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What was it like to attend the ancient Olympic Games?
With the summer Olympics’ return to Athens, Tony Perrottet delves into the ancient world and lets the Greek Games begin again. The acclaimed author of Pagan Holiday brings attitude, erudition, and humor to the fascinating story of the original Olympic festival, tracking the event day by day to re-create the experience in all its compelling spectacle.
Using firsthand reports and little-known sources—including an actual Handbook for a Sports Coach used by the Greeks—The Naked Olympics creates a vivid picture of an extravaganza performed before as many as forty thousand people, featuring contests as timeless as the javelin throw and as exotic as the chariot race.
Peeling away the layers of myth, Perrottet lays bare the ancient sporting experience—including the round-the-clock bacchanal inside the tents of the Olympic Village, the all-male nude workouts under the statue of Eros, and history’s first corruption scandals involving athletes. Featuring sometimes scandalous cameos by sports enthusiasts Plato, Socrates, and Herodotus, The Naked Olympics offers essential insight into today’s Games and an unforgettable guide to the world’s first and most influential athletic festival.
"Just in time for the modern Olympic games to return to Greece this summer for the first time in more than a century, Tony Perrottet offers up a diverting primer on the Olympics of the ancient kind….Well researched; his sources are as solid as sources come. It's also well writen….Perhaps no book of the season will show us so briefly and entertainingly just how complete is our inheritance from the Greeks, vulgarity and all."
--The Washington Post
With the summer Olympics’ return to Athens, Tony Perrottet delves into the ancient world and lets the Greek Games begin again. The acclaimed author of Pagan Holiday brings attitude, erudition, and humor to the fascinating story of the original Olympic festival, tracking the event day by day to re-create the experience in all its compelling spectacle.
Using firsthand reports and little-known sources—including an actual Handbook for a Sports Coach used by the Greeks—The Naked Olympics creates a vivid picture of an extravaganza performed before as many as forty thousand people, featuring contests as timeless as the javelin throw and as exotic as the chariot race.
Peeling away the layers of myth, Perrottet lays bare the ancient sporting experience—including the round-the-clock bacchanal inside the tents of the Olympic Village, the all-male nude workouts under the statue of Eros, and history’s first corruption scandals involving athletes. Featuring sometimes scandalous cameos by sports enthusiasts Plato, Socrates, and Herodotus, The Naked Olympics offers essential insight into today’s Games and an unforgettable guide to the world’s first and most influential athletic festival.
"Just in time for the modern Olympic games to return to Greece this summer for the first time in more than a century, Tony Perrottet offers up a diverting primer on the Olympics of the ancient kind….Well researched; his sources are as solid as sources come. It's also well writen….Perhaps no book of the season will show us so briefly and entertainingly just how complete is our inheritance from the Greeks, vulgarity and all."
--The Washington Post
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IN THE HILLS above Olympia, I awoke with a start before dawn, feeling bleary-eyed from the Greek wine I'd drunk with some rowdy archaeologists the night before. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
IN THE HILLS above Olympia, I awoke with a start before dawn, feeling bleary-eyed from the Greek wine I'd drunk with some rowdy archaeologists the night before. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderful introduction to the ancient Greek sporting culture -- and because athletics was so central to the way of life, it makes a fascinating intro to the whole pagan world, with great sections on the religious and social aspects of the games (boozing, prostitution, literary readings, you name it!). The Olympics festival is taken day by day, from the point of view of spectators (who had to be physically fit just to get to Olympia, walking 210 miles, say from Athens!), the athletes (who were never amateurs -- they loved money!) and the organizers (who had it very easy compared to the modern counterparts -- the ancient games were held at the same site for nearly 1200 years!) The details are wonderful -- Plato was an avid wrestler and sports fan, for example, who went to the games incognito, and slept in a barracks with a bunch of snoring strangers (he became great friends with them, as it happens). It's a funny, erudite, entertaining read -- and the illustrations are excellent, drawn from ancient vase paintings.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I have never been a sports fan, so I didn't know if I would care for Tony Perrottet's book on the ancient Greek Olympics. However, I found it quite enthralling.
The book is packed with fascinating information and there isn't a dull passage in it. It is interesting to learn for instance that the games themselves were only part of the Olypmic experience, religious celebrations predominated, and enormous numbers of animals were sacrificed to the gods in the course of the event. The games were often bloody and violent, and men competed naked (this may or may not be an agreeable prospect to you). Married women were not allowed to attend the games, though they had their own seperate sporting festival in honour of the goddess Hera. Singel women could attend the games, and prostitutes abounded. altogether it was a far more colourful, varied, and violent spectacle than we are accustomed to today.
this is the kind of book I love, packed with fascinating information that makes me go "Gosh, I never knew that" all the time. Well worth reading.
