Sacred Games

by Gary Corby

  Arrachion’s opponent, having already a grip around his waist, thought to kill him and put an arm around his neck to choke off his breath. At the same time he slipped his legs through Arrachion’s and wound his feet inside Arrachion’s knees, pulling back until the sleep of death began to creep over Arrachion’s senses.

  But Arrachion was not done yet, for as his opponent began to relax the pressure of his legs, Arrachion kicked away his own right foot and fell heavily to the left, holding his opponent at the groin, with his left knee still holding his opponent’s foot firmly in place.

  So violent was the fall that the opponent’s left ankle was wrenched from his socket. The man strangling Arrachion signaled with his hand that he gave up.

  Thus Arrachion became a three-time Olympic victor at the moment of his death. His corpse received the victory crown.

  His corpse received the victory crown.

  Arrachion had been at the top of his sport for twelve years. He certainly knew the consequences of what he was doing, and yet he knowingly sent himself to his death, because Olympic victory was more important than life itself.

  This historically true scene provided me with the inspiration for Timo’s self-sacrifice in Sacred Games. In the book it might read like one of the less believable pieces of melodrama, but the essence of that incredible event actually happened.

  TIMODEMUS OF ATHENS was a real athlete of the ancient world. He came from one of those sporting families that seem to throw up great athletes in every generation. Between them, the family of the genos Timonidae won four victories at the Pythian Games, eight at the Isthmian Games, and seven at the Nemean Games, one of which Timo collected himself.

  After the Nemean victory, Pindar wrote a praise song in which he predicted that Timo would win at the Olympics, which he duly did.

  Pindar was the most famous praise singer of his day. They were poets-for-hire, who for a fee would create a poem or song to honor a man whose deeds made him worthy of praise. Pindar really did write a praise song for Timodemus, which is known today as Nemean 2. This book begins with my own, very loose, translation of the first stanza. This is the one and only time that I’ve used my own translation of an ancient Greek text rather than rely on an academic version. To make it more accessible to modern readers, I cut some words and changed the meter. I hope Pindar’s psyche will forgive me.

  Pindar might be the author of the most famous epitaph ever written:

  Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here,

  According to their laws, we lie.

  Those lines were chiseled into the funeral stone for the 300 who held the pass at Thermopylae. No one knows who wrote them.

  After the war, Pindar and Simonides, the great praise singer of the previous generation, were sent on a mission to raise funeral stones and write epitaphs for all the fallen. Since they were the world’s two greatest living poets, the Greeks were emphatically sending their A team.

  It’s known which poet wrote many of the surviving epitaphs, but no one ever claimed credit for the greatest. Most people assume it was Simonides, because the lines are more in his style. The problem with that is, the historian Herodotus listed all the epitaphs written by Simonides, and he specifically does not list the epitaph for the Three Hundred. Which leaves Pindar next in line for the authorship.

  Pindar never does get to sing Nico’s victory song. I can’t let him! Pindar’s collected works are one of the most complete sets of poems from the ancient world; if Pindar sang Nico’s song, I’d have to explain how come it doesn’t appear in the extant collections.

  WOMEN WERE FORBIDDEN to watch the Games. We know this for sure because the ancient travel writer Pausanias tells us so. He also tells us what the penalty was. I copied it for the sentence passed on Timodemus. Pausanias said:

  As you go from Scillus along the road to Olympia, before you cross the Alpheius, there is a mountain with high, precipitous cliffs. It is called Mount Typaeum. It is a law of Elis to cast down it any women who are caught present at the Olympic Games, or even on the other side of the Alpheius, on the days prohibited to women.

  It must be added that, to the best of my knowledge, not once did the Greeks ever enact this terrible penalty, not even in the one famous case in which a woman was caught red-handed. This woman was discovered not only inside the stadion, but inside the box from which the coaches of the athletes watched.

  The story goes that a lady by the name of Callipateira was the widow of a strong athlete, and that her son also was a fine runner. When her husband died, Callipateira took over the job coaching their son, to the point at which he qualified for the Olympics. Determined to see him compete, Callipateira disguised herself as a man and joined the other coaches in their box. Her son won! Callipateira was the first woman in history to train an Olympic victor. She was so excited that she gave herself away. The judges were entirely unwilling to punish such a remarkable lady, so they told her not to do it again, and then they changed the rules so that no other woman could ever pull the same trick. That is why from that day on, the coaches at the Olympics were required to watch the Games stark naked.

  Oddly, the law forbidding women uses the ancient Greek word for married women. As a result it’s become a standard meme on the Internet that unmarried virgins were permitted to watch the Olympics. This is helped by Pausanias making a vague statement about seeing virgin girls at the Games.

  Let’s think about that. We have a stadion filled with thousands of drunken, sports-crazed men, and in among them are a bunch of teenage virgins.

  I don’t think so.

  What is very likely is that fathers brought along unmarried daughters to matchmake them with eligible bachelors from other cities. In fact, I consider it certain that the Olympics was a major matchmaking event. But there’s no way teenage girls were in the stadion when the contests were held. It’s just a recipe for disaster.

  There must have been a women’s camp, and it must have been on the other side of the river, given the rule as stated by Pausanias. The placement and the layout is the work of my imagination.

