Sacred Games (40 page)

We think of the Olympics as a sporting event, but to the Greeks, the Sacred Games were first and foremost a religious festival, and no religious ceremony was complete without a sacrifice.

The everyday, typical Greek sacrifice was
always
eaten. That was how poor families got their only meat meals, and since the sacrifices were supplied by rich men, it was as much as anything a charity system to get some quality food to the poor.

The sacrifice of the hundred white oxen at the Olympics was the largest such event of the ancient world. Though they might be a supersized meal, they were a typical sacrifice and therefore could be eaten.

This is the equivalent of holding a sausage sizzle after a Sunday church service. These days we don’t tend to think about how the meat got inside the sausage, but you need only go back a few generations, to, say, the early 1900s, for the roast pig on the
spit outside the community church to be very recently deceased. In a world without refrigeration the healthiest way for the meat to get to the barbecue was for it to walk there on its own four feet.

The Olympic Oath was almost certainly sworn over sacrificed meat. An oath sworn over a sacrifice was particularly powerful, and the meat of such might not be eaten. But that was by far the exception.

O
F ALL THE
events described in this book, the most ridiculous is the ox made of bread. So needless to say, it really happened. This is one of those cases of real life being sillier than anything a writer could get away with.

The philosopher Empedocles believed in reincarnation; he declared that he himself had once been a fish and a bird, and that therefore we should not kill our fellow beings. All of which is remarkably Buddhist for an ancient Greek of the fifth century BC. Pythagoras too had taught reincarnation in the century before. It’s interesting to speculate how differently Europe might have developed had their teaching caught on.

But Empedocles is better known for his other doctrine: that everything in the world is made up of four elements: earth, water, fire and air. Previous philosophers had had a go at answering this very important question: what was everything made of? Thales, the world’s first true scientist, had held that all matter was simply different forms of water. His student Anaximenes opted for air. Xenophanes liked earth. Heraclitus, who gets a mention in
The Ionia Sanction
, declared that fire was the basic element. Empedocles covered all the bases by declaring that all four of these made up the basic elements. This idea caught on big time!

In fact, it caught on all too well and never let go. To this day, the four elements of Empedocles are central to the theories of alchemists who haven’t quite caught up with the latest developments, with astrologers and practitioners of magic in the Western tradition.

F
EW THINGS CAN
destroy your confidence in the accuracy of historical dating as completely as the detailed study of who won what at the Olympics, and in which Olympiad. Every Greek city ran its own calendar, with its own years; the only thing everyone had in common was the Olympics. So the Greeks used the Olympiads to synchronize their calendars, and when writing about a given world event, would refer to the year it happened by its closest Olympiad. The typical logic would go: “World Event X happened in the same year that So-and-So won the Such-and-Such event at the Nth Olympics.” The Greeks expected everyone to know the winner lists for every Games.

The only problem was, it was by no means certain in which Olympiad So-and-So competed. There are some astounding contradictions, even in the ancient sources, due to fallible human memory. For example it was commonly stated, even in ancient times, and you’ll find it repeated all over the internet, that King Alexander I of Macedon competed in the stadion (sprint) event at the 80th Olympiad, which happens to be the Olympics when this book is set. Herodotus mentions it, and there’s even a fragment of a praise song written by Pindar. But Alexander doesn’t appear in
Sacred Games
because it would be unusual for a man in his fifties to be sprinting! The date is simply wrong. If Alexander did compete at the Olympics, and it’s by no means certain that he did, then it must have been thirty years before.

In the book I have the heralds argue over which Olympiad Dromeus won in. Their inability to agree is all too accurate. The most comprehensive winner list—and that’s not saying much—was compiled by a fellow named Eusebius. Eusebius lived much later, but wrote chronologies for all sorts of things, and one of them was a “complete” list of winners of the Olympic stadion event. Even so, he must certainly have missed some winners, and he must surely have been relying ultimately on the fallible
memories of men such as the heralds, who passed on the list by oral tradition. You don’t have to miss too many entries before the dating of the winners is out by twenty years or more.

D
ROMEUS IS NEEDLED
mercilessly for having won an Olympic crown without having to compete. This actually happened.

The story goes that in the Olympics at which Dromeus competed, there were only two contenders for the pankration: Dromeus and a man named Theagenes. Theagenes had also entered for the boxing, which he won.

Dromeus then stood up to compete for the pankration, but Theagenes refused. He declared that he was too tired to compete. The judges were furious, and they fined Theagenes heavily, but they couldn’t force him to fight. There was no choice but to declare Dromeus the winner as he was ready and willing to compete. Dromeus thus became the first person in history to win at the Olympics without doing a thing. It was no fault of his own, but it surely must have weighed on him.

Dromeus really did come from the city of Mantinea, and the real Diotima also came from Mantinea. The connection was too good to pass by: I made up the bit about them being related.

B
ELIEVE IT OR
not, the mortality rate in this book is probably low compared to the reality. The pankratists and the boxers really were absolved of murder before the contest began. The chariots were as dangerous as they looked.

There was a famous chariot race held a few years before the Olympics of this book, at the Pythian Games, in which no fewer than
forty
chariots crashed out. Pindar wrote a praise song for the winner, who was probably very relieved to be still alive.

No one was in the least bothered by the deaths. Quite the opposite, in fact. The degree of danger they faced enhanced the virtue of the sportsmen. This is by no means only an
ancient attitude. The demand for safety in sport is a very recent attitude indeed. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, not long ago at all, a Formula 1 racecar driver had a 1 in 3 chance of surviving a five-year career.

