Month: April 2008

[Click to read earlier Parts I, II and III]

Cool stuff, this.  From pages 124-128 of Tony Perrottet’s The Naked Olympics:

It takes a serious leap of our modern imaginations to remember that the pagan Olympic Games were devoted first to religion and only second to athletics: every sporting contest was dedicated to Zeus, and sacred rituals took up as much time as sports.  In fact, asked to name the highlight of the Games schedule, a classical sports fan would not have chosen the chariot races, long jump, or even wrestling, but would instead have picked day three, when one hundred white oxen were sacrificed on a grand altar.  This rite, coinciding with the rise of the full moon, was the Greeks’ most important national ceremony, as spiritually profound as witnessing the mysteries of Eleusis or consulting the oracle at Delphi…

[After the sacrifice,]  laborers would drag the remaining carcasses back to the Council House, where they were laid on slabs for an official named the "butcher-cook" to slice…At Olympia, the chunks were placed in giant roasting pits, with the sweetmeats on metal skewers, an incipient form of shish kebab…

It must have been an infernal scene.  The sights and smells — blood soaking into the dry earth, the discarded skin and bone, the heat, the flies gathering in droves, the gore-covered attendants — would probably turn the stomach of the modern observer.  But even in ancient Greece, there were vegetarians who rebelled against the slaughter.  The Western world’s first known animal-rights protest was made on day three of the Olympic Games in 460 B.C. , by the the philosopher Empedocles, who made his own life-sized bull out of dough, garnished it with expensive herbs, and distributed it among the onlookers.  (Empedocles preached the doctrine of reincarnation, announcing that he himself had once been a fish and a bird, so that eating flesh was tantamount to cannibalism.)  [emphasis added]

Few Greeks were won over.  Meat was expensive, and sacrifices were the only time most citizens had the chance to savor it … They could only hope for a small chunk of the sacrificial meat, and took whatever they were given, whether it was a mix of bone and gristle, a kidney, or a chunk of juicy filet mignon.  The deliberate randomness symbolically reflected the equality of Greek worshipers…

(Burger King Whopper-lover that I am, I find it hard not to like this guy.  Unlike Diogenes, he didn’t disrupt an awards ceremony and rob athletes of their moment in the sun.  Instead, between events Empedocles made his case as best he could.  And fed a few people along the way.  Maybe there was a tinge of blasphemy to it all, but it was aimed at honest reform.)

Regardless of how we feel about Diogenes’ message, or Empedocles’, or any of the OTHER philosophers who brought controversial ideas to the Sacred Games, this much is clear: the ancient organizers tolerated their presence in a way that must seem inconceivable to the Butchers of Beijing.  From what you’ve read over the past few days, ask yourself this: How would the ancient organizers have treated the Dalai Lama, one of the premier moral philosophers of the age? 

Would they have sent uniformed thugs into the private rooms of his followers, arresting anyone who might
possess nothing more offensive there than his PICTURE?  Or would they have WELCOMED him, with all the warmth that was shown to a thinker like Aristotle?

China’s Olympics will be held in August, of that there is no doubt.  But as for Beijing’s claims that it’s upholding the SPIRIT of the Games, well, I’ll let the reader be the judge of that.

[click to go to Part I or Part II of this series]

The front page of yesterday’s Taipei Times featured the story of two men in China who were sentenced to 3 1/2 and 5 years in prison for dissent.  Keep their fates in mind while you read about the leniency with which the ancient Greeks handled the original philosophical wild man, Diogenes the Cynic.

From pages 120-121 of Tony Perrottet’s The Naked Olympics:

Some of the greatest intellectuals of ancient life were avid sports fans, comprising a virtual Who’s Who of Western civilization.  According to many scholars, Plato got his nickname during his days as a virile young wrestler at the Isthmian games (from platus, probably meaning "broad-shouldered"; his real name was Aristocles).  The playwright Sophocles, as well as being noted in the ring, was a famous handball player; the [admiral] Themistocles, who defeated the Persians, came to the Games of 476 B.C.; the mathematician Pythagoras may also have been a revered sports coach.  But the Olympics did have their occasional critics.  There had always been a modest but vocal undercurrent of anti-sports feeling among Greek thinkers.  Understandably, in an age when Reason was paramount, some would argue the superiority of the mind over the body, and suggest that the national obsession with athletics was frivolous, even philistine.

