More Olympic scandals . . . in ancient Greece ~heather

By Ron Grossman, Tribune staff reporter. Ron Grossman is a former professor of ancient history at Lake Forest College Published February 21, 2002

Almost instinctively we want to hang our heads in shame when the Olympics are stained by scandal. Allowing national rivalries to get in the way of fairly determining the best figure-skating duo seems to dishonor the tradition of the ancient Games.

Well, you can let go of those guilt feelings. The road to the original Olympics was marked by monuments to athletic skulduggery. Literally so -- according to the Greek author Pausanius, the Arthur Frommer of antiquity.

Gathering material for his book "Perieigeisis teis Ellados," or "Description of Greece," Pausanius visited the site of the Games, Olympia in western Greece, in the 2nd Century A.D. The entrance to the stadium, he found, was lined by statues of Zeus.

A pious display, but it turns out it had its roots in chicanery.

"These [statues] have been made from the monies of fines levied against athletes who have disgraced the games," Pausanius explained. "The first six were set up in the 98th Olympiad (388 B.C.) when Eupolos of Thessaly bought off with money his think of the Greeks as humanity's role models -- builders of shiny white temples, athletes who ran and jumped for pure love of the sport. In fact, when it came to crassness and greed, they could put Don King to shame.

They anticipated the evil genius of television's "Tough Man" contests by 2,700 years. In an Olympic competition called the pankration, punching, kicking, choking, finger-breaking and blows to the groin were standard tactics; only eye-gouging and biting were disallowed.

In one match, a competitor named Arrhachion was strangled and died, even as his opponent was giving up because Arrhachion simultaneously had broken the fellow's toe. Pausanius dryly reports that the judges "proclaimed Arrhachion the victor and crowned his corpse."

With rules like those, it is little wonder that some ancient Olympians looked for shortcuts to victory, a little something to put the odds in their favor. Alcibiades, a slippery Athenian politician, once entered seven teams of horses in the chariot race, an event in which the owner, not the driver, was generally considered the victor. That brainstorm allowed Alcibiades to return to his constituents and proudly brag of having won first, second and third place.

The fix is in

Yet primacy of place in the competition to fix the Olympics has to go to the Roman Emperor Nero. A devoted musician and sportsman, he interrupted his busy schedule of murdering rivals and relatives for a grand tour of Greece in 67 A.D. Though Greece was long past her days of greatness, her glory still shone like a beacon, especially to the Romans who, for all the power of their empire, still considered themselves cultural apprentices to the Greeks. Athletes continued to treasure the wreath of wild olive awarded to victors at Olympia, where the Games went on as they had for hundreds of years.

Nero paid Olympic officials to stage chariot races with a special set of rules: The chariots were to be drawn by a record-breaking team of 10 horses, which effectively kept the riffraff out of competition, and put the emperor in a position to win.

Even so, Nero's biographer Suetonius reports, the road to victory wasn't smooth: "[Nero] lost his balance and fell out of the chariot and had to be helped into it again. Nonetheless, even though he did not run the whole race and quit before the finish, the judges awarded him the crown of victory."

It is amazing what a million "sesterces" will buy -- a bribe, that, according to ancient chroniclers, the emperor Galba, Nero's successor, demanded back, either in the name of purer sport or because the imperial treasury was running low.

Even the Grecian custom of athletes competing nude had as much to do with fraud and deceit as to the Greeks' famed delight in the beauty of the human form. The ancient Olympics, being a religious celebration as well as a sporting contest, were closed to women. But a widow named Diagoras Callipateiras Pherenike was determined to see her son be a winner. So, dressed like a male trainer, she took him to Olympia to compete. In her excitement at his victory, she leapt in the air and, as underwear hadn't been invented, her secret was revealed. The Olympic committee passed a rule that henceforth everyone on the field, trainers and athletes, would have to be stark naked, according to Pausanius.

But the Games weren't just anti-feminist; they also could be an occasion for gay-bashing, notwithstanding the Greeks' supposedly broadminded attitudes in such matters. According to the Greek historian Dion Cassius, a Roman wrestler by the name of Aurelius Helix was the heavy favorite in the 250th Olympiad (221 A.D.). He had just won at the Capitoline Games in Rome. But Olympic officials didn't want to see him victorious at their Games because Aurelius Helix was a boyfriend of the openly gay Emperor Heliogabalus. So they simply canceled the wrestling competition for that year.

Muscling in on the action

Other monarchs, though, used a little muscle to see that their favorites got to compete. The Olympics were divided into two parts, a men's division and one for boys 18 and under. Once, the Spartans entered a certain Eualces in the latter division, even though his height, build and strength made it obvious to the judges that he long since had passed the divide into adulthood. But King Agesilaus of Sparta pressured them to keep him in the boys' division. For once, virtue triumphed: Eualces finished out of the money.

Which brings up something else we don't need to feel guilty about: Fielding NHL and NBA players as our Olympic hockey and basketball teams. Amateur athletics are a strictly modern invention. The ancient Olympians were in it for the money.

The name of the Athenian statesman Solon passed into history as a synonym for wise man. One of his laws provided that Athenians who won at the Olympics would be rewarded with the equivalent of $100,000. Even also-rans didn't make out too badly: Athenians who merely competed at Olympia were entitled to a daily free meal for the rest of their lives at city hall.

Of course, then, as now, there were kill-joy purists claiming sports are corrupted by big bucks. Among them was the Greek author Philostratos, who wrote a treatise called "On Gymnastics."

"Such a luxurious life style as I have just described," Philostratos sadly noted, "led to illegal practices among the athletes for the sake of money. I refer to selling and buying of victories."

Philostratos cited the example of a wrestler who paid his opponent the equivalent of $66,000 to take a dive. "The loser demanded his money," Philostratos noted, "but the winner said that he owed nothing since the other had, after all, tried to win."

Honesty is secondary

Mostly, though, the ancient Greeks didn't fret about honesty in athletics. Even their understanding of where the Olympics came from involved a sporting event where the fix was in. According to the poet Pindar, the hero Pelops fell in love with the daughter of King Oenomaus. The king said, fine, Pelops could have her, if he beat him in a chariot race. But if he lost, Oenomaus reserved the right to run his spear through Pelops -- just as he had done to 13 previous suitors.

So, Pelops bribed the king's servant to take the linchpins out of Oenomaus' chariot. The wheels fell off, Pelops won the race and the girl. To commemorate his victory, he established the Olympic Games.

The Greeks, you see, were more down to earth than are we, who worry about undue influence on ice-skating judges. Philosophers no less than athletes, they realized that men don't set their baser instincts aside when they strip for sport. To keep athletics in proper perspective, when they built a Temple of Zeus at Olympia, they chose to adorn it with a grand sculpture showing Pelops pulling off his tainted upset.

So we're right in line with tradition.

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