  Though women couldn’t compete at the Olympics, they did have their own Games. The Heraea Games were held in honor of Hera, queen of the Gods, just as the Olympic Games were in honor of her husband, Zeus. The women’s Games were severely underreported, in much the same fashion that women’s sport doesn’t get the same attention these days.

  WHEN TIMODEMUS SAYS that he’ll wait until he’s thirty, and then ask his father to find him a fourteen-year-old virgin, he’s following the standard system of the times. It was practically illegal for a man to remain unmarried after thirty, but most men waited until the last moment before getting hitched. The men of ancient Greece were notorious commitment-phobes. Probably some modern women are reading this and thinking not much has changed.

  Marriage between citizens was always negotiated by the fathers. That’s the source of the problem that Nico and Diotima experience. Given human nature, they can’t have been the first young couple to arrange matters for themselves and then expect their fathers to make it official. This is why Nico is confused about whether Diotima is his wife or his fiancée. The circumstances that led to their predicament are related in The Ionia Sanction.

  THE WORDS OF the ancient Olympic Oath have been lost. The modern oath, with its high ideals and fine values, is unlikely to bear much resemblance to the original. The ancient Olympic Oath appears to have been an anti-cheating device, to which extent it had more in common with the modern oath one takes when giving evidence in court.

  To a people who truly believed in the power of the Gods, it was more than lip service to swear by Zeus. The Greeks believed very much in the concept of luck. Except to them, luck was supplied by the Gods. A man who forswore an oath to Zeus could expect very bad luck indeed. The statue of Zeus before which the oath was taken really did show a wrathful god holding a lightning bolt in each hand; I’m not making that up at all.

  Despite the oath, cheating certainly did occur. There are
known, documented cases, and nearly all of them involve bribery. This is why an athlete’s relatives also had to swear not to cheat.

  Anyone who was caught was fined a huge sum, which was used to install a zane—a statue of Zeus—in a public place at Olympia, with the name of the cheater prominently displayed for everyone to see for generations to come. It was a name-and-shame strategy.

  WITCHCRAFT WAS THE elephant in the room when it came to cheating in the ancient Olympics, just as drugs are a major problem in the modern Games. We know that witchcraft doesn’t work, but they didn’t.

  The Greeks believed in witchcraft—a very different witchcraft to the modern version, but witchcraft all the same. The Greeks wrote curse tablets by inscribing their curse into a thin sheet of lead and then tossing it down a well. Hundreds of these curse tablets have been recovered, some are on display in museums, and they’re all very malicious.

  There’s no record of anyone using hemlock to cheat. That part of the story is the product of my own demented imagination. Yet the ancient Greeks certainly knew enough to try it. Hemlock had been the poison of choice for a gentle self-exit for centuries. Indeed on some islands, notably Keos, it was the custom for men when they reached sixty years to take hemlock to make room for the next generation.

  Hemlock was prescribed as a folk medicine to treat arthritis and tremors right up until relatively recently. Don’t try this at home. Hemlock is unbelievably deadly, and as Heraclides points out in the book, the line between a medicinal and a fatal dose is very slim.

  HERACLIDES DISPLAYS AN unusual degree of skill for the primitive state of ancient Greek medicine, but I think we may reasonably expect high ability from the father of Hippocrates. After all, Heraclides taught his son.

  Hippocrates is the most famous doctor in all of history. To this day the word “Hippocratic” is synonymous with the very best in medical practice. Doctors still swear the Hippocratic Oath. Hippocrates wasn’t the world’s first doctor, but he was the first to record the effects of his treatments, and to apply the principle of doing what he saw worked, and refrain from repeating what didn’t. Today we’d call it evidence-based medicine. Hippocrates invented it.

  At the time of this story, the man destined to become the world’s greatest doctor is one year old. The name of his father really was Heraclides. In those days, doctors learned their trade by apprenticeship to their fathers.

  Such was Hippocrates’s skill that the Greeks in his own lifetime called him Hippocrates the Great. Despite which, there is only one contemporary mention of him in surviving books. I know this seems almost too good to be true, but the only contemporary reference to Hippocrates comes from none other than Socrates!

  It happens in a book called Protagoras, written by Plato, in which Socrates refers to Hippocrates of Kos in a familiar way that makes it clear the two men were acquainted: yet another amazing proof that the men and women who founded our civilization all knew one another.

  Socrates and Hippocrates almost certainly met about forty years after the time of this story, on the occasion when Hippocrates visited Athens, which the great doctor did at the invitation of Pericles. Which means that at one point in history, Pericles, Socrates, and Hippocrates were in the same room together. One wonders what the world’s greatest statesman, the world’s greatest philosopher, and the world’s greatest doctor said to one another. Alas, we’ll never know.

  IN NICO’S TIME, the latest fad in sports science was the all-meat diet. It’s easy to see why. The usual Greek diet was almost entirely seafood, vegetables and fruit. All very healthy! Red meat was extremely expensive and hard to obtain. But meat, and the fat that goes with it, is high-energy food, just the thing for a top athlete. After several meat-eating athletes won famous victories, the all-meat regimen became mandatory for any serious competitor. It must have cost their fathers a small fortune.

  THE BUTCHER OF the Games is a job I invented, but I think that there must have been such a position, because there were so many sacrifices held at the Olympics.

  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.

  OF 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.

  FEW 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.

  DROMEUS 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.

  BELIEVE 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.