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A.D. 394—The emperor Theodosius I bans all pagan festivals. The Olympics are officially disbanded—although archaeologists now suggest that they kept going in some form, perhaps in ********* guise. Phidias’ great statue of Zeus is packed up and transported to Constantinople for display in the emperor’s palace.
The ancient Olympic Games ended in 393 A.D., when its pagan rituals were no longer tolerated by ********* emperors, and the Roman Empire itself was crumbling under the weight of barbarian invasions. The magnificent shrine where the Games were held, Olympia, was repeatedly sacked, its treasures destroyed, and its location forgotten by all but local peasants. It would not be for another thousand years, during the Renaissance, that Britons would join the European revival of interest in the classical world, and scholars would begin poring once again over rediscovered editions of Homer, Herodotus, and Sophocles. King Henry VIII appointed England’s first professors of Greek at Cambridge University in 1540, and at Oxford in 1541. Ancient sagas culled from Plutarch became grist for Shakespeare and other popular playwrights, while Pindar’s Olympic odes endowed the name of Olympia with a magical, talismanic ring. As a result, in the 1620s, a certain extravagant, history-loving lawyer named Richard Dover decreed the world’s first revived “Olympick” festival in—of all places—the green hillsides of the Cotswolds. At the time, Puritans were attacking England’s traditional rural festivals for promoting gambling, drinking, and lewd behavior, riddled as they were with pagan relics of fertility rites such as dancing around the Maypole. Dover’s Olympicks was an act of defiance against this dour movement, and as an annual event, it began to lure thousands of spectators of all social classes to sit on muddy hillsides near the village of Chipping Campden. A motley range of “sports” was on the schedule, including hammer throwing, bear baiting, shin kicking, and the brutally violent “fighting with cudgels,” which left the contestants bloody and toothless (an accidental echo of the most gory of the ancient Greek body contact sports, the pankration). The entire festival was marked by heavy imbibing of ale, and a genial air of license. To his credit, Dover also included a “Homeric harpist” in an attempt to lift the tone and thus attract the gentry. One English poet in 1636 hailed Dover as “an Hero of this our Age.” But the exuberant festival could not last. The Cotswald Games were canceled in 1644 due to nearby fighting during the Civil War. Dover died heartbroken six years later.
Our modern conception of sport was actually born in Victorian Britain, as the growing middle class repressed the lawless, brutal rural competitions in favor of more civilized and regulated affairs. Teachers at exclusive public schools (that is, fee-paying schools for well-to-do young gentlemen) such as Eton and Rugby began to espouse the radical idea that physical education was crucial for health, moral well-being, team spirit, and general “manliness of character.” Rules for organized team sports such as football were codified, as were track-and-field events. Europeans and Americans looked on at first in bemusement, then in admiration, as the cult of sports took hold in Victorian society, and seemed to go hand-in-hand with the invincibility of the British Empire.
This new passion for exercise dovetailed naturally with the interest in ancient Greece, which grew throughout the nineteenth century to a virtual British obsession. Interest had been rekindled in 1766, when a group of traveling English scholars from the Society of Dilettanti “rediscovered” the site of ancient Olympia in the Peloponnesus of Greece. By the 1800s, imaginative Oxford and Cambridge dons were idealizing the ancient athletic tradition, and studying Greek statues and vases to revive events like the javelin and discus throw, which had not been practiced for over a millennium.
The admiration for the Greek ideal of the male physique was not purely aesthetic. For upper-crust Victorians, conversations about “Greek love,” of a man for a young boy, allowed the expression of ********** desires that were otherwise forbidden. (As historian Linda Dowling has put it, “the prestige of ancient Greece … was so massive that invocations of Hellenism could cast a veil over even a hitherto unmentionable vice or crime.”) Sometimes the talk was less ethereal. The Victorian author Frank Harris tells a marvelous story of meeting Oscar Wilde at the Café Royal in London, where he was pontificating on the Olympic Games to two ****ney youths he was evidently trying to pick up. “Did you say they was naked?” one asked, according to Harris. “Of course,” Wilde replied, “nude, clothed only in sunshine and beauty.” When Wilde was prosecuted in 1895 for “acts of gross indecency,” he mounted a spirited defense of the “pure” male ****** companionship, citing the celebrated Greek sources he had studied in Dublin and Oxford.
