Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience.
Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Find out about family life, entertainment, food and fashion. The Greeks believed in many gods and goddesses.
Find out about their gods and the stories told about them. Learn about ancient Greek soldiers, the Spartan soldier state and read about famous Greek battles. Find out what ancient Greek theatre was like and learn about different ancient Greek festivals and art.
What did the ancient Greeks do for us? Festivals and, for example, funerals were among the limited occasions when women, especially virgins, or parthenoi , had a public role. At the Games unmarried girls, besides helping with the running of the festival, may have taken the opportunity to find a fit future husband. He was Olympic champion in the men's wrestling six times in the sixth century, besides winning once in the Olympic boy's wrestling, and gaining seven victories in the Pythian Games.
He is said to have carried his own statue, or even a bull, into the Olympic arena, and to have performed party tricks such as holding a pomegranate without squashing it and getting people to prize open his hand - nobody could.
He was Olympic champion in the men's wrestling six times in the sixth century, Then there is Leonidas of Rhodes, who in the second century BC won all three running events at four consecutive Olympics. His three sons and two of his grandsons were also Olympic champions. Superhuman heavyweights were regarded with special awe.
Cleomedes, a fifth-century Olympic boxing champion, killed an opponent at the Olympics, was disqualified, went mad and smashed up a school. Not a recipe for special reverence, you might think.
But the Greeks regularly explained abnormal feats and states of mind by saying that something divine, or a god, had entered whoever was affected in this way, and Cleomedes ended up receiving semi-divine honours as a hero. Just because someone has won an Olympic victory, he says, they won't improve the city.
The tragedian Euripides expressed similar sentiments in his play Autolycus , now only surviving in fragments. In it he describes how athletes are slaves to their stomachs, but they can't look after themselves, and although they glisten like statues when in their prime, become like tattered old carpets in old age.
Galen, physician and polymath of the first century AD, also attacked athletics as unnatural and excessive. He thought that athletes eat too much, sleep too much and put their bodies through too much. But in the end the detractors of athletics lost out to the sympathisers. The person who most idealised the Olympics was Pindar, from Thebes, midway between Delphi and Athens. Pindar composed odes for victors at the Olympic and other Games in the fifth century BC, comparing their achievements to those of the great heroes of the past - such as Heracles or Achilles - thus raising them to an almost divine level.
He thought that, though mortals, their superhuman feats of strength had temporarily elevated them to another realm and given them a taste of incomparable bliss.
Channel Four: The Ancient Olympics. Powerhouse Museum: Ancient Olympics. Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled.
While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience.
0コメント