean. They
declared a truce throughout the Greek world for a month. No matter who
you had a war with, you had to stop the
war and let their athletes and performers
go through your city-state
safely to get to the Olympic Games. Each city-state paid for a few athletes
from their city to travel to Elis. But if you had ever been a slave,
or if you had ever done anything against the gods, then you couldn't
be in the Olympics. And, the men had to swear that they had already
trained for at least ten months. This meant that only men who were pretty
rich could be in the Games, so they could afford to take so long off
work, and also pay a trainer.
Click here for the beginning
of the Games
Or here for the main Ancient Greece page
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