The Victorian enthusiasm for sports was accompanied by class-specific distortions. On the scantiest of evidence, scholars espoused the idea that ancient Greek athletes were all “amateurs” who competed without reward except for wreaths. (In fact, except at the Olympics and three other “crown” games, the ancients lavished material prizes on the victors, who gained instant celebrity status; even at the Olympics, the material rewards for athletes were enormous once they returned to their home cities.) This conveniently supported the new movement to keep the working classes out of top competitions, so that educated gentlemen could prove that they were superior to the masses in physical achievements as well as mind and character. Under the new rules, any athlete who had ever accepted financial reward for training or competing was disqualified from the most prestigious contests, ensuring that sports would be reserved for gilded youth who had the funds and leisure time to train. This cult of amateurism, which was espoused by official organizations like the Amateur Athletics Association, has been denounced by historian David C. Young as “a kind of historical hoax” twisting ancient Greek texts to maintain an elitist sporting culture.
A more ********ic development occurred in 1850, when an English country doctor (and devoted classicist) named William Penny Brookes began another version of a revived “Olympian Games” in a Shropshire village called Much Wenlock. Surrounded by emerald-green hills and attended by country gents, local merchants, and ruddy-faced farmers, the event had the air of a quaint rural carnival—although this time more sober than Dover’s “Olympicks.” It’s difficult to picture the event today without invoking Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for Brookes had a fondness for flamboyant costumes and theatrical rituals. The Olympian Herald wore a cloak and hat with a plume, and announced each competition with a bugle. A key event was the medieval-style “tilting at the ring,” where horseback riders would try to pierce a ring with a lance. Other competitions were a peculiar mix of the highbrow (foot races, cycling, archery, hurdles, and the pentathlon) to the indulgent (“races for old women”). Prizes ranged from silver trophies to a pound of fresh tea. From 1860, ten years after its inception, the games at Much Wenlock began a tradition of crowning its victors with a wreath, in homage to ancient tradition. The presenter was usually the local vicar’s daughter, who was outfitted less like an ancient Greek sylph than one of Queen Victoria’s dowdy nieces, in a heavy bustle dress.
Brookes’s revived Olympian Games are still held in Shropshire every July, and many relics from the Victorian era, including the herald’s uniforms, are on view at the Much Wenlock Museum. In a sense, it is these games that are the seed of our modern Olympics. Not only did imitators of the event spring up around Britain, but Brookes espoused the notion that the Greeks themselves should revive an international version of the Olympics on their own soil. When he learned of a local Olympics being held in Athens in 1859, funded by a Greek businessman named Evangelos Zappos, he sent a Wenlock Cup to be awarded in a long footrace, along with encouragement that the festival should be turned into a much grander event. Brookes repeatedly pressed the idea of an international Olympics upon the Greek minister in London, without success; the Greeks felt that the enterprise would be too expensive for their struggling nation.
Yet the fascination with the Greek world continued to grow as the celebrity archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered the sites of Troy and Mycenae. From 1875, German archaeologists also began excavating the site of Olympia. When they revealed the sanctuary complex and unearthed 14,000 objects, including such masterpieces as the Hermes of Praxitiles, the pages of Homer and Pindar sprang to life. The world’s enthusiasm for the heroes of Greek antiquity was reaching fever pitch.
Into this heady milieu stepped the young French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), a diminutive, obsessive, and wildly energetic figure who would eventually have himself proclaimed the “father of the modern Olympics.”