T
HE STARTING STALL
system used for chariots at the Olympics was a fascinating mechanical device. Pausanias describes its operation, and I slavishly copied his description for the book.

The
hippaphesis
provided for a staggered start, controlled by gates that opened in sequence, with the teams on the outside starting first and from behind, but given a running start, whereas the teams in the more advantageous center line had to go from a standing start. It was obviously very complex.

People don’t normally associate advanced mechanics with ancient Greece, and we might doubt today if this device actually existed, but for one astounding fact: a statue made by the inventor has been discovered.

Pausanias tells us that the
hippaphesis
was invented by an Athenian architect, one Kleoitas son of Aristokles. Modern archaeologists have discovered a statue in Athens, into which these words are inscribed:

Which means we’ve discovered an artifact that was personally made by someone mentioned by name, in a text that’s 2,500 years old! What are the odds of that happening?

I
F YOU THINK
there’s a lot of sex happening in this book, consider this: at the Beijing Olympics, they supplied 70,000 condoms to the athletes at the Olympic Village.

They ran out of condoms. They had to send in another 20,000.

Every Olympics Village of the last few decades has set similar
remarkable records. There’s no reason to think the ancient Games were any different.

I
N ANCIENT
G
REEK
religion, someone who touched a dead body was considered ritually unclean. They had to restore themselves by washing their hands in seawater. Back in Athens or any other city, a bereaved family would place a bowl of seawater outside their door, so that those who came to pay their last respects could wash on their way out.

The custom clearly has its origin in basic hygiene. Nico is punctilious about washing, which is why, after he’s touched the body of Arakos, he asks where in landlocked Olympia he might find some seawater. I think it certain that in those parts of Greece that were away from the sea, the local residents would have decided the largest available river was the place to go.

T
HE
S
ACRED
T
RUCE
was a for-real system. A couple of months before the Games were due to begin, three runners were sent from Elis to crisscross Greece, shouting as they went that the truce had begun. The moment you heard that, you were legally and spiritually obliged to give even your worst enemy safe passage across your land, as long as the sole intent was to attend the Games. Once at Olympia, you and your enemy could pitch your tents side by side, secure in the knowledge that bad things would happen to anyone who broke the rules.

You’re probably wondering if anyone ever broke the Sacred Truce, and the answer is yes. Exactly forty years after this book, Sparta happened to be at war with Elis, the Olympic hosts. A tricky situation, but not an impossible one given the system. Except then the Spartans attacked an Elisian fort during the Truce. The Judges were not impressed, to put it mildly, and nor were the other cities. The Judges fined the Spartans two hundred thousand drachmae. To put that in perspective, it was enough money to feed a family for about five hundred years.
The Spartans refused to pay the fine, so the Judges of the Games banned Sparta from attending the Olympics. In like manner, Exelon threatens to ban Athens over the death of Arakos.

I’
M SURE THAT
the Sacred Truce didn’t extend to fights breaking out between spectators from opposing cities. Incidents like this happen in football stadiums around the world every day. Getting caught up in such a skirmish usually requires either a low IQ or a high blood-alcohol reading. The ancient Olympic Games were well supplied for both conditions, so I assume that at every Games there was a certain amount of drunken brawling.

G
ORGO IS ONE
of the few women mentioned by name in the Greek histories, and one of even fewer to have had a powerful influence in Greek politics.

Gorgo began her career in international diplomacy at the tender age of eight. That seems almost unbelievable, but the story is told by Herodotus that when she was eight she advised her father the king not to aid an insurrection in Persia. The influence that Gorgo wielded within Sparta was well known to the other Greek states. Her intelligence was extraordinarily high. The story that she deduced the existence of the secret message that warned of the Persian attack is true.

The death of Gorgo’s father, King Cleomenes, really was as bizarre and gruesome as she relates in the book. At the time, the official cause of death was suicide, but even back then people were whispering the word
murder
. If true, the killers would certainly have been from the Spartan leadership. That the krypteia may have done the deed on orders is my speculation, but not impossible.

Gorgo was totally bought into the Spartan ethic. The question that I put into Diotima’s mouth, “How is that you Spartan women are the only ones who can rule men?” was in fact asked by an unknown woman from Athens. Gorgo’s answer was, “It’s
because we’re the only ones who give birth to real men.” The same quote is used in the movie
300
, in which Gorgo appears as a character, somewhat scantily clad.

Gorgo of Sparta, Diotima of Mantinea, and a third lady, Aspasia of Miletus, stood high among the intellectual elite of the fifth century BC, which is saying a great deal since there would not be another century to match it until the Renaissance, 2,000 years later. There’s no reason to believe that the real Gorgo and the real Diotima ever met, but there was no way I was going to let this series run without these two brilliant women getting to say hello to each other.

Y
OU HAVE TO
feel sorry for King Pleistarchus of Sparta. When your father’s one of the most revered warriors in all of human history, and your mother’s the most intelligent woman on the planet, you’ve got a tough act to follow. He seems to have acquitted himself well.

At the time of this story Pleistarchus must have been in his mid-thirties. He was underage at the time his father died in 480 BC, which we know because a regent ruled in his name for the first few years. I assume that his mother, Queen Gorgo, put considerable effort into making sure her son was ready to rule, and given her background, I suspect she was demanding.