Olympia

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Olympia is a sanctuary of Zeus in the western Peloponnese, in the territory of Elis, set in a wooded valley where the Kladeos meets the Alpheios. It was never a city. It was a sacred enclosure — the Altis — that drew worshippers from across the Greek world to its festival, its oracle, and its accumulated treasure of dedications, and it gave its name to the games still called Olympic.

Cult activity at the site reaches back into the early Iron Age, and the sanctuary grew across centuries by accretion rather than plan. The oldest major building, the Temple of Hera, dates from around 600 BCE; the great Temple of Zeus, finished about 457 BCE, housed the seated statue of the god made of gold and ivory by the Athenian sculptor Phidias — counted in antiquity among the Seven Wonders of the World and now wholly lost. Around these stood treasuries raised by individual cities, altars, the workshop where Phidias worked, and the stadium and hippodrome where the contests were held. The Greeks reckoned time partly in Olympiads, the four-year intervals between the festivals; the traditional date for the first games, 776 BCE, served as a fixed point for dating much else.

The games were held in honour of Zeus and framed throughout as an act of worship: a sacred truce protected travellers to the festival, and the central day was given over to the sacrifice of a hundred oxen at the god’s great ash altar. Olympia was also an oracular site. Inquirers consulted Zeus chiefly through the inspection of sacrifices, the work of hereditary seer-families, the Iamidai and the Klytiadai, who read the will of the god in the burning of the offerings. Victory in the games was itself understood as a sign of divine favour, and victors were honoured at home as men the god had marked.

The sanctuary’s long life ended with the Christianisation of the empire. The games were suppressed under the Christian emperors at the close of the fourth century CE — the ban is conventionally tied to Theodosius I, though the sequence is not certain — and the buildings fell to earthquake, flood, and the silt of the two rivers, which buried the site deeply enough to preserve it. Systematic excavation by German archaeologists from 1875 recovered the plan of the Altis and notable sculpture, including the Hermes attributed to Praxiteles and the pedimental figures of the Temple of Zeus. What survives is read today less as a single monument than as a record, layered over a millennium, of how the Greeks brought a scattered people together in the presence of a god.

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