The Olympics :: essays research papers

Olympic Games were held throughout Ancient Greece, only when the most famous games were the games held in Olympia. They were held between August and September in honor of genus Zeus. Some claim that Zeus and Kronos the mightiest of the gods, wrestled for possession of the earth on the high peaks in Greece, and the games were in commemoration of the victory of Zeus. People every throughout Greece would come to Olympia to watch and take place in the festival. The entrance to the stadium in which the Olympic games were held had a row of statues. The statues, c every last(predicate)ed Zanes were do in the likeness of the Zeus of Oaths statue. On the first daytimelight of the games the athletes stood before this heroic- sized statue of Zeus poised to throw a thunderbolt, and promised to obey the laws of Zeus. The money to create such human like statues was collected from the fines from athletes who break the Olympic code of honor in competition. The Zanes were erected so that the y were almost the ultimately things the athletes saw as they marched into the stadium to take part in the games. The tabernacle of Zeus was constructed as a meeting point for the athletes of the Olympic games. They all gathered to worship Zeus before the games. On the middle day of the Olympics, 100 oxen were sacrificed and burned outside the temple. Now a day we offer no sacrifices to Zeus. The stadium was built to accommodate 45,000 spectators. All women were excluded from the early Olympic Games, even as on lookers. The punishment for any fair sex caught in Olympia during the festival was death by being thrown from a cliff. However, Pausanius wrote about a story of one incident that transpired when a mother ran out of the stadium to congratulate her son on winning. Kallipateira, an comport from Rhodes, broke the law and went unpunished. After the death of her husband, she trained her son to contest in the Olympics of 404 B.C. On the day of his contest, she entered the stadi um disguised as a trainer. As the story goes, she ran out to congratulate him on winning the boxing event, it was discovered she was a woman. Because her father, bother, and now son acquired a total of sextet Olympic victories, she was not punished. Thereafter, however, the trainers, as well as the athletes, were required to accede in the nude.