The first Olympic Games were held at Olympia, Greece in 776 BC. They were held at Olympia because they were a paean to Zeus who supposedly presided there. The games were designed to be held every 4 years until the Roman Emperor Theodosius the Great ordered them stopped because his Christian sensibilities were offended by the worship of Zeus. Theodosius was born in 347 AD and ruled from 379 AD until his death in 395. Rome had finally conquered the Achaean League (Greece) in 146 BC after about a century of strife.
What became known as Greece was a conglomeration of city states, Corinth, Athens, Sparta and the Kingdom of Macedonia, that competed and cooperated for several hundred years until the Romans used wily diplomacy and military stratagems as fatal wedges to divide the Greeks. However, the ancient Romans, much as contemporary peoples yet today, adopted much of Greek culture, such as art, literature and philosophy. That included the Olympic Games.
The theory of the Olympic Games that the ancient Greeks put into practice with their Greek neighbors was that a sacred truce, in the name of Zeus, would be declared if the neighbors were at war and peace would reign during travel to and from and during the games. Even after Rome took over, the games were not a problem for over 500 years. Then the flame was extinguished until the “modern” Olympic Games were reignited in 1896.
There were probably many fractures in the 1,000 years of laying down swords and beating them into ploughshares. However, the concept of feats of athleticism replacing warfare, even for a day or a couple of weeks, must have helped the Achaeans live in relative non-belligerence for many years. Also, this state of truce surely encouraged the interchange of cultural benefits. Perhaps this attitude of “Hey, can’t we all just get along?” if even for a short time every 4 years, helped the Greeks lay the foundation our Founders built upon.
After 4 years of war between Russia and Ukraine and battle lines being in place over much of our known planet, using the old “Champion System” where soldiers sheath their weapons and vie for medals that stand for physical excellence, not dominance or survival as those Greek heroes did, might assuage our wounds. It makes more sense than endless negotiations over the shape of the table as in our war with Viet Nam, or who gets to claim another Pyrrhic victory such as the endless bloodletting in the Middle East. This will be especially obvious soon when President Trump gleefully girds our military’s loins up about him and once again attacks Iran on Benjamin Netanyahu’s orders.
