In an attempt to demonstrate his strength Milo split apart a tree trunk with his bare hands but become trapped and was devoured by wolves. The ancient Olympic games in Greece were an incredible show of bravery, athleticism, and sometimes downright savage absurdity.
The most shocking of these events was pankration. Often described as a combination of boxing and wrestling, pankration was pretty much a free for all where only biting and gauging was banned. The other Olympic events included chariot racing, boxing, running and a pentathlon.
As Greece entered a new age the event saw a slow but sure demise. The integrity of the games was all but slipping and a perfect example of this was shown in 67 AD when the Roman emperor Nero competed in a chariot race and despite making a spectacle of himself and falling off, he named himself the champion!
Later under the reign of the Roman emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, pagan temples and sites were destroyed and in AD he banned the ancient Olympic games for their link to paganism as they were originally held in honour of the Greek god Zeus.
In a revival of the ancient Olympic Games in Greece occurred, this time with a more modern approach. The event saw male women were not able to compete until 4 years later in athletes come from 13 different countries to compete. The opening ceremony drew a crowd of 60, people! This modern version of the Olympics included 43 different events from weightlifting to cycling. Ever since then the Olympics have grown and evolved into what you see today. You must be logged in to post a comment.
Greek History. With this in mind, Hippias ignored the unknown victors from earlier Games. Thus -- he dated the 1st Olympiad from the victory of Coreobus of Elis also spelled "Koroibos". Olympiads were then identified by each year within that Olympiad so, for example, you would refer to your birthday as: "I was born in Ol. Keep in mind that all ancient civilizations, not just the Greeks, used different calenders. There was no such thing as "B. Some ancient civilizations based their calender on the cycles of the moon and some on the seasons of the year -- for planting purposes.
The Greeks themselves did not use the same calendar -- each individual city-state had its own version Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Elis, etc.
Of all the Greek city-states the calendar of Athens is best known to today's scholars. The fact that the Greeks used the Olympiad as a calendar is interesting -- it may have been the only way to determine accurate time among all the separate city-states.
There was still a need to send a herald across Greece to announce the date of the Olympic festival, so that the various Greek city-states had to have some familiarity of a common calender system in order to make sense of the upcoming religious festival.
It is the ancient Roman calendar that is the basis for our modern calendar. The next emperor was Augustus, and he renamed the month of Sextilis to Augustus in his own honor. SO -- please understand that dating events in ancient history is very difficult.
All dating is debatable because all events prior to 45 BCE have to be translated into the fixed Roman Julian calendar that we know today -- and that is how we determine the year BCE for the "first" Olympic Games. Read more about the Romans here: Roman Republican Calendar. The ancient Roman calendar was good but Julius Caesar corrected a deficiency that existed -- and therefore he added leap years. This worked very well for over years -- until the 13th century. Then the story of the calendar gets really complicated so you can read about it here: The Calculation of Easter.
The Christian holidays of Easter and Christmas needed accurate dates. Because they were based upon the ancient Hebrew calendar, which was a thirteen month calender based upon the cycles of the moon, they needed to be re-examined. Pope Gregory finally refined the Julian calendar in , and it became known as the Gregorian calender.
But Gregory was a Catholic Pope and this period of time was during the Protestant Reformation -- so some European countries refused to change their calender until the 's Great Britain and the American colonies changed to the Gregorian calender in Read more here: Gregorian Calendar Conversion. So why are we getting all fussy about the dates and the calendar? Who cares you ask? Well -- we need to know these things because if you are memorizing dates -- then you must understand that they are not always accurate.
AND -- in when the first Modern Olympic Games were held in Greece -- the Greek calendar was in use in Greece and the dates were different than the rest of the world. The American athletes who traveled from the East coast almost missed the Athens Games because of the difference in dates. With this background in the history of calendars and the problem of fixing dates in history, we now return to the historical issue of the ancient Olympic Games and the date of BCE.
Using our modern version of the calender, we can now say that Hippias found that the first recorded winner of the ancient Olympic Games was from the year BCE before the common era, also written in many books in the past as "BC" before Christ. The international scholarly community has changed terminology to a non-religious reference of BCE. One century later the records compiled by Hippias were revised and corrected by Aristotle.
After Aristotle, other ancient writers, both Greeks and Romans, attempted to write histories of the Olympic Games. Much of this material, written on papyrus scrolls, was destroyed when the ancient library at Alexandria Egypt was burned during a battle between Julius Caesar's Roman army and the defending Egyptian army of Queen Cleopatra. In fact much of the knowledge about the ancient world was lost at that time.
The library at Alexandria was rebuilt -- and destroyed by fire -- two more times over the next centuries. The ancient Olympic Games were held every four years for almost 1, years.
There are no surviving records after this date. There are no records of any Olympic winners over the next years -- but there must have been something happening that seriously angered Roman emperors. Several times Roman Emperors issued decrees that banned ancient Greek pagan festivals. Later, the site of the Olympics was destroyed in an earthquake. Unlike the modern Olympics, there was no torch relay in the ancient Olympics.
However, an Olympic flame would be lit at each Olympics, and it would burn throughout the Olympics. The games would begin with choir singing, and each athlete would go to the sanctuary of Zeus to sacrifice a pig.
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