Coubertin was raised in the shadow of France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-P******n war in 1870, and became a committed (and, in Paris, very unfashionable) Anglophile. He was enchanted as a teenager by the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a paean to the sporting traditions of Rugby School. Coubertin became convinced that the rigorous British athletic culture was the basis for the Empire’s success—a marked contrast to France’s evident physical “degeneracy”—and decided to become a fitness advocate. In 1883, at the age of twenty, lithe, muscular, and sporting an enormous handlebar mustache, Coubertin made a pilgrimage to the fields of Rugby to meet with British experts and study how their methods might be imported to France. He followed this in 1889 with a journey to the United States, where he discovered new spectator sports such as baseball and met with fitness luminary Teddy Roosevelt, who had taken up outdoor adventure and strenuous exercise as a way to overcome his sickly adolescence. Soon, Coubertin was advertising in European newspapers for assistance in organizing a congress on physical training for the coming Paris Exhibition. He was promptly contacted by that tireless British Olympic advocate, William Penny Brookes—who, at the very least, deserves the title of “grandfather of the modern Olympics.”
In 1890, Coubertin accepted Brookes’s invitation to attend the Olympian Games at Much Wenlock. We do not know exactly what transpired between the mutton-chopped, eighty-one-year-old country squire, Brookes, and the excitable, twenty-seven-year-old Frenchman as they wandered the country pubs, enjoyed tea and scones, and witnessed a special session of the athletic extravaganza of Shropshire. But it’s clear that Coubertin was bewitched by the whole event, particularly with the florid pomp and ritual of the games, including the victory ceremony. (Correspondence between Brookes and Coubertin remains on display at the Raven Hotel in Much Wenlock, where victory dinners are traditionally held.)
Historians have no doubt that Brookes espoused his idea that the Olympics should be revived on an international level—and that Coubertin, with his youthful energy, connections, wealth, and deft organizational skills, was the man to do it. On his return to France, Coubertin wrote that Brookes was a true pioneer: “If the Olympic Games that modern Greece has not yet been able to revive still survive today, it is due, not to a Greek, but to Dr W. P. Brookes.” In another essay, he raved: “It is safe to say that the Wenlock people alone have preserved and followed the true Olympian traditions.” Coubertin also swallowed some of the British academics’ class-based views of the ancient Games. His acceptance of the theory that the Greeks were “amateurs” would distort the rules of participation in the Games for decades. (In 1912, for example, U.S. athlete Jim Thorpe, a Native American from an impoverished background, was stripped of medals for his brilliant victories in Stockholm because he had once competed for a few dollars a week in semiprofessional baseball; the medals were eventually restored by the Olympic Committee in 1983, thirty years after his death.) Coubertin also accepted the romantic belief that the ancient “sacred truce,” which restricted warfare at the time of every Olympic Games, had been a genuine force for peace. (In fact, it was intended as a limited truce between the endlessly feuding Greek city-states to enable athletes and spectators to travel to Olympia in safety.) And Coubertin’s often-voiced Olympic credo—“to participate is more important than to win; for the essential thing in life is not to conquer but to struggle well”—would have been incomprehensible to the ancients, for whom victory was everything, and anything less was worthy of mockery.
Brookes died one year before he could see his dream of an international Olympics realized, in Athens in 1896. Over time, Coubertin, an inveterate self-mythologizer, played down Brookes’s role as a mentor, preferring to cast himself as a heroic rénovateur. He would make two telling pilgrimages to Olympia itself. The first was early, in 1894, just after he had confirmed that the first Athens games would occur two years later. After wandering the ruins, he recognized his own arrogance in reviving the Olympics after a 1,500 year hiatus. (“I became aware in this sacred place of the size of the task which I had undertaken,” he wrote, “and I glimpsed all the hazards which would dog me on the way.”) His second visit was in 1927, after the Olympics had become a fixture. He was invited by the Greek government for the official unveiling of a stele, or stone pillar, in his honor. Now he took a more sober, long-range view of his efforts, and meditated more humbly on his achievement. Merit, he said, involves overcoming great obstacles. “Favored by lot in many respects … I count no such victories to my credit.”
Before his death in 1937, he arranged for his body to be buried with the remains of his wife in Lausanne, Switzerland, but his heart to be sent to Olympia, where it rests today inside his commemorative pillar. It was a classic Coubertin flourish, linking himself forever to the ancients who had disported there millennia before. The French baron certainly deserves his place of honor: No one but Coubertin had the passion or the political skill to carry the Olympic plan to fruition, and he spent his family fortune on the project, dying in virtual poverty. But he also tapped the unlikely roots of rural Britain.
