Long-distance runner ©
Athletics fans and haters
Not all Greeks admired athletes.
'It isn't right to judge strength as better than good wisdom',
writes Xenophanes (sixth to fifth century BC). Just because someone has won an Olympic victory, he says, they won't improve the city.
The tragedian Euripides expressed similar sentiments in his play Autolycus, now only surviving in fragments. In it he describes how athletes are slaves to their stomachs, but they can't look after themselves, and although they glisten like statues when in their prime, become like tattered old
carpets in old age.
Galen, physician and polymath of the first century AD, also attacked athletics as unnatural and excessive. He thought that athletes eat too much, sleep too much and put their bodies through
too much.
But in the end the detractors of athletics lost out to the sympathisers.
The person who most idealised the Olympics was Pindar, from Thebes, midway between Delphi and Athens. Pindar composed odes for victors at the Olympic and other Games in the fifth century BC, comparing their achievements to those of the great heroes of the past - such as Heracles or Achilles - thus raising them to an almost divine level.
Galen, physician and polymath of the first century AD, also attacked athletics as
'unnatural and excessive.'
He thought that, though mortals, their superhuman feats of strength had temporarily elevated them
to another realm and given them a taste of incomparable bliss.
'For the rest of his life the victor enjoys a honey-sweet calm'
he writes.
For Pindar, the Olympics stood out among the Games -
'Water is best; gold like fire that is burning during the night is conspicuous outshining great wealth;
but if, my heart, you desire song to celebrate the Games, look no further than the sun for another
radiant star hotter in the empty day-time sky, nor let us proclaim a contest better than Olympia.'
Contrived poetry -
let's hope he continues to be right.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/greeks/greek_olympics_01.shtml