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. Within the low wall of the Altis stood the temples and the great ash altar, the rows of treasuries, the workshop where the god’s image was made, and beyond the eastern boundary the stadium and the hippodrome. The whole of it was the property of a god, administered by a single small state that grew rich and famous by keeping his festival.

Cult before the temples

Cult activity at the site reaches back into the early Iron Age, well before any building worth the name stood in the Altis, and the sanctuary grew across the following centuries by accretion rather than by plan. The earliest worship attaches not only to Zeus but to Pelops, the hero whose chariot victory over Oinomaos the Greeks made the mythical charter of the games; his enclosed mound, the Pelopion, is among the oldest monuments in the Altis, and offerings to him and to Zeus were burned side by side. From this deposit of sacrifice the place acquired its strangest feature. The altar of Zeus was not built of stone but of ash — the compacted residue of centuries of burnt thigh-bones, bound each year with water carried up from the Alpheios and worked into a rising cone that Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, measured at a considerable height. Worshippers approached the god across the accumulated matter of every sacrifice that had come before. The German excavators never found it; its place in the Altis is reconstructed rather than recovered, which is itself a measure of how completely the site was buried.

The two temples

The oldest major building is the Temple of Hera, the Heraion, raised about 600 BCE. It began with wooden columns that were replaced one by one in stone as each decayed, so that the temple stood for centuries as a record of its own slow rebuilding — Pausanias still saw one oak column in place. The great Temple of Zeus came later, the work of the local architect Libon of Elis, a Doric building dedicated about 457 BCE and paid for, the Eleans said, from the spoils of a war against neighboring Pisa. Its east pediment showed the chariot race of Pelops and Oinomaos in the moment before it began, the figures held in a stillness heavy with what is about to happen; its west pediment showed the Lapiths and Centaurs at the wedding of Peirithous, with a serene Apollo presiding over the violence from the center; and its metopes carried the twelve labors of Herakles. The pediments and metopes survive, and are among the finest sculpture of the early classical style.

The temple was built to house an image. The seated statue of Zeus made by the Athenian sculptor Phidias — who had already made the Athena Parthenos in Athens, and who came to Elis afterward — was chryselephantine, fashioned of gold and ivory over a wooden core: the god’s flesh in ivory, his robe and beard and scepter in hammered gold, the throne inlaid with ebony, gems, and painted scenes. It stood roughly twelve meters high, seated, so that the crown of the god’s head nearly touched the roof; visitors remarked that were he to rise he would unroof the temple. In his right hand he held a figure of Victory, in his left a scepter on which an eagle perched. The ivory was kept from cracking in the damp valley air by a pool of olive oil set before the statue, whose dark surface doubled the gold. The image was counted in antiquity among the Seven Wonders of the World and is now wholly lost: removed, the sources suggest, to Constantinople in the fifth century CE and destroyed there in a palace fire. What survives of Phidias at Olympia is his workshop, excavated west of the temple — built to the exact interior dimensions of the temple cella so the statue could be assembled in its true proportions — and, found within it, the casting molds, scraps of ivory and glass, and a small black cup scratched with the words that it belonged to Phidias.

The games and the reckoning of time

The games were held in honor of Zeus and framed throughout as an act of worship. The Greeks reckoned time partly in Olympiads, the four-year intervals between the festivals, and the traditional date for the first games, 776 BCE, served as a fixed point from which much else was dated. That date is a construction rather than a record: the sophist Hippias of Elis compiled the first list of victors around 400 BCE, and arrived at 776 not from any archive but by counting generations of Spartan kings back to the lawgiver Lykourgos, whom tradition linked to the games’ refounding. Later chronographers disagreed sharply — Eratosthenes placed the first Olympiad in 884 BCE, Callimachus in 828 — which is why the unbroken count from 776 is best understood as the scaffolding a later age built to hold its own past in order, not as a measured beginning. However reckoned, the Olympiad became one of the few common clocks of a politically fractured Greek world.

A sacred truce, the ekecheiria, was proclaimed before each festival and protected travelers to and from Olympia across the territories they crossed; to break it against a pilgrim was an offense against Zeus himself. The festival drew competitors and embassies from the whole Greek world, including the western colonies, and the contests — the foot races, the wrestling and boxing and the brutal pankration, the chariot and horse races in the hippodrome — were religious acts as much as athletic ones. Victory was understood as a sign of the god’s favor. The single prize was a wreath cut from a sacred wild-olive tree that grew within the Altis; the victor carried no money home, but cities honored their Olympic winners as men whom the god had marked, and the great choral poets were paid to set their names in verse.

The central day and the oracle

The festival in its developed form ran across five days, and its sacred center was the great hecatomb. A procession set out from the Prytaneion — the sanctuary’s hearth, where the victors would later feast — and moved along the boundary of the Altis to the ash altar, where a hundred oxen, the gift of the Eleans, were sacrificed to Zeus and their thigh-bones burned on the cone of ash. The day belonged to the god before it belonged to the athletes; the contests were the festival’s fame, but the burning of the hundred oxen was its purpose.