The Cynic Diogenes, who traded repartee with Alexander the Great himself, was one of the most outrageous naysayers, and, in the fourth century B.C., he brought his attacks to the sports field itself.  His best-documented occurred at the Corinth games*, when he grabbed a victory wreath from the prize table and put it on his own head, claiming that he was the victor in the contest of life, and that spiritual rather than physical effort was more worthy of rewards.  "Are those pot-bellied bullies good for anything?" he asked a gathering crowd.  "I think athletes should be used as sacrificial victims.  They have less soul than swine.  Who is the truly noble man?  Surely it is the one who confronts life’s hardships, and wrestles with them day and night — not like some goat, for a bit of celery or olive or pine**, but for the sake of happiness and honor throughout his whole life."

Later, when he saw a sprinting champion being carried from the Stadium, Diogenes acidly noted that the rabbit and the antelope were the fastest of animals, but also the most cowardly.  He later ran off with another victory wreath and put it on the head of a horse that had been kicking another horse, proclaiming it the victor in the [no holds-barred  wrestling] contest.  Finally, Diogenes made reference to Hercules, the patron of athletes, who had cleaned the filthy Augean stables as one of the Twelve Labors — then Diogenes squatted on the ground and emptied his bowels, suggesting that the competitors clean it up.

"At this the crowd scattered," we read, "muttering that Diogenes was crazy."

First of all, and let’s just get this out of the way:  Diogenes the Cynic sounds like a world-class a-hole to me.  No pun intended.  I can certainly see why Plato described Diogenes as "Socrates gone mad."  But that’s really besides the point.  What’s interesting is what we DON’T read in this account.  Remember, the Isthmian Games in Corinth was one of the four Sacred Games in classical Greece.  These games were religious festivals first (though the athletics component came a not-too distant second).  Intentional public defecation at a RELIGIOUS FESTIVAL?  Sounds pretty darn sacrilegious to me.  Yet we don’t read about fourth-century crowds calling for him to be beheaded, like the Muslim mob did with the Mohammed teddy bear teacher — in the not-so-distant year of 2007.  We don’t read that he sentenced to 3 1/2 or 5 years in prison, like those two poor bastards in China.  Nor was he sent to some god-forsaken re-education camp on a remote island in the Aegean, either.

In fact, from this account, it’s rather difficult to figure out exactly HOW he was punished — IF he was even punished at all!  He couldn’t have been beaten to a pulp after the first time he grabbed the victory wreath, because we’re told he was able to repeat that stunt a SECOND time.  So, was he detained?  If he was, it couldn’t have been for long.  Because again, he was able to lay his hands on a victory wreath not once, but TWICE.

My own guess is that he was restrained, and maybe tossed out on his ear.  After which, he snuck back in to work more of his mischief.

Like I said, Diogenes the Cynic strikes me as a pretty unlikable showboat.  But the thing that most strikes me here is the tolerant spirit of the organizers of the games.  The organizers could have come down like a ton of bricks on this guy…BUT THEY DIDN’T.  In fact, the Wikipedia entry on Diogenes states that after his death, the Corinthians went ahead and built a MONUMENT in the philosopher’s honor.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s that kind of generosity and magnanimity which makes the Corinthian organizers of the games the real unsung heroes of the story.

[next: PETA in the Age of Pericles!]

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* Now strictly speaking, this isn’t an Olympic Games story at all, because it
took place at the Isthmian Games in Corinth.  But the Isthmian Games,
along with the Olympics, WERE one of the four Sacred Games of Greece,
and there’s no reason to believe that the organizers of the ancient Olympics would have treated similar conduct any differently.

** Diogenes makes reference here to the victory wreaths awarded during the Sacred Games.  Wreaths given at the Nemean, Pythian, Isthmian and Olympic Games were composed of celery, laurel, pine and olive, respectively.

[Part I of this series can be found here.]

Picked up The Naked Olympics near Taipei’s Warner Village back in November or December last year, and it was quite a good read.  The writer, Tony Perrottet, vividly describes the ancient games, in all their sacredness and profanity.  On pages 88-89, he tells how non-athletes discovered the Olympics could be the ideal forum for the savvy up-and-coming writer or philosopher:

The first to fully grasp Olympia’s PR potential had been Herodotus, the revered "Father of History" who around 440 B.C. wanted to promote his newly written account of the Persian Wars.   Why go on an epic book tour around Greece, Italy and Asia Minor, he pondered, when one could get the same exposure overnight at Olympia?  As Lucian recounts it, Herodotus waited until all the notables had arrived at the festival — this appears from the sources to have been the afternoon of day one — then, "behaving less like a spectator than an athletic contestant," he went inside the crowded Temple of Zeus and began to read his work aloud.  It was a smash hit.  The audience was mesmerized.  As Lucian relates, "It was not long until he was better known than the Olympic victors.  There was not a man in Greece who hadn’t heard the name of Herodotus, either because they had been at Olympia, or were told about him by returning spectators."

