The Olympics

          No one knows for sure who invented the Olympics or when they were first established.  There are some myths and legends about it, but there really is not any hard-core evidence concerning the origin of the Games.  The first written record of the Olympic Games was about a man winning a 200-yard footrace in 776 B.C, and receiving an olive branch as his prize.  Archaeologists have uncovered temples and other buildings at the site where it is believed the Olympics were held that date back to before 776 B.C, but there is no evidence that Olympic games were held there until that footrace.  From 776 B.C. to 393 A.D, 293 Olympic competitions were celebrated.

Chariot Races

           In the beginning, there were only footraces. Later, more events were added.  These include chariot races, boxing, wrestling, pancratium, and the pentathlon.  Pancratium was a sport that combined boxing with wrestling, as well as adding biting, kicking, and strangling into the mix.  Many men were injured or killed in this event.  The pentathlon combined five sports, including wrestling, throwing the discus and javelin, sprinting, and competing in the long jump.  Some of the most popular Olympic sports were wrestling, boxing, and pancratium.  According to archaeologists, this may be because of the level of hostility among cities.  The Olympics demanded that there be a truce between all warring city-states while the festival was going on, but people could still watch athletes from enemy cities fighting with their own athletes.
         Women were not allowed to compete in the Olympic games until the 128th Olympics.  They could not even watch, death being the consequence to disobedience.  Only men who were citizens of Greece could compete.  Although the stakes were so high, some women still risked their lives to see the games by wearing a disguise.  Supposedly, a woman who had helped to train her son in running, disguised herself as a man so she could watch him compete.  When he won, she was so loud that she was found out, but she was not killed.  Even after all these years, scientists still don't know why.  Originally, the athletes competing in the Olympics had to come from wealthy families, because they all had to be able to provide transport to and from wherever they lived and Athens.  Also, winners of the games were expected to host a large banquet to celebrate their success.  Therefore, women, slaves, foreigners, and people of the lower class could not compete in the Olympic games.
           While the Olympic festival was at its peak, there were five days of athletic events, feasts, parades, religious rituals.  Every day, sacrifices were made to the gods and gifts were placed in front of the statues of past Olympic winners.  City-states competed against each other in which one could give the most lavish and expensive gifts to the statues.  On the third day of the Olympics, one-hundred cattle were killed and then burned as a special sacrifice to the gods.   These were good times for Greece.
           However, all good things must come to an end.  The Romans conquered Greece in 100 BC, and from then on, the Olympic festivals went into decline.  People stopped celebrating the Olympics as a way of honoring the gods, and instead, everyone wanted to win for themselves.  Cheating and bribery ensued among the competitors.  In 393 AD, around the time Christianity had spread to Rome, the emperor Theodosius declared an end to the Olympics.  As said in the text, "After well over twelve hundred years, the festival at Olympia had ended.  There would be no Olympic Games for more than fifteen hundred years".

References:

Knight, Theodore. “The Ancient Olympics.” The Ancient World. 2010 ed. 2010. Print.