Ancient Athletics Part Eleven: Romans at the Games
3rd century CE Roman floor mosaic depicting a retiarius armed with trident and dagger fighting against a secutor. From the Roman villa in Nennig, Germany. https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2326/roman-gladiator-mosaic/
3rd century CE Roman floor mosaic depicting a retiarius armed with trident and dagger fighting against a secutor. From the Roman villa in Nennig, Germany. https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2326/roman-gladiator-mosaic/
There was much to admire about Greek culture, even if Romans could be a little reluctant to admit it. The Romans gave Greeks gladiators and in return, they adopted athletic festivals. Athletic festivals took a while to catch on in the Caput Mundi, but eventually became very popular indeed. After all, Greek colonies in Magna Graecia had been athletics fans for centuries, and it was only a matter of time before the craze inched up the peninsula. After a few tentative displays in the Republican period, including Games held by Julius Caesar, athletics started to really ramp up for Romans in the Imperial period.
However, we should be clear that Romans enjoyed watching athletics (although they really didn’t like the Greek habit of competing nude.) Actually competing wasn’t the done thing, so most of the athletes competing in Rome were immigrants and visitors. Romans also seldom travelled to the Greek East to compete, although some aristocrats certainly flaunted their wealth by sending chariot teams, including Tiberius and Germanicus.
As with Greeks and gladiators, the Romans definitely wanted to put their own stamp on athletics. Usually this took the form of monumentalising sports venues, and the west has its fair share of permanent stadia. This eventually bled back into Greece, where men such as the Greek Herodes Atticus, a Roman senator, furnished his homeland with renovated monuments: not only did he build a fountain at Olympia, finally ending the need to fetch water from the river, he also renovated the stadia at Delphi and Athens to add stone seating.
Roman Festivals
Travelling eastwards could be a bit of a bother, so festivals were founded closer to home for Romans to enjoy.
Two years after defeating Mark Anthony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, Augustus founded the Actian Games at Nikopolis, a brand new city he founded close to where the naval battle was fought. Both were to celebrate the victory. The Games were held in September on the anniversary of the battle, every four years. As well as athletic, equestrian and musical contests, a rather fitting boat race was also added to the programme. As the battle was at sea, the prizes were linked to Poseidon; in this case wreaths of reeds. There had been a small local Games dedicated to Apollo in the region for a long while though, so Augustus (re)founded the Games in his honour and not Poseidon.
As mentioned above, Domitian founded the Capitoline Games dedicated to Jupiter, which were held, in Olympic fashion, every four years. The Circus Maximus was used for equestrian events, which may have seemed rather tame compared to the usual chariot racing held there, and a new stadium and odeum (the first in Rome) were constructed for the athletic and artistic events on the Campus Martius. The stadium is easy to spot on any map of the modern city, as its outline is preserved in the Piazza Navona. Underneath the modern piazza, there is an excellent subterranean museum where you can see some of the original building.
The Sebastan Games were founded in 2 CE and were held in Naples, a city with deep Greek roots, and the Eusebia Games were held in Puteoli from 142 CE in memory of the philhellene Hadrian. These four Games became the Roman version of a periodos, and Greek athletes in the Imperial period considered them as worthy as the original Panhellenic circuit and were more than happy to travel westwards to compete.
Of course, I couldn’t talk about the Olympics and Romans without mentioning Nero.
Nero
Nero loved the Games so much he invented two of his own, the one-off Juvenalia (to commemorate his first shave,) and the Neronia, which were abolished after his death. Domitian would later create the Capitoline Games in Rome which proved to have far greater longevity and prestige.
Greek festivals with musical events had already been (rather sycophantically) awarded Nero lyre and singing prizes without him ever leaving Rome to compete, which he giddily accepted as if he’d truly earned them. This may have been a mistake, for Nero was soon determined to go one better and ‘win’ the wreaths in person. What Nero wanted most of all was to be a periodonikes, to win at each of the four Panhellenic Games. This would in theory take at least three years, but Nero wanted to achieve it in one and wasn’t shy of bribing Greeks to make his dream a reality, spending a rumoured one million sesterces on the Olympic hellanodikai alone. In an unprecedented move the Olympics of 65 CE were postponed and all four Panhellenic Games were scheduled for the same year of 67 CE (the biannual Nemean and Pythian Games performed twice each to ensure the ‘circuit’ wasn’t condensed), so that Nero could cram as much into his ‘Grand Tour’ as possible. Additionally, he also competed in the Actian Games at Nikopolis and the Heraia in Argos, which was handily hosting the Nemean Games at that time anyway.
Funnily enough, Nero won every event he took part in, some because of his bribes, some because his opponents didn’t care to find out what happened to the man who made Nero lose. At Olympia, the festival that had staunchly refused to include musical and literary competitions since 776 BC, Nero insisted on competing in singing, playing the lyre and reciting tragic poetry. Spectators were forbidden from leaving, and some chose to fake their own deaths to escape. Suetonius even reports that women in labour were not allowed to leave their seats, and that babies were born to the sound of Nero singing.
Nero also entered a chariot, with ten horses instead of the usual two or four. Scandalising the conservative Romans at home, Nero drove the chariots himself instead of using an enslaved driver. He was thrown from the chariot and nearly died. He did not complete the race, but was declared victor anyway.
Suetonius states that whilst Nero often pretended to treat his competitors in a polite manner, he couldn’t help but treat many of them quite rudely. He did take the rules very seriously and tried his hardest to compete at the required standard, ‘worrying’ when he wavered or made a mistake that he would lose an event. He needn’t have bothered pretending to panic; it was an open secret that victories were reserved for Nero only. This was certainly easier in the artistic competitions that Nero favoured, whose judging was subjective anyway. Suetonius also says that Nero was jealous of historic victors (presumably because he knew his own victories were hollow) and that their statues were quietly dragged out of sanctuaries by hooks and thrown into sewers and cesspits.
In other words, Nero completely ruined the concept of the best athlete winning by merit, which was the essence of Greek athletic competition. In his desperation to be the best of the best, he merely succeeded in making a mockery of the very tradition he claimed to love so much. The Greeks did get something in return; at his second stint at the Isthmian Games Nero declared that the province of Achaia was liberated. After letting Nero literally ride roughshod over their most sacred festivals, this may have felt as hollow as his wreaths.
Nero returned to Rome with 1800 wreaths from various Greek Games (including ones that he couldn’t even feasibly have competed in) and threw himself four triumphs to celebrate. He declared that he was the ultimate circuit champion, the periodonikes pantonikes. After his death a mere two years later, Greek officials erased the Games of 67 CE from the Olympic record and encouraged Greek sports fans to pretend they had never happened. Some Greek history websites still fail to mention their existence. As far as Greece seems still to be concerned, the 211th Olympiad simply never happened.