Olympic Protests II: An Ancient Marketplace For New Ideas

[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]