05/06/2025
David M. Pritchard (University of Queensland, Australia) on the Great :
❝The Olympic Games immediately spring to mind when people think about sport in ancient Greece. This is easy to understand because these games are what has inspired our modern Olympics. The ancient Greeks celebrated their Olympics for a truly staggering 1,000 years. Their games attracted sportsmen from the 1,000 Greek microstates of the Mediterranean basin. Those Olympics, like ours, were the world’s largest event.
Our focus on this four-yearly festival in honor of Zeus, who was the ruler of the gods, is thus perfectly understandable.
Yet what most people do not realize is that the Olympics were only one aspect of sport in ancient Greece. Often overlooked is that these games were part of a periodos or circuit of four international sporting festivals. The other three games in this circuit took place at Corinth, Nemea and Delphi. Each of Greece’s 1,000 microstates also staged their own sporting festivals. We know of many hundreds of these local games.
Traditional education also included classes for the events that were common to all games. Therefore, ancient Greek sport was both a competitive and educational activity.
By far the largest local games of ancient Greece was the Great Panathenaea. Ancient democratic Athens staged this sporting festival every four years in honor of its chief deity, Athena, who was a daughter of Zeus. Local as it was, the Great Panathenaea was, in important ways, as great as the Olympics.❞
More: https://www.ekathimerini.com/culture/1268886/the-games-of-democratic-athens-were-as-great-as-the-ancient-olympics/
