The Greek Olympics (Week 14 History Essay)

In ancient Greece, there were two main things that brought all of the people together:

Threat of War, and The Greek Olympics.

The Greek Olympics started as a religious gathering of the gods. It was founded in 776 B.C., and was built in Olympia because it was believed that Olympia was where the gods lived.

The Greek Olympics were similar to the Olympics that we have today, including many sports.

Some sports included were foot racing, boxing and wrestling, and pentathlons.

Winners were given laurel wreaths and were invited to fancy parties, and had a good reputation from their hometown (basically esteem). However, this came at a very expensive cost, as competitors were very brutal, especially in sports like wrestling and   boxing, where the referee tried his hardest to make sure competitors would bite each other.

The way The Greek Olympics were built consisted of hard clay, making a 640-feet track covered with sand. The track was able to have 3 race options, all of them of different length.

However, The Greek Olympics ended in 4th Century A.D. 364 by Emperor Theodosius.  Then, Olympia was destroyed by earthquakes in 365.


Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s