by Gary Corby
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.
THE 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:
He who first invented the horses’ aphesis at Olympia,
Kleoitas son of Aristokles made me.
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?
IF 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.
IN ANCIENT GREEK 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.
THE SACRED TRUCE 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.
GORGO 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.
YOU 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.
The forces of progressive politics in Sparta—to the extent that there were any in that most unusual of cities—came oddly enough from within the two royal families. It was the common Spartans who were the ultraconservatives. The reason for this is the one that Gorgo gives in the book: that a king knows his descendants will be ruling the city for hundreds of years to come, and therefore takes the long view. The common Spartan was very, very reactionary.
The political order was as the book gives: two hereditary lines of kings who ruled simultaneously, with a council of elders to advise them, and an elected council of ephors with power of veto.
THE STORY OF the krypteia ritual looks like something I must have made up, but it was for real. The krypteia was nothing short of training and field practice in the art of assassination. The ancient biographer Plutarch says this of the krypteia ritual, from his Life of Lycurgus:
The so-called KRYPTEIA … is as follows: The magistrates from time to time sent out into the countryside at large the most discreet of the young men, equipped only with daggers and necessary supplies. During the day they scattered into obscure and out-of-the-way places, where they hid themselves and lay quiet. But in the night, they came down to the roads and killed every helot w
hom they caught. Often, too, they actually made their way across fields where the helots were working and killed the sturdiest and best of them.
Aristotle has a word on the subject too. He says that the ephors, as soon as they came into office, made formal declaration of war upon their own helot slaves, so that there might be no impiety in slaying them.
WHAT MADE WAR inevitable was the growth of Athenian power, and the fear which this caused in Sparta.
So said Thucydides in his great history of the Peloponnesian War, and in that one sentence he pretty much sums up why everything went so horribly wrong. If you studied ancient history at school then your stomach is probably churning at the sight of it, because it’s almost impossible to get through any ancient history course without writing a long essay about that sentence!
The Olympic Games of 460 BC was the first after Athens became a full democracy, and the last before the First Peloponnesian War began. Sacred Games plays out, in the microcosm of the Olympics, the hideously complex intercity politics unfolding across Greece. This book takes place almost exactly twenty years after the Persian Wars. In the face of the Persian onslaught, the Greeks had united for the first time (sort of … mostly … even then there were major arguments). But once the Persian War was over, it didn’t take long for the alliance to fracture.
The interweb of alliances and enmities between the Greek city-states was at least as complex as the diplomatic situation in Europe prior to World War I, and just as liable to explode. So when my fictitious Arakos the Spartan is murdered at Olympia, that could be all that was needed to send Greece into a general conflagration.
In the author’s note to The Pericles Commission, I described Athens as a deer caught between two wolves: Sparta and Persia. Now we’re up to book three, and it’s not getting any better for our heroes. Athens has started a war in Egypt; it’s a strategic diversion to force the Persians to send their army there rather than back into Europe. But it’s a huge commitment. If Sparta joins in, things are going to get tricky. Now it looks like Sparta wants to play.
Athens, a city of not more than 250,000 people, barely larger than a modern town, is prosecuting wars on three continents. And right now, they’re winning every one of them.
NICO AND DIOTIMA have had a busy year. Which is only fair because the Athenian year spanning 461 to 460 BC was one of the most momentous in human history. Things can get hectic when you’re inventing western civilization.
In The Pericles Commission, Nico and Diotima dealt with internal political threats to the new democracy. In The Ionia Sanction, they dealt with threats from Persia in the east. Now in Sacred Games they’ve seen off danger from Sparta in the west. I think they deserve a holiday.
They’re going home to be married. I’m sure nothing can go wrong there.
EVENTS AND WINNERS OF THE 460 BC OLYMPICS
NICO ONLY GETS to see three events, but of course while he’s busy investigating, there’s a real Olympic Games going on in the background. For what it’s worth, here are my notes on who won what at the real Olympics of 460 BC. I’ve included Nico’s efforts so you can see where he fits in. If you’ve read the author’s note, then you’ll know how dodgy the winner lists can be. It’s possible for a winner to be misplaced by sixteen or twenty years. In the great majority of cases we have no idea who won, but where there’s a likely winner, I’ve named him.
I find it hard to believe that every Olympics was run to the same strict timetable. There were a few scheduled items that had to be fixed in stone—such as the opening and closing ceremonies, and the sacrifice of the oxen on Day Three—but beyond that the Greeks probably didn’t care exactly when the events began and ended.
The judges were free to add extra competitions around the edges of the core events. We know for example that this Olympics was one of only fourteen to include a mule race. And of course at these Olympics they added the unique event of murder investigation.
