Oddity of the Week: Olympic Glory and Glamour BCE
Created | Updated Aug 27, 2012
It's that time of the Olympiad, folks. This week's Oddity celebrates the ancient Games.
Olympic Glory and Glamour BCE
Young people may or may not know this, but long before there was Sky News and ESPN, there were Olympic Games. In fact, the Olympics existed, not only before satellite television (gasp!), but even before newspapers. The ancient Olympic Games were pretty cool, involving lots of nude men, if you like that sort of thing. Unfortunately, women weren't allowed to watch because of the lack of clothing on the athletes and the sacred nature of the whole thing. It was hard to get any good advertising going, too, because there wasn't anywhere much to put the logo. We're not sure what the corporate sponsors got out of it all. The ancient Olympics were limited to people who spoke Greek natively, so there, and honoured the god Zeus (rather than the corporate gods of Nike et al.)
Anyway, the ancient Olympics took place at the site shown here, at Olympia. This stereograph card from 1907 shows a strange man, maybe a pilgrim with an interest in ancient history (?), sitting in front of the athletes' entrance. The Library of Congress has only one side of the stereograph – usually, there are two pictures, side-by-side, which produce a 3D picture when you use the right viewer. People used to collect and enjoy these pictures from around the world. This stereograph card was issued by the Underwood & Underwood company.
In its heyday, the stadium must have been impressive. Unfortunately, the Romans kind of professionalised the whole thing, and when the Christians got in. . . see the bit about the whole enterprise being Pagan. (Which might explain all that nonsense on the Internet about the 'occult significance of Olympic symbolism', or maybe somebody's just trying to push web pages.)
As it is, modern athletes are probably glad for the modern conveniences of the new venues. Less marble, more hot-and-cold-running-water. We wish them well.
