ATHENS—In the pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses, Hera was a nag and a shrew. But also shrewd.
Both sister and wife to Zeus — ick — she routinely countered his thunderbolt ferocity with her cunning.
And there is a body of literature that asserts she was honoured with athletic festivals for girls even before the stag Olympics were established in 776 BC.
Of course, men write history, so it has been all too easy to erase the female factor from the record, much as the Christian church has done. Most archival chronicles would have us believe no dame ever stepped foot in the sanctuary of Olympia — upon pain of death — during the testosterone-pumped spectacle of the quadrennial Games.
Not so.
There were women on the periphery, admittedly whores, plying their trade in the smoke-choked camps where attendees arriving from all points of the Hellenic empire bivouacked during the Olympics. And, according to some contemporaneous sources, there were women inside the stadium at Olympia too, a few brave suffragists penetrating security by stealth, but the majority in situ as husband-trolling spectators.
Their dads took them. Their brothers took them. Their moms were proscribed from accompanying them. Only unmarried females were allowed, which seems a little weird, since presumably matrons would be less shocked by the dangly bits on view. Conversely, young girls were also considered still "wild," or at least untamed.
The Greeks loved the male form, were in thrall to washboard abs and rippling pecs, indeed had no hang-ups about homosexuality — generally man-on-boy couplings, the older partner exacting carnal pleasures in a quid pro quo exchange for introducing the younger stud to society and advancing the youth's career aspirations.
Thus the blatant homoeroticism of the Olympics.
But all those delectable young men on parade, while eye-candy for the lechers in the stands, were equally potential husbands for the nubiles of Greece. Less a Chippendales show than a mate-market, the Olympics allowed pubescent girls an opportunity to point and pick: "Daddy, I want him."
As the Greek text expert and university lecturer Robin Waterfield writes in his new book, Athens: "(Many) of the athletes would be in their mid-twenties, close to the age of marriage, and the girls' fathers — as well as the girls themselves — took the opportunity to pick out prospective husbands."
There was also one woman in Greece, and one alone, who was afforded pride of place at the Olympics, subservient to nobody — the priestess of Demeter. Held in high esteem as the successor to Gaia, the Great Mother and goddess of nature, the priestess could sashay about as she pleased, without fear of being flung off a cliff at nearby Mount Typaion, which was the punishment for violators of the gender-exclusive policy. But the priestess was also a virgin by job description, so not in technical violation of the rules anyway.
Even the traditionalists who persist in portraying the Olympics as a no-girl-go zone concede one clever woman did pierce the inner sanctum, and locker rooms, of the Games. That was Kallipateira, a resourceful doyenne of the high-status Diagorides family from Rhodes. The ancient writer Pausanias tells us that Kallipateira had a son, Peisirodos, who was competing as a boxer at the Olympics. She wanted to watch, so disguised herself as a trainer and slipped through the gates.
As it happened, Peisirodos won the competition and Kallipateria, in a burst of maternal pride, rushed to embrace the boy, at which point her disguise fell off and "her sex was revealed," as Pausanias delicately put it. The spectators, to say nothing of the officials, were aghast.
Because of her rich and powerful family, Kallipateira was spared the cliff-launch. But from then on, to prevent any similar incidents, it was deemed that all trainers had to march into the stadium starkers, like the athletes.
Nakedness was a feature of the Olympics, although not at their induction, adopted only in 720 BC after Orisppos of Megara crossed the finish line in his birthday suit, having ditched his uni somewhere during the footrace. Because he'd won, that was good enough for other competitors to follow suit, or non-suit as the case may be.
At Hera's games, known as the Heraia and believed to have predated the Olympics by about two centuries, the female athletes competed clothed, wearing loose garments that exposed the right breast — à la Janet Jackson — and rose above the knee. Little is known about these games, apart from the fact that girls ran shorter distances than the standard stade of the Olympics, or what was believed to be the distance that legendary Olympics-founder Herakles (Hercules) could run — 200 metres, one length of the stadium — without drawing breath.
It is unlikely females competed in any version of the "combat sports" deemed too unladylike, even for wild girls — wrestling and boxing and so forth. (It's taken multiple millennia to reverse those prejudices, and not yet completely. Women will be wrestling at the Athens Olympics for the first time ever, but they still aren't allowed to box, so there will be no Games comeback for Tonya Harding.)
For all the restrictions placed on females, their names did show up in the victory column at the Olympics, albeit obliquely, as owners of chariot teams.
The chariot races, which didn't make their debut until later, were the glamorama events of the ancient Games. It was a perilous sport because the carts had no suspension system and easily spilled on the turns. Thus owners — generally wealthy Greeks — entrusted the reins to slaves, whose lives were expendable. And quite a few of those owners were women of the idle rich class, in the same way women, including the Queen of England, run racehorses today. The charioteers didn't get the laurels — the owners did. The first to do so — in fact she did it twice in the fourth century BC — was Kyniska of Sparta, sister to King Agesilaos.
The king's biographer, Xenophon, wrote: "Agesilaos persuaded his sister Kyniska to breed a team of horses for chariot racing and so, when she won a victory at the games, he proved that to keep such a team is not a mark of manly virtue but merely of wealth."
Another woman, Belistiche, described as a "protégé" of Ptolemaeus Philadelphus, the Greek king of Egypt, repeated the feat — or at least the feat-by-proxy — in 264 BC.
They may not have worked up the sweat, not even lifted a dainty and bejewelled finger. But they were the original grand dames of the Olympics, lineal ancestors to Babe and Flo-Jo and Marion. You go, girls.
here
Both sister and wife to Zeus — ick — she routinely countered his thunderbolt ferocity with her cunning.