Day 1 – Morning
The Olympic Oath
Competition for the Heralds
The boys’ events: running, wrestling and boxing
A lad by the name of Kyniskos won the boys’ boxing, which we know because a statue was made of him by the sculptor Polykleitos. The winner of the boys’ wrestling was a certain Alcimedon, who was praised by Pindar in a song now known as Olympian 8. (Which goes to show that Pindar was present at these Games, and that he managed to get some work!)
Day 1 - Afternoon
The afternoon of Day 1 was free time. Fathers looking to find husbands for their daughters would be checking out the prospects. Old friends from different cities would be catching up.
Day 2 - Morning
Nico and Markos take an extra special Olympic Oath.
Chariot Races
there were four:
2-horse chariot race for colts
2-horse chariot race for older horses
4-horse chariot race for colts
4-horse chariot race for older horses
For my own dramatic purposes I had the 4-horse race for older horses run first. Nico and Markos miss the other events.
Horse races
there were three:
Race for stallions
Race for colts
Race for mares
The mule race probably came after the horse races, no doubt for comic relief.
Day 2 - Afternoon
The Pentathlon:
Running
Wrestling
Long Jump
Discus
Javelin
Day 3 – Morning
The sacrifice of the oxen. This was the event of the Games for the ancient Greeks.
Day 3 - Afternoon
First up was the dolichos, which was the long distance race. The winner in 460 BC was the famous Ladas of Argos. He was known as a runner so very light on the ground that his feet never left an imprint. It’s said that he died on his way home from these Olympics, and that a memorial was built by the roadside where he collapsed.
Next came the stadion, which was the sprint event. Needless to say, it was one length of the stadion. The winner is listed as Torymmas of Thessaly. More than any other event, to win the stadion race was to win immortality, because most Olympics were uniquely named by the stadion winner.
Then came the diaulos, which was two lengths of the stadion. Winner unknown.
In the evening a massive barbecue feast was held of the ox meat and, at this particular Olympics, also the bread ox of Empedocles. (Yes, that really happened.)
Day 4
Wrestling
The winner of the wrestling was Amesinas of Barce, who trained by wrestling with a bull while he tended his cattle. He even brought the bull with him for extra practice.
Boxing
winner unknown
Judging of the Murder Investigation event
The winner is listed as Nicolaos, son of Sophroniscus.
Pankration
The winner was Timodemus, son of Timonous.
The hoplitodromos: the race in armor
winner unknown
For the hoplitodromos, competitors ran two lengths of the stadion in standard soldier kit. Nico misses this event, of course, because at that moment he has Timo slung over his shoulders and is racing for the aid station.
Day 5
Closing Ceremony
GLOSSARY
Agora. The marketplace. Every city had its agora, and so too must have Olympia during the Games.
Amphora. The standard container of the ancient world. Amphorae come in many sizes. An amphora vaguely resembles a worm caught in the act of eating far too big a mouthful: wide at the top, tapering to a pointy bottom. Amphorae are used to hold wine, oil, water, olives, you name it. Tens of thousands of ancient amphorae have survived to this day.
Attica. The area of southern Greece controlled by Athens. Most of Attica is rural, very hilly, farmland. When Gorgo says she would cheer on her men as they laid waste to Attica, she means to the farmland that fed Athens.
It was a common strategy in those days to destroy the enemy’s food production.
Aulos Pipes. A recorder-like musical instrument, but with two pipes which form a V at the mouthpiece. Music was played during some Olympic events, such as the long jump.
Bouleterion. Council house. Boule means council. Olympia had a bouleterion, which was the administration center during the Games.
Chaire! “Rejoice!” Friends who met each other on the street would call out, “Chaire! I rejoice to see you!” In the Bible—clearly at a much later date—chaire is the first word spoken to Mary by the angels.
Chiton. The chiton is the usual garment of a wealthy citizen. The chiton is a large rectangular sheet, or two sheets pinned together, wrapped around the body from the right, wide enough to cover the arms when outstretched and fall to the ankles. The sheet is pinned over both shoulders and down the left side. Greek clothing is neither cut nor shaped; there’s a lot of spare material below the arms. The chiton is belted at the waist so the extra material doesn’t flop around. The chiton is worn with a himation, a bit like a stole, across the shoulders. The chiton is for men with no need to labor. A middle class artisan might wear an exomis.
Deme. A deme is like a combination of suburb and sub-tribe. All of Attica is broken up into demes. When an Athenian introduces himself to a stranger, he always gives his name, his father’s name, and the deme in which he lives. Hence, “Timodemus, son of Timonous, of the deme Archarnae of Athens,” or, “Nicolaos, son of Sophroniscus, of the deme Alopece of Athens.”
The patronymics and the demes I used above are totally correct. This was the standard way of naming. Even in writing, there are many real people mentioned in classical sources about whom we know almost nothing, except who their father was, and where to find their house. A man took the same deme as his father.