Perhaps there should be another monument to two less continental figures who played essential supporting roles—Richard Dover and William Penny Brookes—with statues of them both raising a glass of sherry to the ancient Greeks.
The ancient Olympic Games ended in 393 A.D., when its pagan rituals were no longer tolerated by ********* emperors, and the Roman Empire itself was crumbling under the weight of barbarian invasions. The magnificent shrine where the Games were held, Olympia, was repeatedly sacked, its treasures destroyed, and its location forgotten by all but local peasants. It would not be for another thousand years, during the Renaissance, that Britons would join the European revival of interest in the classical world, and scholars would begin poring once again over rediscovered editions of Homer, Herodotus, and Sophocles. King Henry VIII appointed England’s first professors of Greek at Cambridge University in 1540, and at Oxford in 1541. Ancient sagas culled from Plutarch became grist for Shakespeare and other popular playwrights, while Pindar’s Olympic odes endowed the name of Olympia with a magical, talismanic ring. As a result, in the 1620s, a certain extravagant, history-loving lawyer named Richard Dover decreed the world’s first revived “Olympick” festival in—of all places—the green hillsides of the Cotswolds. At the time, Puritans were attacking England’s traditional rural festivals for promoting gambling, drinking, and lewd behavior, riddled as they were with pagan relics of fertility rites such as dancing around the Maypole. Dover’s Olympicks was an act of defiance against this dour movement, and as an annual event, it began to lure thousands of spectators of all social classes to sit on muddy hillsides near the village of Chipping Campden. A motley range of “sports” was on the schedule, including hammer throwing, bear baiting, shin kicking, and the brutally violent “fighting with cudgels,” which left the contestants bloody and toothless (an accidental echo of the most gory of the ancient Greek body contact sports, the pankration). The entire festival was marked by heavy imbibing of ale, and a genial air of license. To his credit, Dover also included a “Homeric harpist” in an attempt to lift the tone and thus attract the gentry. One English poet in 1636 hailed Dover as “an Hero of this our Age.” But the exuberant festival could not last. The Cotswald Games were canceled in 1644 due to nearby fighting during the Civil War. Dover died heartbroken six years later.
Our modern conception of sport was actually born in Victorian Britain, as the growing middle class repressed the lawless, brutal rural competitions in favor of more civilized and regulated affairs. Teachers at exclusive public schools (that is, fee-paying schools for well-to-do young gentlemen) such as Eton and Rugby began to espouse the radical idea that physical education was crucial for health, moral well-being, team spirit, and general “manliness of character.” Rules for organized team sports such as football were codified, as were track-and-field events. Europeans and Americans looked on at first in bemusement, then in admiration, as the cult of sports took hold in Victorian society, and seemed to go hand-in-hand with the invincibility of the British Empire.
This new passion for exercise dovetailed naturally with the interest in ancient Greece, which grew throughout the nineteenth century to a virtual British obsession. Interest had been rekindled in 1766, when a group of traveling English scholars from the Society of Dilettanti “rediscovered” the site of ancient Olympia in the Peloponnesus of Greece. By the 1800s, imaginative Oxford and Cambridge dons were idealizing the ancient athletic tradition, and studying Greek statues and vases to revive events like the javelin and discus throw, which had not been practiced for over a millennium.
The admiration for the Greek ideal of the male physique was not purely aesthetic. For upper-crust Victorians, conversations about “Greek love,” of a man for a young boy, allowed the expression of ********** desires that were otherwise forbidden. (As historian Linda Dowling has put it, “the prestige of ancient Greece … was so massive that invocations of Hellenism could cast a veil over even a hitherto unmentionable vice or crime.”) Sometimes the talk was less ethereal. The Victorian author Frank Harris tells a marvelous story of meeting Oscar Wilde at the Café Royal in London, where he was pontificating on the Olympic Games to two ****ney youths he was evidently trying to pick up. “Did you say they was naked?” one asked, according to Harris. “Of course,” Wilde replied, “nude, clothed only in sunshine and beauty.” When Wilde was prosecuted in 1895 for “acts of gross indecency,” he mounted a spirited defense of the “pure” male ****** companionship, citing the celebrated Greek sources he had studied in Dublin and Oxford.