And there is a body of literature that asserts she was honoured with athletic festivals for girls even before the stag Olympics were established in 776 BC.
Of course, men write history, so it has been all too easy to erase the female factor from the record, much as the Christian church has done. Most archival chronicles would have us believe no dame ever stepped foot in the sanctuary of Olympia — upon pain of death — during the testosterone-pumped spectacle of the quadrennial Games.
Not so.
There were women on the periphery, admittedly whores, plying their trade in the smoke-choked camps where attendees arriving from all points of the Hellenic empire bivouacked during the Olympics. And, according to some contemporaneous sources, there were women inside the stadium at Olympia too, a few brave suffragists penetrating security by stealth, but the majority in situ as husband-trolling spectators.
Their dads took them. Their brothers took them. Their moms were proscribed from accompanying them. Only unmarried females were allowed, which seems a little weird, since presumably matrons would be less shocked by the dangly bits on view. Conversely, young girls were also considered still "wild," or at least untamed.
The Greeks loved the male form, were in thrall to washboard abs and rippling pecs, indeed had no hang-ups about homosexuality — generally man-on-boy couplings, the older partner exacting carnal pleasures in a quid pro quo exchange for introducing the younger stud to society and advancing the youth's career aspirations.
Thus the blatant homoeroticism of the Olympics.
But all those delectable young men on parade, while eye-candy for the lechers in the stands, were equally potential husbands for the nubiles of Greece. Less a Chippendales show than a mate-market, the Olympics allowed pubescent girls an opportunity to point and pick: "Daddy, I want him."
As the Greek text expert and university lecturer Robin Waterfield writes in his new book, Athens: "(Many) of the athletes would be in their mid-twenties, close to the age of marriage, and the girls' fathers — as well as the girls themselves — took the opportunity to pick out prospective husbands."
There was also one woman in Greece, and one alone, who was afforded pride of place at the Olympics, subservient to nobody — the priestess of Demeter. Held in high esteem as the successor to Gaia, the Great Mother and goddess of nature, the priestess could sashay about as she pleased, without fear of being flung off a cliff at nearby Mount Typaion, which was the punishment for violators of the gender-exclusive policy. But the priestess was also a virgin by job description, so not in technical violation of the rules anyway.
Even the traditionalists who persist in portraying the Olympics as a no-girl-go zone concede one clever woman did pierce the inner sanctum, and locker rooms, of the Games. That was Kallipateira, a resourceful doyenne of the high-status Diagorides family from Rhodes. The ancient writer Pausanias tells us that Kallipateira had a son, Peisirodos, who was competing as a boxer at the Olympics. She wanted to watch, so disguised herself as a trainer and slipped through the gates.
As it happened, Peisirodos won the competition and Kallipateria, in a burst of maternal pride, rushed to embrace the boy, at which point her disguise fell off and "her sex was revealed," as Pausanias delicately put it. The spectators, to say nothing of the officials, were aghast.
Because of her rich and powerful family, Kallipateira was spared the cliff-launch. But from then on, to prevent any similar incidents, it was deemed that all trainers had to march into the stadium starkers, like the athletes.
Nakedness was a feature of the Olympics, although not at their induction, adopted only in 720 BC after Orisppos of Megara crossed the finish line in his birthday suit, having ditched his uni somewhere during the footrace. Because he'd won, that was good enough for other competitors to follow suit, or non-suit as the case may be.
At Hera's games, known as the Heraia and believed to have predated the Olympics by about two centuries, the female athletes competed clothed, wearing loose garments that exposed the right breast — à la Janet Jackson — and rose above the knee. Little is known about these games, apart from the fact that girls ran shorter distances than the standard stade of the Olympics, or what was believed to be the distance that legendary Olympics-founder Herakles (Hercules) could run — 200 metres, one length of the stadium — without drawing breath.
It is unlikely females competed in any version of the "combat sports" deemed too unladylike, even for wild girls — wrestling and boxing and so forth. (It's taken multiple millennia to reverse those prejudices, and not yet completely. Women will be wrestling at the Athens Olympics for the first time ever, but they still aren't allowed to box, so there will be no Games comeback for Tonya Harding.)
For all the restrictions placed on females, their names did show up in the victory column at the Olympics, albeit obliquely, as owners of chariot teams.
The chariot races, which didn't make their debut until later, were the glamorama events of the ancient Games. It was a perilous sport because the carts had no suspension system and easily spilled on the turns. Thus owners — generally wealthy Greeks — entrusted the reins to slaves, whose lives were expendable. And quite a few of those owners were women of the idle rich class, in the same way women, including the Queen of England, run racehorses today. The charioteers didn't get the laurels — the owners did. The first to do so — in fact she did it twice in the fourth century BC — was Kyniska of Sparta, sister to King Agesilaos.
The king's biographer, Xenophon, wrote: "Agesilaos persuaded his sister Kyniska to breed a team of horses for chariot racing and so, when she won a victory at the games, he proved that to keep such a team is not a mark of manly virtue but merely of wealth."
Another woman, Belistiche, described as a "protégé" of Ptolemaeus Philadelphus, the Greek king of Egypt, repeated the feat — or at least the feat-by-proxy — in 264 BC.
They may not have worked up the sweat, not even lifted a dainty and bejewelled finger. But they were the original grand dames of the Olympics, lineal ancestors to Babe and Flo-Jo and Marion. You go, girls.
here
