Let the (nude) games begin
Boston's MFA reveals juicy secrets from the ancient Olympics
by J.A. Lopata
BOSTON - “The Olympic Games.”
The phrase conjures up all sorts of heroic images: Nadia Comaneci achieving the first perfect 10 score in gymnastics, Greg Louganis diving his way to four gold medals in 1984 and 1988, and black athlete Jesse Owens winning the 100 and 200 meter dashes, long jump and 4 x 100 meter relay in the 1936 Berlin games despite Adolf Hitler’s claims to Aryan supremacy.
But what about Koroibos of Elis, who won the first stadion race (a short footrace) in 776 B.C.? Or the great Phayllos from 480 B.C. who could throw a discus at 30 meters? Or the great wrestler Milo (536-508 B.C.), who won at all four major ancient festivals (at Olympia, Dephi, Isthmia and Nemea) for four years in row?
With the Olympic Games back in its country of origin Greece, the Boston Museum of Arts (MFA) is staging a look at the ancient world’s competitions: “Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit.” And the results are mouth-wateringly beautiful.
So what were the first games like? Is it true that participants competed in the nude? Were events really only open to male competitors? Was ancient Greek sporting as homoerotic as we’ve been made to believe?
First, not only were all events but one performed in the nude (chariot racing, with its high risk of accidental dragging, was deemed too dangerous to be performed naked), but all training was conducted in the nude as well.
“When we arrived at the gymnasium, we removed our clothes,” wrote the Roman poet Lucian.
In fact, the word gymnasium is derived from the Greek word gymnos, which means naked.
The gymnasiums of the ancient world were the training arena for
the sons of wealthy Greeks. Only free male citizens were
eligible to train and study at the gymnasium.
In democratic Greece, stripping nude symbolized equality.
And the training in the gymnasium was not merely relegated to athletics. Philosophy and the arts were also taught. The MFA exhibit features a young man taking a flute lesson --naked, of course.
It was at the gymnasium that young boys made their passage to adulthood. It was also here that, as witnessed in numerous scenes from the ancient Greek art, younger men engaged in physical affection with older men; this was part of a mentoring process at the time.
Statues of the Greek God Eros frequently adorned gymnasia with
the inscription “Eros Enagonios,” which means “he who presides
over contests,” according to the curators of the MFA exhibition
Co-Chair Art of the Ancient World John J. Herrman, Jr. and
Curator of Greek and Roman Art, Art of the Ancient World
Christine Kondoleon.
But it would be a mistake to think that most of Greek male life
in the gymnasium was about homosexual interactions.
Some of the highest ideals in the ancient Greek society concerned moderation and self-control.
Many athletes and trainers believed that sexual abstinence made them more competitive. Some went so far as to engage in infibulation, which is tying up the foreskin of the penis with a rope.
Famed fifth century B.C. pentathlon athlete Ikkos of Taras was
noted by Plato to have had extraordinary sex drive, yet never
“touched boy or woman” when training.
For the most prestigious games held at Olympia, competitors
engaged in a month of “seclusion, fasting, and sexual
abstinence.”
Eros was not the only God of import to the games. The Gods of Hermes, Zeus, Herakles, and Hera reigned as well: Hermes as the swiftest of the Gods who invented wrestling; Zeus as the head of the Gods; and Herakles, as the half-man, half-God founder of the games, when he won immortality by successfully completing the 12 heroic labors assigned to him Zeus’s wife Hera.
The games themselves grew from religious festivals concerning the Gods. The games were a way for man to approach the heroics of the Gods themselves.
The ancient Greek’s were obsessed with finding the fastest human being alive. And the first 13 Olympic Games, beginning in 776 B.C. consisted of only one event, a roughly 200 meter foot race, run barefoot and in the nude.
Later games expanded to include javelin throwing, jumping, discus throwing, the pentathlon, boxing and wrestling.
The most startling event, by contemporary standards, was a no holds-barred wrestling match called pankration.
In it, only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden. A contender could choke their opponent and even punch the guy right in the balls.
In fact, in one extant wrestling handbook, a trainer calls on his trainee to “catch hold of [his opponent] by the testicles.” Ouch.
Only the ruthless Spartans would not compete in the dangerous pankration. Why? Because all Spartans took a vow to never submit. The only way to stop a pankration match, short of death, was to hold up one’s index finger in a sign of defeat.
Winners of the ancient games were universally admired, just as
the winner’s of today’s Olympic Games, with prizes, hometown
honors, the pick of mating companions and such.
And while married women were barred from witnessing the ancient
games under penalty of death, all Greek’s, including women could
admire the beauty of the great Greek male athletes. The gorgeous
winners frequently posed for paintings that went on the sides of
vases, and became statues, all fully naked, which adorned the
major public civic areas of the Greek metropolises.
Unfortunately today’s games aren’t held in the nude.
Fortunately, the ancient Greeks made sure that they captured the breath-taking beauty of the posteriors of their athletes for all of posterity.
“Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit” is on exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, through November 28. For more information call 617/369-3448, or connect to www.mfa.org.
Photo Credit: Deep cup (skyphos) depicting pankratists
Ceramic, black-figure technique; painted by the Theseus Painter / Late Archaic period, about 500 B.C. / The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1906 (06.1021.49) / Photograph © 2003 The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
This piece first appeared in "In Newsweekly: New England's largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender newspaper."
August 13, 2004