Coroebus of Elis
Coroebus of Elis was a cook who won the foot race at Olympia in 776 BC, the only event of the first recorded Games, and became the first name on the list of victors that the Greeks used for the next thousand years to count their years by; nothing else is known about him and a great deal has been built on it. The list itself was compiled three centuries later by the sophist Hippias of Elis, who had every reason to make his city's festival old and its first victor local. The chronographers who followed him took 776 as the point from which Greek history could be dated, so that Timaeus and Eratosthenes counted Olympiads back to Coroebus as Romans counted from the foundation of the city. What is known of the first Games is what Pausanias wrote in the second century AD from what he was told at Olympia. He wrote that the race was the stadion, a single length of the track of about a hundred and ninety metres, that Coroebus won it, that he was a cook or a baker, that his tomb was shown on the border of Elis, and that the diaulos of two lengths was added at the fourteenth Games and the wrestling and the pentathlon at the eighteenth. The archaeology has something to say to the tradition. The sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia has offerings from the tenth century and the stadium was not laid out where it stands until the sixth, and some historians move the real beginning of the Games down into the seventh century. They treat the early entries in Hippias's list as a reconstruction. The Games themselves ran until Theodosius closed the pagan festivals in the 390s, every four years for nearly twelve hundred. The victor's olive crown, the truce that let the athletes travel, the naked running and the statues in the sacred grove are the things the modern Games said they were reviving in 1896. Coroebus is the first man in Greek history with a date, which is not the same as being the first to exist.
- Lived: 800 BCE – 750 BCE
- Nationality: Greek
- Roles: athlete, cook
