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Nor was every death accidental. The Olympics also featured a "ferocious, no holds-barred brawl known as the pankratio … [This] was a vicious mix of wrestling, boxing, and street fighting in which punches, kicks to the groin, shoulder and ankle dislocations, and chokeholds were allowed." One infamous contestant earned the nickname "Mr. Digits" as he specialized in breaking his opponents' fingers. Spectators of boxing events witnessed comparable violence—historian Stephen Miller recounts the story of one Damoxenos who jabbed his opponent with his fingers sticking straight out, pierced the man's rib cage, and yanked out his intestines!

It's not difficult to imagine what Christians thought of all this. Sport itself was not necessarily off-limits to Christians—consider St. Paul's reference to "running the good race" in his letter to the Galatians. But bishops and ministers would assuredly have discouraged Christians from competing in the Olympics' combat sports. In fact, the third century minister Hippolytus listed 24 vocations forbidden to Christians in his book, Apostolic Traditions; and eight of these involved brutality, including chariot driving. For that matter, church fathers from Justin Martyr to Origen to Tertullian counseled Christians to shun violence, even if they did it in self-defense.

Moreover, Christians could not have participated in the Games, because they were so thoroughly pagan. Before the Games began, competitors processed to the village of Piera on the outskirts of Olympia. There, priests sacrificed a fat pig to Zeus, and the athletes participated in a ceremony of purification. Once the contestants had been confirmed, the priests repeated the ceremony, this time sacrificing a pig and sheep before the colossal statue of Zeus in Olympia. The athletes then swore allegiance to the Greek gods and fidelity to Zeus.

Nor were the gods relegated to the opening ceremonies. Winners of events visited the Temple of Zeus to sacrifice to the gods, and half of every animal was delivered to the priests to be prepared for the Olympic feast. That feast, held on the third day of the Games, was marked by a procession—priests scooped up glowing embers from the fire of Hestia, goddess of the hearth, then carried those embers past spectators singing a hymn to Zeus. Arriving at the Temple of Zeus, the priests mounted the steps and lit the fire in the altar with the embers. There, the priests slaughtered and sacrificed 100 bulls—one at a time—after which the feasting began.

If this wasn't offensive enough to Christian sensibilities, Greek men competed in the nude—apparently, one runner early in the Games' history lost his loincloth en route and ended up winning the race, thereby encouraging everyone else to follow suit. Married women were not allowed in the stands; women who flouted this prohibition ran the risk of being pitched head first off of nearby cliffs. But unmarried women were allowed to watch; and hetaeras, or "high-class" escort girls, would prostitute themselves during the banquets for Olympic victors. Some of these women likely came from the population of temple prostitutes dedicated to Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex.

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48