Founding of the Olympic Games
The Greeks dated their first Olympic games to 776 BC and used the four-year cycle as a calendar for a thousand years. The festival was religious before it was athletic. It was held at Olympia in the western Peloponnese at a sanctuary of Zeus, in the second full moon after the summer solstice, and the sacrifice of a hundred oxen on the great altar was the centre of it. The first recorded victor is Coroebus of Elis, a cook, in a single foot race of about 192 metres. Events were added over the following century and a half: longer races, the pentathlon, wrestling, boxing, the four-horse chariot race and the pankration, which had two rules and permitted almost everything else. Competitors were free Greek men, competed naked, and swore an oath before a statue of Zeus holding a thunderbolt in each hand. A truce was proclaimed for the duration so that travellers could reach the site through territory at war, and it was not a general peace but a safe conduct. The prize was a wreath of wild olive, and the athlete's own city generally supplied the rest — cash, meals for life, a statue, and exemption from taxes. Women were barred from attending under most conditions, and had their own festival of Hera. The games ran for about twelve centuries and were ended, with the other pagan festivals, under Theodosius around 393. They were revived at Athens in 1896. The list of victors was compiled in the fifth century BC and used by historians to date everything else, which is why events are given in Olympiads. The dating of the first games is itself a reconstruction, and archaeology at the site suggests activity there some centuries earlier.
- Year: 776 BCE
- Category: Cultural