A tradition was begun — appearing at Olympia, preferably on the first day for maximum impact, became the literary "short-cut to fame."  In Herodotus’ audience was a young aspiring wordsmith named Thucydides who, according to legend, was moved to tears, and would later write his majestic history of the Peloponnesian Wars (and naturally debut it at Olympia).  Other writers soon followed suit.  Inspired poets took to the temple steps in snow-white tunics and sang their works while strumming a lyre with an ivory pluck.  Some were hailed with cries of Euge! — "Bravo!"  Others were mocked.  Greek audiences were discerning, and were not distracted by displays of wealth.  The tyrant Dionysius of Sicily had his verse read by professional actors, but it was so bad that the crowd looted his tent…

Whoa!  Tough crowd, tough crowd…

Philosophers quickly seized the potential:  soon every soapbox orator in Greece was converging to add his voice to the chorus.  In an early show of antisports snobbery, Diogenes said that it was his social duty to speak to athletics fans:  "Just as a good doctor rushes to help in places full of the sick, so it was necessary for a wise man to go where idiots proliferate."  His fellow Cynic philosophers, who reviled all the trappings of civilization, became a fixture at the Games.  Antiquity’s hippies, they wore their hair unkempt, dressed in rags, mooched meals, and railed against every Greek sacred cow.  But the heroes of Greek philosophy also put in appearances, and geniuses like Aristotle even had their statues raised at Olympia alongside those of athletes…  [emphasis added throughout]

Kinda sounds like dissent, and TOLERANCE of dissent, weren’t antithetical to the Games – they were an essential part of it!  Something to keep in mind in August of ’08, when Chinese authorities display THEIR understanding of the ancient Olympic spirit by busting heads and arresting harmless folk with placards in Tiananmen Square.

[more on Diogenes in Part III]

I really shouldn’t overgeneralize like that.  One Brit at The Guardian hears the talk, and is anxious that a bad precedent is being set – a precedent that could bite the U.K. when it hosts the Olympics four years from now.  Here’s Peter Preston:

You can write much of the script for London 2012 already: the tube strikes, the cost over-runs, the security computers that won’t work and the Kazakh weightlifters lost in Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Five. Factor fat helpings of familiar chaos. But the real problem for the Olympic games we thought we wanted to host is beginning to emerge from the smog over Beijing. Boycotts, boycotts everywhere, and never a pause to think.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has given in already. She won’t be going to China this summer, like the Polish prime minister and Czech president.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is wandering down the same lightly principled path. Expect more European political defections, plus threatening talk from the US would-be leaders in election year. Darfur began the chat and Tibet has turned it to hubbub; this year will be a time for tender consciences to stay away – and 2012 can’t fail to catch the same virus.

[…]

Cue London 2012. Cue all the other freedom warriors who have seen what attention protest can bring. Don’t think that the tiger won’t be pulled by its tail again. But surely we are different: Everyone loves us, don’t they? Not when Stratford provides such a splendid world stage. Not when mushy precedent is set. Prepare, alas, to be very disappointed.

I can see where he’s coming from.  For causes ranging from Northern Ireland to Scottish independence to, heck, the Iraq War for all I know, professional protesters will see 2012 as their golden opportunity.  And while Preston & myself would probably both agree there’s a time and a place for dissent, I think he completely misses the point with regards to Tibet.  Because for Tibetans, there IS no time or place they’re permitted to protest.  If they’re not to march now, then when?

Let’s be clear here.  The Republican in Northern Ireland is free to argue for his cause with a letter to the editor.  The Scot can agitate for his by starting a blog.  The anti-war protester in London can receive a permit to march almost any time he wants one.

And the native of Tibet?

Well, he’s free, too, in a fashion.  Free to shut his mouth, or be sent to a re-education camp somewhere.  By presenting him with this stark choice in the past, the Chinese government made it more, not less likely that he would stand up now.  Because at any other time, Beijing could have done whatever it wanted with its prisoners, confident in the knowledge that the world would quickly lose interest.

But now, the Olympics are but a few short months ahead.  And the world is watching, and wondering.  Nosy foreign reporters are asking if the accused are all right, and the impertinent fellows are even asking to be allowed to SEE these dastardly splittists.

What’s Beijing gonna do with the detainees now?  Line ’em all up and have ’em all shot?

It’s interesting Preston should bring up the issue of precedent with respect to Olympic protests.  He might be surprised to learn that protests have long been a part of the Games, even in ancient times…

[to be continued]