UPHOLDING TRADITION
Olympic Corruption? It's All Greek to Me.
The Sydney games are more akin to the spirit and practice of the ancient games than any other modern Olympiad.
At every Olympiad, anguished traditionalists call for a return to athletic purity. They remind us of the lost ideals of amateurism, and of how we have corrupted the spirit of universal brotherhood envisioned in the pan-Hellenic festivals of ancient Greece. The apparent manifestations of boorishness in our age are now well known: medal-counting nationalism, global hype that seeks to turn sport into profit, and the careerism of the athletes themselves, who now compete more for endorsements and lucre than for the love of sport.
Yet the truth is that the Sydney Olympics are probably more akin to the actual spirit and practice of the ancient games than any other modern Olympiad since the resurrection of the contests in 1896.
Some might object that our athletes are singularly spoiled, and complain that, unlike in the past, they now value profit and fame rather than the spirit of competition and athletic excellence. Hardly. Few, after all, have hired publicists like Pindar, Simonides and Bacchylides, who all made fortunes composing laudatory poems--media guides if you will--for wealthy Olympic victors. Wild olive crowns at Olympia, like modern gold medals, were not the real rewards of victory; lifelong free meals, cash bonuses, free luxury seats at the theater and at athletic contests were. And there were expensive gifts, too.
Do we object to the gimmickry and artificiality of our modern athletes? After all, they take victory laps while ostentatiously waving American flags, rehearsals for the Wheaties commercials to come. Marion Jones and Maurice Green, however, are not as flashy as the six-time winner Milo of Croton. Far more crassly than any trash-talking, high-fiving modern sprinter, he drew attention to himself by holding his breath, expanding his cerebral veins, and thus snapping a cord wound round his head.
Haven't we heard that the games have become showcases for the worst sort of national chauvinism? But the Spartans, not we moderns, provided winners with honorific assignments in the military, and they dedicated wealthy statues to them at public expense. Most city-states even issued public decrees boasting of the number of their national athletic heroes. Nor would we go to war, inflamed by the brag of an Olympic victor as would-be national hero. The Athenians embarked on the disastrous Sicilian expedition, in part mesmerized by Alcibiades, who boasted of entering seven chariots in the same race in 416 B.C.
Others might object that the contemporary games have been tarred by the brush of politics and terrorism--the tragedy at Munich, the boycotting of the 1980 Moscow Olympiad, the retaliation by the Soviets in 1984 and the 1996 Atlanta bombing. But as yet no army has invaded the actual Olympic village and fought a pitched battle amid the facilities. The Eleans and Arcadians did just that in 364 B.C. and turned the sanctuary into a bloodbath. And earlier, in 420 B.C., thousands of troops, like modern riot police, guarded the sanctuary to enforce a ban on Spartan participation--a politically inspired exclusion engineered by Athens and her allies.
Today's scandals involving the Olympic committee and allegations of bribery in selecting Olympic sites are also nothing new. Ancient judges were habitually accused of being on the take. Three hundred years elapsed before they were at last barred from entering their own horses in equestrian contests. Is it any wonder, then, that the earliest surviving written regulations about the Olympic games deal with cheating and rule-breaking?
Perhaps purists now are troubled by the proliferation of events--all sorts of strange boat races, jazz dances that are dubbed "rhythmic gymnastics," synchronized swimming and obscure shooting categories. But in the ancient Olympics, events were added all the time to the original track-and-field competitions. Besides the early inclusion of aristocratic horse racing, a clunky foot race in armor was added by the late sixth century B.C. Runners took off in elements of the infantry panoply, the ancient equivalent of modern camouflaged SWAT teams lumbering in full battle gear. And, as yet, no one has clamored for mule-cart racing, which was added to the games in 500 B.C. and felt by Greek critics, from Aristotle to Pausanias, to be a travesty of the games.
But are the Olympics increasingly unmanageable and unwieldy events, as bankrupt host cities habitually fail to complete promised facilities for impatient throngs? The Olympia of antiquity was not the verdant, quiet glen that now entices springtime tourists. The ancient facilities were awful. The Peloponnese in summer was scorching. Water was scarce. The precinct was in a constant state of remodeling as ad hoc construction failed to keep up with the rambunctious hordes. Epictetus, the philosopher, was less than stoical when he whined, "Are you scorched in Olympia by the searing heat? Aren't you packed in together? Isn't bathing a problem? And don't you get drenched to the skin? Aren't you troubled by the noise, the clamor and all the other bothers?"
Surely, another gripe runs, the vain competitors of today seek to be models as much as athletes. Isn't the sheer sexuality exuded by ever smaller, ever tighter, and ever brighter spandex a far cry from the tasteful uniforms and solemnity of the 1950s? But so far, no modern athletes have competed buck naked, as did the contestants at Olympia. Ancient Greece, like most Mediterranean cultures, did not encourage public nudity, and the nakedness of the athletes at Olympia marked a shocking, often sex-charged departure from accustomed norms of probity. And no postvictory party in the Olympic village could rival the famous bash hosted by Charbrias in 374 B.C., at the Pythian games, in which group sex, call girls and public drunkenness were de rigueur.
The ancients did not envision the Olympics as a device for global harmony. Nor was it even an event, played out among gentlemen, to showcase the virtue of amateurism. Rather, it was a much-needed late-summer holiday from farm work and war, where the hoi polloi could appreciate physical and mental excellence, gape at firm, youthful bodies, applaud without embarrassment their hometown boys, and laud the prowess of strangers who could do things they could not.
The Greeks, who crafted the values of Western civilization, put a primacy on competition, freedom of thought and expression, individual initiative, patriotism and material prosperity--all under the aegis of consensual government, personal liberty and free markets. Sometimes the wages of freedom, egalitarianism and individualism are not pretty, a world apart from the pretense of robed philosophers at elite symposia. But like it or not, the world is embracing these values as never before, and the Sydney games remind us that we are all now Greeks after all.
Mr. Hanson is a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and the author of "Carnage and Culture," due out next year from Doubleday.