The Victorian enthusiasm for sports was accompanied by class-specific distortions. On the scantiest of evidence, scholars espoused the idea that ancient Greek athletes were all “amateurs” who competed without reward except for wreaths. (In fact, except at the Olympics and three other “crown” games, the ancients lavished material prizes on the victors, who gained instant celebrity status; even at the Olympics, the material rewards for athletes were enormous once they returned to their home cities.) This conveniently supported the new movement to keep the working classes out of top competitions, so that educated gentlemen could prove that they were superior to the masses in physical achievements as well as mind and character. Under the new rules, any athlete who had ever accepted financial reward for training or competing was disqualified from the most prestigious contests, ensuring that sports would be reserved for gilded youth who had the funds and leisure time to train. This cult of amateurism, which was espoused by official organizations like the Amateur Athletics Association, has been denounced by historian David C. Young as “a kind of historical hoax” twisting ancient Greek texts to maintain an elitist sporting culture.
A more ********ic development occurred in 1850, when an English country doctor (and devoted classicist) named William Penny Brookes began another version of a revived “Olympian Games” in a Shropshire village called Much Wenlock. Surrounded by emerald-green hills and attended by country gents, local merchants, and ruddy-faced farmers, the event had the air of a quaint rural carnival—although this time more sober than Dover’s “Olympicks.” It’s difficult to picture the event today without invoking Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for Brookes had a fondness for flamboyant costumes and theatrical rituals. The Olympian Herald wore a cloak and hat with a plume, and announced each competition with a bugle. A key event was the medieval-style “tilting at the ring,” where horseback riders would try to pierce a ring with a lance. Other competitions were a peculiar mix of the highbrow (foot races, cycling, archery, hurdles, and the pentathlon) to the indulgent (“races for old women”). Prizes ranged from silver trophies to a pound of fresh tea. From 1860, ten years after its inception, the games at Much Wenlock began a tradition of crowning its victors with a wreath, in homage to ancient tradition. The presenter was usually the local vicar’s daughter, who was outfitted less like an ancient Greek sylph than one of Queen Victoria’s dowdy nieces, in a heavy bustle dress.
Brookes’s revived Olympian Games are still held in Shropshire every July, and many relics from the Victorian era, including the herald’s uniforms, are on view at the Much Wenlock Museum. In a sense, it is these games that are the seed of our modern Olympics. Not only did imitators of the event spring up around Britain, but Brookes espoused the notion that the Greeks themselves should revive an international version of the Olympics on their own soil. When he learned of a local Olympics being held in Athens in 1859, funded by a Greek businessman named Evangelos Zappos, he sent a Wenlock Cup to be awarded in a long footrace, along with encouragement that the festival should be turned into a much grander event. Brookes repeatedly pressed the idea of an international Olympics upon the Greek minister in London, without success; the Greeks felt that the enterprise would be too expensive for their struggling nation.
Yet the fascination with the Greek world continued to grow as the celebrity archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered the sites of Troy and Mycenae. From 1875, German archaeologists also began excavating the site of Olympia. When they revealed the sanctuary complex and unearthed 14,000 objects, including such masterpieces as the Hermes of Praxitiles, the pages of Homer and Pindar sprang to life. The world’s enthusiasm for the heroes of Greek antiquity was reaching fever pitch.
Into this heady milieu stepped the young French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), a diminutive, obsessive, and wildly energetic figure who would eventually have himself proclaimed the “father of the modern Olympics.”
Coubertin was raised in the shadow of France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-P******n war in 1870, and became a committed (and, in Paris, very unfashionable) Anglophile. He was enchanted as a teenager by the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a paean to the sporting traditions of Rugby School. Coubertin became convinced that the rigorous British athletic culture was the basis for the Empire’s success—a marked contrast to France’s evident physical “degeneracy”—and decided to become a fitness advocate. In 1883, at the age of twenty, lithe, muscular, and sporting an enormous handlebar mustache, Coubertin made a pilgrimage to the fields of Rugby to meet with British experts and study how their methods might be imported to France. He followed this in 1889 with a journey to the United States, where he discovered new spectator sports such as baseball and met with fitness luminary Teddy Roosevelt, who had taken up outdoor adventure and strenuous exercise as a way to overcome his sickly adolescence. Soon, Coubertin was advertising in European newspapers for assistance in organizing a congress on physical training for the coming Paris Exhibition. He was promptly contacted by that tireless British Olympic advocate, William Penny Brookes—who, at the very least, deserves the title of “grandfather of the modern Olympics.”