Olympia was also an oracular site, and the geographer Strabo credited the oracle, as much as the games, with the sanctuary’s early rise. Here Zeus was consulted not through a speaking priestess, as Apollo was at Delphi, nor through the rustling of an oak, as Zeus himself was at Dodona, but through the fire of the altar. Inquirers put their question and a sacrifice was made; the will of the god was read in the burning of the offering — the behavior of the flame, the markings of the entrails — a form of divination by fire worked by two hereditary families of seers, the Iamidai and the Klytiadai. The Iamidai traced their descent and their gift to Iamos, a son of Apollo to whom the god had given prophecy and whom he had brought to Olympia; the Klytiadai claimed descent from the seer Melampous. These families held the office across many centuries — the Iamidai are still attested in the third century CE — and they were drawn upon not only to read the altar but to help administer the festival itself. The oracle of Olympia belongs with Dodona and Siwah in the small group of oracles of Zeus, as distinct from the far larger network gathered around Apollo.

The Altis and its monuments

The space around the temples filled, over a thousand years, with the offerings of a whole civilization. A row of treasuries — small temple-like buildings, several of them raised by the western Greek colonies of Sicily and southern Italy — stood on a terrace below the hill of Kronos, each holding the dedications of a single city. The Bouleuterion, the council house, held the image of Zeus Horkios, Zeus of the Oath, before which athletes and their trainers swore to compete fairly. Near the temples stood the Philippeion, an elegant round building begun by Philip II of Macedon after his victory at Chaeronea and finished under Alexander, which set the images of the Macedonian royal house inside the sanctuary of the Greek gods — a political claim made in marble. The Nike of Paionios, a winged victory descending from the sky, stood on a tall pillar before the Temple of Zeus. Beyond all of these ran the stadium, entered through a vaulted tunnel, its banks of bare earth able to hold tens of thousands. The sanctuary was at once a shrine, a museum of victory, and a treasury of the relations between the Greek states.

The end and the recovery

The sanctuary’s long life ended with the Christianization of the empire. The games were suppressed under the Christian emperors at the close of the fourth century CE, conventionally tied to the anti-pagan legislation of Theodosius I around 393; the date is a modern inference more than a documented fact, and a rival tradition has the games continuing in some form until the time of Theodosius II, whose edict of 426 ordered the destruction of pagan temples. The Temple of Zeus burned; the great statue had already gone. In the centuries after, earthquake brought down the columns, and the two rivers did the rest, shifting their beds and laying down silt that buried the Altis several meters deep — the same flooding that destroyed the sanctuary preserved it, sealing the sculpture and the bronzes under river clay.

The recovery was the work of German archaeology. In 1874 the historian Ernst Curtius concluded an agreement with the Greek government granting the German Archaeological Institute the exclusive right to excavate Olympia, on terms that left the finds in Greece — a model for the large-scale, scientifically documented excavation that would follow across the country. From 1875 Curtius and the architect Friedrich Adler uncovered nearly the whole of the Altis: the plan of the sanctuary, the pediments and metopes of the Temple of Zeus, the Heraion, the location of the stadium, the Nike of Paionios, and Phidias’s workshop with its cup. On the eighth of May 1877, in the cella of the Heraion, the diggers brought up the marble figure of Hermes carrying the infant Dionysus — the statue Pausanias had seen there and named as the work of Praxiteles, recovered almost intact because the fallen mud roof had cradled it. Its attribution to Hermes’ own sculptor is debated, but the figure remains one of the most complete pieces of major Greek sculpture to survive, and it stands today, with the pediments of Zeus, in the museum on the site.

Texts and scholarship

Almost everything known of Olympia in use rests on a single ancient guide. Books V and VI of Pausanias’s Description of Greece walk the Altis monument by monument — the temples, the treasuries, the ash altar, the statue of Zeus, the long catalog of victor-statues — and the modern site is read, building by building, against his account; W. H. S. Jones’s Loeb translation of the Elis books is the standard English version and is freely available (Pausanias V, Loeb 1926, at Topos Text). The games’ founding myth and their religious weight come through most powerfully in the victory odes of Pindar, who composed the Olympian Odes for the winners of the early fifth century — the same poems that give the descent of the Iamidai from Apollo (Pindar, Olympian 6, at Perseus).

The standard study of the oracle is H. W. Parke’s The Oracles of Zeus: Dodona, Olympia, Ammon (1967), which reconstructs the fire-divination of the seer-families from the scattered ancient notices. The problem of the 776 date and the victor lists has been re-examined most fully by Paul Christesen in Olympic Victor Lists and Ancient Greek History (Cambridge, 2007), which treats the Olympiad chronology as a Hellenistic scholarly construction rather than an inherited record. The architecture and sculpture rest on the original excavation publication, Olympia: die Ergebnisse der von dem Deutschen Reich veranstalteten Ausgrabung, issued by Curtius and Adler in five volumes from 1890; the ongoing excavations and the conservation of the site are the work of the German Archaeological Institute, whose Olympia project at the DAI Athens department carries the modern bibliography. The single best one-volume account in English is Nigel Spivey’s The Ancient Olympics (2004).

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 and quarrelsome people together — under a truce no city dared break — to burn a hundred oxen, run a single race, and stand for a few days each fourth year in the presence of their greatest god.

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