Olympic Games, a review of Miller’s Ancient Greek Athletics, debunks a few cherished myths about the ancient games:
The idea that the ancient games were apolitical celebrations of amateurism, for instance, is an invention of the late Victorians, who projected their idealizations of the Greeks back onto a reality that was as obsessed with money and prestige as our own times. To be sure, athletes in the stephanitic (‘crown’) games like the Olympics received only a crown made of olive leaves or celery, but the prestige attending victory in these games often produced more practical benefits, such as free meals for life at public expense, gifts from the city, and exemptions from taxes and civic duties: rewards as profitable as today’s endorsement contracts for Olympic victors.Then there were the “money” games, numerous competitions besides those held every four years at Olympia, in which the value of prizes could reach as high as what today would be half a million dollars. Theagenes of Thasos, active in the early fifth century B.C., earned what translates as around $44 million from his fourteen-hundred athletic victories. The late-sixth-century trainer Demokedes earned the equivalent of a quarter-million dollars a year after rival city-states twice lured him away with better offers.
Such lucrative payouts encouraged a professionalization of training and competition that by the Roman period had turned athletes into full-blown professionals who earned their living solely from sports. (Pliny the Younger, for instance, records the complaints of athletes who felt their free room and board provided by the emperor during training wasn’t generous enough.) And this professionalization was attended with the same evils — fixing, bribery, trade unions, and raiding athletes and trainers — that characterize the modern world with its greedy, peripatetic free agents.
No description of the ancient games would be complete without a rant about their brutality:
The frequent brutality of ancient sports reinforced this vision of life’s hard limits. Important functionaries of the games were the rabdoi: judges armed with willow switches who punished fouls and false starts with a flogging. Even more indicative of the Greek acceptance of life’s brutal limits were events like boxing and the pankration, a fierce combination of wrestling and boxing, with strangulation, finger-breaking, and eye-gouging (ostensibly forbidden) thrown in. Boxers fought with hard leather strips wrapped around their fists and pounded each other’s heads until somebody gave up. Blood flowed freely, and fighters died, none more spectacularly than a certain Kreugas, who had his guts torn out by his sharp-nailed opponent.
Ostensibly forbidden? In soccer, kicking someone in the head is ostensibly forbidden too — but it happens. Boxers [...] pounded each other’s head until somebody gave up? Is it better that we expect boxers to pound each other’s heads until one of them falls unconscious?