Someone sent me this story from the Chicago Tribune:

More Olympic scandals . . . in ancient Greece
By Ron Grossman, Tribune staff reporter. Ron Grossman is a former
professor of ancient history at Lake Forest College

February 21, 2002

Almost instinctively we want to hang our heads in shame when the Olympics
are stained by scandal. Allowing national rivalries to get in the way of
fairly determining the best figure-skating duo seems to dishonor the
tradition of the ancient Games.

Well, you can let go of those guilt feelings. The road to the original
Olympics was marked by monuments to athletic skulduggery. Literally so --
according to the Greek author Pausanius, the Arthur Frommer of antiquity.

Gathering material for his book "Perieigeisis teis Ellados," or
"Description of Greece," Pausanius visited the site of the Games, Olympia
in western Greece, in the 2nd Century A.D. The entrance to the stadium, he
found, was lined by statues of Zeus.

A pious display, but it turns out it had its roots in chicanery.

"These [statues] have been made from the monies of fines levied against
athletes who have disgraced the games," Pausanius explained. "The first
six were set up in the 98th Olympiad (388 B.C.) when Eupolos of Thessaly
bought off with money his think of the Greeks as humanity's role models --
builders of shiny white temples, athletes who ran and jumped for pure love
of the sport. In fact, when it came to crassness and greed, they could put
Don King to shame.

They anticipated the evil genius of television's "Tough Man" contests by
2,700 years. In an Olympic competition called the pankration, punching,
kicking, choking, finger-breaking and blows to the groin were standard
tactics; only eye-gouging and biting were disallowed.

In one match, a competitor named Arrhachion was strangled and died, even
as his opponent was giving up because Arrhachion simultaneously had broken
the fellow's toe. Pausanius dryly reports that the judges "proclaimed
Arrhachion the victor and crowned his corpse."

With rules like those, it is little wonder that some ancient Olympians
looked for shortcuts to victory, a little something to put the odds in
their favor. Alcibiades, a slippery Athenian politician, once entered
seven teams of horses in the chariot race, an event in which the owner,
not the driver, was generally considered the victor. That brainstorm
allowed Alcibiades to return to his constituents and proudly brag of
having won first, second and third place.

The fix is in

Yet primacy of place in the competition to fix the Olympics has to go to
the Roman Emperor Nero. A devoted musician and sportsman, he interrupted
his busy schedule of murdering rivals and relatives for a grand tour of
Greece in 67 A.D. Though Greece was long past her days of greatness, her
glory still shone like a beacon, especially to the Romans who, for all the
power of their empire, still considered themselves cultural apprentices to
the Greeks. Athletes continued to treasure the wreath of wild olive
awarded to victors at Olympia, where the Games went on as they had for
hundreds of years.

Nero paid Olympic officials to stage chariot races with a special set of
rules: The chariots were to be drawn by a record-breaking team of 10
horses, which effectively kept the riffraff out of competition, and put
the emperor in a position to win.

Even so, Nero's biographer Suetonius reports, the road to victory wasn't
smooth: "[Nero] lost his balance and fell out of the chariot and had to be
helped into it again. Nonetheless, even though he did not run the whole
race and quit before the finish, the judges awarded him the crown of
victory."

It is amazing what a million "sesterces" will buy -- a bribe, that,
according to ancient chroniclers, the emperor Galba, Nero's successor,
demanded back, either in the name of purer sport or because the imperial
treasury was running low.

Even the Grecian custom of athletes competing nude had as much to do with
fraud and deceit as to the Greeks' famed delight in the beauty of the
human form. The ancient Olympics, being a religious celebration as well as
a sporting contest, were closed to women. But a widow named Diagoras
Callipateiras Pherenike was determined to see her son be a winner. So,
dressed like a male trainer, she took him to Olympia to compete. In her
excitement at his victory, she leapt in the air and, as underwear hadn't
been invented, her secret was revealed. The Olympic committee passed a
rule that henceforth everyone on the field, trainers and athletes, would
have to be stark naked, according to Pausanius.

But the Games weren't just anti-feminist; they also could be an occasion
for gay-bashing, notwithstanding the Greeks' supposedly broadminded
attitudes in such matters. According to the Greek historian Dion Cassius,
a Roman wrestler by the name of Aurelius Helix was the heavy favorite in
the 250th Olympiad (221 A.D.). He had just won at the Capitoline Games in
Rome. But Olympic officials didn't want to see him victorious at their
Games because Aurelius Helix was a boyfriend of the openly gay Emperor
Heliogabalus. So they simply canceled the wrestling competition for that
year.

Muscling in on the action

Other monarchs, though, used a little muscle to see that their favorites
got to compete. The Olympics were divided into two parts, a men's division
and one for boys 18 and under. Once, the Spartans entered a certain
Eualces in the latter division, even though his height, build and strength
made it obvious to the judges that he long since had passed the divide
into adulthood. But King Agesilaus of Sparta pressured them to keep him in
the boys' division. For once, virtue triumphed: Eualces finished out of
the money.

Which brings up something else we don't need to feel guilty
about: Fielding NHL and NBA players as our Olympic hockey and basketball
teams. Amateur athletics are a strictly modern invention. The ancient
Olympians were in it for the money.

The name of the Athenian statesman Solon passed into history as a synonym
for wise man. One of his laws provided that Athenians who won at the
Olympics would be rewarded with the equivalent of $100,000. Even also-rans
didn't make out too badly: Athenians who merely competed at Olympia were
entitled to a daily free meal for the rest of their lives at city hall.

Of course, then, as now, there were kill-joy purists claiming sports are
corrupted by big bucks. Among them was the Greek author Philostratos, who
wrote a treatise called "On Gymnastics."

"Such a luxurious life style as I have just described," Philostratos sadly
noted, "led to illegal practices among the athletes for the sake of
money. I refer to selling and buying of victories."

Philostratos cited the example of a wrestler who paid his opponent the
equivalent of $66,000 to take a dive. "The loser demanded his
money," Philostratos noted, "but the winner said that he owed nothing
since the other had, after all, tried to win."

Honesty is secondary

Mostly, though, the ancient Greeks didn't fret about honesty in
athletics. Even their understanding of where the Olympics came from
involved a sporting event where the fix was in. According to the poet
Pindar, the hero Pelops fell in love with the daughter of King
Oenomaus. The king said, fine, Pelops could have her, if he beat him in a
chariot race. But if he lost, Oenomaus reserved the right to run his spear
through Pelops -- just as he had done to 13 previous suitors.

So, Pelops bribed the king's servant to take the linchpins out of
Oenomaus' chariot. The wheels fell off, Pelops won the race and the
girl. To commemorate his victory, he established the Olympic Games.

The Greeks, you see, were more down to earth than are we, who worry about
undue influence on ice-skating judges. Philosophers no less than athletes,
they realized that men don't set their baser instincts aside when they
strip for sport. To keep athletics in proper perspective, when they built
a Temple of Zeus at Olympia, they chose to adorn it with a grand sculpture
showing Pelops pulling off his tainted upset.

So we're right in line with tradition.








Dr. Yigal Levin
Dept. of Philosophy and Religion
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
615 McCallie Avenue
Chattanooga TN 37403-2598
U.S.A.