The Olympic Games

The son of Saturn to resound, When far, from every land, they come, To visit Hiero's regal dome, Where peace, where plenty, is for ever found.

The 2024 Paris Olympics have started off explosively. Less like a firework, and more like an inflamed abscess which spurts puss all over the place. Snoop Dogg, rap music, transvestite drag queens and obese ugly people seemingly parodying the Last Supper, all in the middle of downpour that resulted in a city-wide power outage ironically sparing only the Sacré-Cœur Basilica. I was incensed by the retarded Trad OrthoDOGs on Twitter claiming that this was because the Olympics was a “Pagan tradition” and that the Olympics were being run by Pagans… These people, let me tell you, they believe that there are demons in their Xboxes. Just some brilliant stuff. They are like if you took medieval peasants from 15th century Russia and brought them to the 21st century. Except… A lot of those peasants would have been Pagan in all but name… Uhh, people will get mad that I said that but it’s true, maybe that is a topic for some other time.

But anyways, this angered me because the Greek Olympics were one of the greatest and most admirable things about Hellenic civilization. The Olympics were actually only one of four games in the series of games known as the Panhellenic games. These were not international, you had to be an ethnic Greek to join them. This is demonstrated by the record of Alexander I of Macedon (not the famous one, who was Alexander III) participating in the games of 504 BC. The same judges of the Olympics (the Hellanodikai) were in charge of judging someone’s Greekness, and there was a debate as to whether or not Alexander I was a Greek. They eventually decided that he was a Greek, because of his family’s claimed descent from Heracles (something the Dorians also claimed). Over time, the standards of the games became more lax, but being able to speak Greek was still a requirement. During the Games, the Greeks stopped their wars with each other, recognizing that they were all related to one another, and declared truces so that athletes could safely travel to Olympia.

The aforementioned Christian pundits are correct that the games were religious. Many religious feasts and sacrifices were held during the games, particularly to Zeus. The other games were dedicated to other gods such as Apollo and Poseidon. This is about the only thing they get right in connecting the displays of decadence we saw in Paris, to the Pagan European love of Sport which characterized both the ancient Olympics, and continues to make the modern Olympics a pretty fun spectacle to watch.

The Greeks have been practicing ritual games since at least the Bronze Age. Anyone who has ever read Homer’s Iliad will be familiar with the funeral games of Patroclus. Such games served two purposes. First of all, they served as a sort of proxy test for skill which are important in warfare. Running and endurance are obviously extremely important for any ancient soldier, who often found himself having to traverse the countryside at fast speeds either to escape enemies or to pursue them. Wrestling and Boxing were also featured at the games, which are important in combat situations where one cannot strike with their arm (often times, soldiers would have to get their opponents on the ground before going in for the kill with a dagger). You see the use of grappling continue heavily in medieval training books. Several events were dedicated to equestrianism, be it horse racing or chariot racing. Chariots were no longer used militarily by the time of the Olympic Games, but they retained a cultural significance that would continue long into the Byzantine period. Chariots seem to have retained a cultural significance elsewhere too, long after they stopped being used for military purposes. Blood nostalgia…

The Greeks even had an event known as the Hoplitodromos, where contestants would race wearing a helmet, greaves, and holding a large circular shield. Many competitors were themselves warriors, which reveals the second purpose of the Olympic games. The Olympics were opportunities for warriors to achieve glory, excellence, and fame outside of a military setting. If no wars were going on, warriors would spend their energy on the games. It was productive behavior anyways, because the games made them better warriors. To achieve heroism in battle was the best in life for a Greek, but to achieve glory at the games was second best. Just as the exploits of Achilles would be immortalized by Homer, the greatness of the Olympic victors would be immortalized in Pindar’s Olympian Odes, which express the exact sort of love of beauty and excellence characteristic of Greek society, combined with a hatred for ugliness and pitifulness. The Panhellenic Games did not only include athletic competitions. The Delphic and Isthmian games actually had artistic and poetic competitions integrated into the games themselves, but even at the Olympics many sculptors would come to find subjects for their art. And obviously, as we were just talking about, the victories of athletes would be sung by the great lyric poets of Greece.

Agrias, a Pankration champion in the Panhellenic Games. Pankration is basically what we today would call Mixed Martial Arts, by the way. Combination of boxing and wrestling.

Olympic athletes seem to have eaten diets reminiscent of what the Homeric heroes ate as well. That is, extremely heavy on the meat. Pythagoras, who ironically is usually described as a vegetarian, is credited with first advising Olympic athletes to eat meat-heavy diets. Milo of Croton, who was an admirer of Pythagoras, is said to have eaten twenty pounds of bread, twenty pounds of meat, and eighteen pints of wine every day. Obviously, this is exaggerated, but the point is that Olympic athletes were not eating a “Mediterranean diet”… It is not terribly surprising for Pythagoras to advise athletes with different diets. He viewed the Olympics as similar to life in society. There were those who came to the Olympics for petty reasons, trying to peddle some sort of product to sell like trinkets. There were above them, the athletes, who came to achieve glory. And finally, Pythagoras identified philosophers like himself with the spectators. They did not have any physical thing to gain from the games, and did not want anything but to enjoy the spectacle of it all and analyze it.