In 1890, Coubertin accepted Brookes’s invitation to attend the Olympian Games at Much Wenlock. We do not know exactly what transpired between the mutton-chopped, eighty-one-year-old country squire, Brookes, and the excitable, twenty-seven-year-old Frenchman as they wandered the country pubs, enjoyed tea and scones, and witnessed a special session of the athletic extravaganza of Shropshire. But it’s clear that Coubertin was bewitched by the whole event, particularly with the florid pomp and ritual of the games, including the victory ceremony. (Correspondence between Brookes and Coubertin remains on display at the Raven Hotel in Much Wenlock, where victory dinners are traditionally held.)
Historians have no doubt that Brookes espoused his idea that the Olympics should be revived on an international level—and that Coubertin, with his youthful energy, connections, wealth, and deft organizational skills, was the man to do it. On his return to France, Coubertin wrote that Brookes was a true pioneer: “If the Olympic Games that modern Greece has not yet been able to revive still survive today, it is due, not to a Greek, but to Dr W. P. Brookes.” In another essay, he raved: “It is safe to say that the Wenlock people alone have preserved and followed the true Olympian traditions.” Coubertin also swallowed some of the British academics’ class-based views of the ancient Games. His acceptance of the theory that the Greeks were “amateurs” would distort the rules of participation in the Games for decades. (In 1912, for example, U.S. athlete Jim Thorpe, a Native American from an impoverished background, was stripped of medals for his brilliant victories in Stockholm because he had once competed for a few dollars a week in semiprofessional baseball; the medals were eventually restored by the Olympic Committee in 1983, thirty years after his death.) Coubertin also accepted the romantic belief that the ancient “sacred truce,” which restricted warfare at the time of every Olympic Games, had been a genuine force for peace. (In fact, it was intended as a limited truce between the endlessly feuding Greek city-states to enable athletes and spectators to travel to Olympia in safety.) And Coubertin’s often-voiced Olympic credo—“to participate is more important than to win; for the essential thing in life is not to conquer but to struggle well”—would have been incomprehensible to the ancients, for whom victory was everything, and anything less was worthy of mockery.
Brookes died one year before he could see his dream of an international Olympics realized, in Athens in 1896. Over time, Coubertin, an inveterate self-mythologizer, played down Brookes’s role as a mentor, preferring to cast himself as a heroic rénovateur. He would make two telling pilgrimages to Olympia itself. The first was early, in 1894, just after he had confirmed that the first Athens games would occur two years later. After wandering the ruins, he recognized his own arrogance in reviving the Olympics after a 1,500 year hiatus. (“I became aware in this sacred place of the size of the task which I had undertaken,” he wrote, “and I glimpsed all the hazards which would dog me on the way.”) His second visit was in 1927, after the Olympics had become a fixture. He was invited by the Greek government for the official unveiling of a stele, or stone pillar, in his honor. Now he took a more sober, long-range view of his efforts, and meditated more humbly on his achievement. Merit, he said, involves overcoming great obstacles. “Favored by lot in many respects … I count no such victories to my credit.”
Before his death in 1937, he arranged for his body to be buried with the remains of his wife in Lausanne, Switzerland, but his heart to be sent to Olympia, where it rests today inside his commemorative pillar. It was a classic Coubertin flourish, linking himself forever to the ancients who had disported there millennia before. The French baron certainly deserves his place of honor: No one but Coubertin had the passion or the political skill to carry the Olympic plan to fruition, and he spent his family fortune on the project, dying in virtual poverty. But he also tapped the unlikely roots of rural Britain.
Perhaps there should be another monument to two less continental figures who played essential supporting roles—Richard Dover and William Penny Brookes—with statues of them both raising a glass of sherry to the ancient Greeks.
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