The nice losers
Benny Green
In that masterly public relations job for the Athenian cause, Thucydides' Peioponnesian War or 'nice guys always finish last,' there occurs towards the end of Book 5 a passage not without relevance to the events of the last few weeks. The Eleans, having fined the Spartans for an alleged breach of the Olympic truce, suspect that the Spartans, who are refusing to pay the fine, might mount an attack during the Games, and are so fearful that they deploy more than 2,000 soldiers to stand guard throughout the Olympiad. But then Thucydides adds, "The Spartans, however, made no move, and allowed the festival to pass off quietly." There was of course an immensely powerful reason why the Spartans should have suddenly started behaving themselves in this way, and sadly it happens to be a reason which argues conclusively against the perpetuation of the Olympic Games in modern times.
Notice that Thucydides uses the word festival.' And earlier in the passage he describes how the Eleans make the first, decisive diplomatic move by refusing the Spartans access to the temple, thus "preventing them from sacrificing or competing in the Games." I think it has been said before that whereas the modern world tends to make a religion of games, the Greeks made games a part of their religion, and it was this respect for their own anthropomorphic polytheism which caused the Spartans to stand aside and allow their rivals to enjoy themselves. The twentieth century appears to have deluded itself into the fatuous belief that by holding the Games once more it is reviving a glorious ancient tradition; in fact the opposite is true, and the modern Olympics fly directly in the teeth of everything the Greeks believed their Games stood for.
The quintessential factor of the original Games was their status as an intimate tribal affair, a celebration by a unified cultural group. It is true that the factions within this group spent a great deal of BC doing awful things to each other, true that the Spartan men were perfectly happy to let their Athenian prisoners fry by day and freeze by night in the mines at Syracuse, and that the Spartan girls wore athletics uniforms a little too spartan for decency. Nevertheless, all the warring factions were attempting to propitiate the same gods. It is worth remembering that whether describing the Athenian expedition to Syracuse or the expulsion of the Spartans from the Games, Thucydides is writing about an interecine war. Not long after the Battle of Thermopylae, Xerxes, who by this time was beginning to wish he had never got himself involved in the first place, asked some enemy deserters what the Greeks were doing; the answer bewildered him. The Greeks were celebrating their Olympic festival:
. . . where they were watching athletic contests. When he asked what the prize was for which they contended . . . they mentioned the wreath of olive leaves. This drew from Tritanaechmes, "Good heavens, what kind of men are these that you have brought us to fight against? — men who compete with one another for no material reward, but only for honour."
As Herodotus, who wrote this account, was not only a Greek but also a pathological liar, the nobility of his Olympic concept may be regarded at least in part as Greek propaganda, but there is no doubt that the Olympic idea was beyond the grasp of the barbarian mind.Solon once told a puzzled outsider:
I cannot find words to give you an idea of the pleasure you would have if you were seated among the anxious spectators, watching the courage of the athletes, the beauty of their • bodies, their splendid poses, their extraordinary suppleness their audacity, their sense of competition, their unconquerable courage, their unceasing efforts to win victory.
With which point we come to the second of the two reasons why the modern Olympics are a travesty of the Athenian ideal. Solon speaks of "the beauty of their bodies." Look what the ingenuity of man has done to the Weightlifting contestants, those pathetic monsters manufactured for . the sole purpose of winning a victory to be used later as ammunition in some squalid propaganda war. What would Solon have said of women so grotesque that it taks a physician to determine their sex, of contestants who gain forty pounds in six weeks in order to improve their chances, of the contemptible tiddlers of the world's communications industry who pervert the Games into a flagwaving exercise? Above all, what would he have made of the armchair athlete's misconceived belief that victory justifies all?
For the Greeks believed in true amateurism. As their religion made no attempt to cleave the soul from the body, the activities of both were given equal importance. A man should sometimes turn aside from exercising his mind and spirit, in order to exercise his body, hence the Olympic Games. But for him to neglect everything else just to run faster or jump higher would have sounded to the Greeks like a particularly dangerous form of madness. Pindar, the most perceptive • sporting journalist western civilisation has so far produced, perhaps went too far with his idea that athletic excellence must always be confined to the aristocracy because the poor will never find the time to become champions. But then Pindar was a congenital last-ditcher, a type who surveys the world from his cradle and decides he doesn't like the way things are going. But it is interesting that just once more, and in just one place, there evolved precisely those social conditions Pindar prescribed for the games-playing amateur. That time was the nineteenth century, that place England, and when we remember Dr Grace and Lord Kinnaird, C. B. Fry and A. C. Maclaren, we take the point. If we were to examine the Victorian Olympics would we not find that same evidence of the Pindaric spirit?
Times have changed since then. The first Olympic Games in 776 BC inscribed the first recorded date in European history. It says little for our fitness as Olympians that we are so mightily preoccupied with the likelihood of inscribing the last one.
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