As I talked about in my post on Video Games, I think games are one of the best things in life, and I think they are microcosmic of this world. The best attitude to have during a game is to play it with emphasis on the act of playing, and not the rewards within games we know are illusory at the end of the day. Just as in life, we should act for the sake of action, without attaching ourselves to outcomes we can never fully control. But there is one thing you should seek in the participation of games, which is not like anything else in the universe. It is what the Greeks would call arete. Excellence, virtue, unlocked potential. It is the highest one can hope to achieve, and in the Olympics we are given a glance not only at the search for arete, but on top of that among the highest of the high, the physically superior.

Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with sports and games from a Christian perspective, there is no denying that there has been a heavy tension between Abrahamism and the Greek athletic culture since before Christianity even arose. During the Greek rule of Israel, the religious Jews lament the spread of the Gymnasium. It is perhaps the earliest instance of the “unathletic Jew” stereotype, where in II Maccabees the Jewish author laments those Jews, including among them some priests, who abandon their religious study to go throw discus with the gentiles. The Greeks were not terribly happy with Jews invading their Gymnasiums either, however. The Greeks felt that the circumcised penises of the Jews were not only disgusting as they mutilated the divinely inspired human body, but also inappropriate, as the Greeks associated the visibility of the glans with vulgar nudity. Hence why they did not feel uncomfortable participating naked in the Gymnasium and Olympics. The glans was covered by the foreskin.

Just a little side-tangent on nudity, because it is one of the most idiosyncratic elements of Classical Greek competition. Historically, people were much less uncomfortable being in the nude. At least around members of the same sex. This was true in Christian European society as well. I find it strange, I think us people in the modern world find it strange, but athletic wear didn’t really exist back then, and neither did swimwear. So if you wanted to swim, you did it naked. Even today, we all know that the old fellas like to “ball out” in the gym locker room.

The Greeks were a very sexually segregated society. Reading about Athenian gender mores, it reminds you of Sharia Law. Women were expected to ideally stay within the house, and retreat to their own quarters when the head of household had male guests over. Events like the Olympics were certainly no place for a woman, although women did have their own games parallel to the Olympics. The Romans and especially the Germanics were far less gender-segregated, and also less enthusiastic about nudity, but it was still far more acceptable than in modern times. When women were integrated into the workplace, politics, drinking establishments, and schools, the sexual battlefield extended to encompass every moment of public life. The nude body could not be recognized without its sexual element. Today we look at Greek statues, and people go “why did they make their penises so small?” which is a good evidence of this. The Greeks made the penis small to de-emphasize it and to have people focus on the form of the body, but people today associate nudity entirely with the sexual organs.

Sports in Roman times continued to be associated for obvious reasons with Paganism. They didn’t really have much of a religious justification under Christianity in the way they did under Paganism, and the Christians ended up shutting down the Panhellenic Games and ending hunts in the Colosseum. Many Christians wanted to shut down the hippodrome too, but chariot racing was simply too popular. I recently heard a Catholic priest discussing the sinfulness of mixed martial arts, and it reminded me of all of this. This whole obsession with games is very much a European or maybe more broadly Indo-European thing. You don’t see it that much with Semitic or East Asian peoples before Western influence. Board and card games, maybe. But these sort of full blown athletic competitions, I have no knowledge of any such thing. I know it has long occurred in Northern Europe, however.

So, no… The Olympics today are not “reverting to their Pagan origins”, instead they are actually adopting the exact opposite of the Pagan idea of the Olympics. The Greek Olympics was not only a celebration of the underlying unity of the Hellenic race in the face of the Barbarians, but also it was a celebration of natural beauty and the greatest among us, those with a high amount of latent ability and those who push themselves to achieve the maximum state of their bodies. Instead, we are celebrating the fat, the ugly, and the foreign, and on top of that people who mutilate their bodies and try to escape their bodily nature. Nothing could be further from the Greek Olympics. Honestly, I would say the Paralympics and the level of fetishization we have for them contributed to this. I think there’s something kind of impressive watching guys with no legs race around in those wheelchairs, because at least that is a novel skill. The blind people stuff is also kind of cool, but both of these are not on the same level as true Olympians. For the record, I don’t even like the WNBA, so why the hell would I watch people with down syndrome playing Basketball? That is not Olympian… Good for them, but the best are still the ones who, you know, aren’t missing physical or mental faculties. Everyone knows that even in the Paralympics there is a heavy genetic and luck factor to who goes the furthest, and yet for some reason if the genetic debuff is visible enough we give a bunch of attention to their feats. I think it is possible that this mentality, our obsession with the Paralympics, led to the Olympics getting to the state we saw it in during the opening ceremony. It is extremely sad, because the Olympics are a great event and I do really like to watch the amazing feats of these athletes. So to see it be subverted and used to peddle a political agenda that makes no sense given the competition.