The book is packed with fascinating information and there isn't a dull passage in it. It is interesting to learn for instance that the games themselves were only part of the Olypmic experience, religious celebrations predominated, and enormous numbers of animals were sacrificed to the gods in the course of the event. The games were often bloody and violent, and men competed naked (this may or may not be an agreeable prospect to you). Married women were not allowed to attend the games, though they had their own seperate sporting festival in honour of the goddess Hera. Singel women could attend the games, and prostitutes abounded. altogether it was a far more colourful, varied, and violent spectacle than we are accustomed to today.
this is the kind of book I love, packed with fascinating information that makes me go "Gosh, I never knew that" all the time. Well worth reading.
Format:Paperback
"... there was no reliable water supply at Olympia ... so dehydrated spectators would be collapsing in droves from heatstroke. Nobody bathed for days. The sharp odor of sweat did battle with Olympia's fragrant pine forests and wildflowers, only to be overpowered by the intermittent wafts from the dry riverbeds, which had been turned into open-air latrines. And every minute of the day was a trial with Olympia's incessant plague of flies ... The smoke from thousands of cooking fires created a pall of pollution. Crowd control was enforced by local officials with whips." - from THE NAKED OLYMPICS, on the conditions facing the spectators. Perhaps could also describe the ambience surrounding modern-day after-Christmas sales.
With THE NAKED GAMES, author Tony Perrottet repeats what he previously did with Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists, i.e. take the reader back to the good old days. In this volume, Tony describes, based on relatively meager and scattered historical sources, what it was like to attend, either as a spectator or an athlete, the original Greek Olympic Games, which were uninterruptedly staged every four years from 776 B.C. to 394 A.D. That's 1,170 years, a performance run that Broadway productions can only fantasize about. Some rocks don't live that long.
My pre-existing knowledge of the Greek games and Olympia being, well, nil, the only errors apparent to me were in an artist's re-creation of the forty-foot high statue of Zeus within his Olympia temple. The drawing of the idol is wildly out of proportion, based on measurements provided in the historical record, to the human figures alongside. Moreover, Tony's text places a scepter in his right hand and a winged statue of Victory in his left while, in the drawing, it's just the opposite. Didn't anyone proof-read?
The volume contains thirty-one illustrations, most of which show the contestants' activities as depicted on drinking cups, amphorae, and water jars of the period. Not surprisingly, pretty much all of the subjects are buck naked, which is how they competed and which is consistent with the book's title. I wish I'd had the sunscreen concession.
There's also a drawing of what the Sanctuary of Olympia complex may have looked like around 150 B.C. based on extant ruins and archeological evidence. There is, however, no placement of Olympia on a map; it was rather isolated from the rest of Greece. I had to look it up on-line.
Finally, there's a scene from the film Ben-Hur [1959] [DVD] that shows the title character racing his 4-horse chariot. Perrottet maintains that the film's race sequence, and action sequences like it in other movies, accurately portrays the chaotic and violent nature of the event as it was staged at the Greek games. Really? I didn't realize Charleton Heston was that old.
As a work of popular history, THE NAKED GAMES is almost certainly not the most learned or comprehensive work on the subject. But for anyone with a casual interest in a wide range of topics, this book, assuming Perrottet is reporting the facts with reasonable accuracy, is a congenial and instructive diversion.
With THE NAKED GAMES, author Tony Perrottet repeats what he previously did with Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists, i.e. take the reader back to the good old days. In this volume, Tony describes, based on relatively meager and scattered historical sources, what it was like to attend, either as a spectator or an athlete, the original Greek Olympic Games, which were uninterruptedly staged every four years from 776 B.C. to 394 A.D. That's 1,170 years, a performance run that Broadway productions can only fantasize about. Some rocks don't live that long.
My pre-existing knowledge of the Greek games and Olympia being, well, nil, the only errors apparent to me were in an artist's re-creation of the forty-foot high statue of Zeus within his Olympia temple. The drawing of the idol is wildly out of proportion, based on measurements provided in the historical record, to the human figures alongside. Moreover, Tony's text places a scepter in his right hand and a winged statue of Victory in his left while, in the drawing, it's just the opposite. Didn't anyone proof-read?
The volume contains thirty-one illustrations, most of which show the contestants' activities as depicted on drinking cups, amphorae, and water jars of the period. Not surprisingly, pretty much all of the subjects are buck naked, which is how they competed and which is consistent with the book's title. I wish I'd had the sunscreen concession.
There's also a drawing of what the Sanctuary of Olympia complex may have looked like around 150 B.C. based on extant ruins and archeological evidence. There is, however, no placement of Olympia on a map; it was rather isolated from the rest of Greece. I had to look it up on-line.
Finally, there's a scene from the film Ben-Hur [1959] [DVD] that shows the title character racing his 4-horse chariot. Perrottet maintains that the film's race sequence, and action sequences like it in other movies, accurately portrays the chaotic and violent nature of the event as it was staged at the Greek games. Really? I didn't realize Charleton Heston was that old.
As a work of popular history, THE NAKED GAMES is almost certainly not the most learned or comprehensive work on the subject. But for anyone with a casual interest in a wide range of topics, this book, assuming Perrottet is reporting the facts with reasonable accuracy, is a congenial and instructive diversion.
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