Expert Available: The ancient history of the Olympics

Newswise — Professor of classics Daniel Leon teaches about sports and society in ancient Greece and Rome. With the Paris Olympic Games beginning today, he shared how the original Games looked more than thousands of years ago in Olympia.

Daniel Leon is director of graduate studies in the Department of Classics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His main area of research is Greek and Roman historical narrative, particularly as it reflects intercultural relations and the political uses of the past. Additional interests include Hellenistic history, Roman Egypt, epigraphy, papyrology, and medieval Greek scholarship.

Quotes

"It was a religious festival, first and foremost. It’s very old. The traditional date of the foundation of the games is the early 8th century B.C.E., but there is archeological evidence pushing that back hundreds of years earlier. We think probably what happened in the 8th century was that it was reorganized and became a little bit larger, which is why that date stuck." - Daniel Leon, professor of classics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"In their origins it was just a single sprint race. It was 200 meters long. Over time the schedule of events became more complicated with sprinting events, jumping events, wrestling events, and the combat style events. They were all very popular but the most prestigious of the events was chariot racing. The interesting thing about chariot racing is that the people who won those events were usually not actually driving the chariot... Somebody did figure that out. Her name was Kyniska, a woman from Sparta. She sponsored a chariot racing team in the early 4th century B.C.E. and became the first female Olympic victor." - Daniel Leon, professor of classics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"They had a donkey-drawn chariot race for about 20 years and that didn’t stick for some reason. I guess they probably thought donkeys were less dignified than horses. There was one Olympics festival where they did a boy’s pentathlon, and nobody really knows why (it stopped) but the main suspicion is that it was just too much for those kids. So they did the games in the same place and same time on the same schedule, but then were also constantly tinkering." - Daniel Leon, professor of classics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign