Ancient Athletics Part Three: No Cheating!

Two athletes competing in the pankration. Panathenaic amphora, made in Athens in 332-331 BC, during the archonship of Niketes. From Capua.

There were some pretty stringent rules if you wanted to compete in the games.

All athletes had to be culturally Greek and free men. They were required to spend 10 months prior to the Games training according to Olympic regulations. The competitors had to travel to Elis (the town that organised the Games,) a month before everyone else. There, the Hellanodikai checked that every athlete was who he said he was, had an unblemished record, and was eligible to compete. They also oversaw final training.

Some competitors never got to compete in Olympia at all, as preliminary qualifiers were held to make sure that the official events didn’t overrun. One athlete tried to skip the prelims. A boxer named Apollonius of Alexandria was late. He tried to explain that he’d intended to get to Elis on time, but that his ship had been caught in storms and he’d been slowed down. It seems that the judges accepted the story, and he was cleared to compete and got into the final. After all, all Greeks were familiar with the perils of sea travel.

However, his scheduled opponent, Heracleides, happened to know that this was a lie.

Apollonius wasn’t detained by bad weather, he’d been competing in Asia Minor in local festivals that offered cash prizes (and no real competition, seeing that the creme de la creme of boxers had already set sail for Elis,) and cooked up the storm to explain his absence. The judges cancelled the fight, and announced that Heracleides was the winner by default. During the prize ceremony, Apollonius grabbed his himantes (prototype boxing gloves) and started punching Heracleides, as the crown was being placed on his head. The judges slapped Apollonius, who had the dubious honour of being the first Egyptian to cheat at the Olympics, with a hefty fine in punishment. 

All athletes had to compete naked. This was not unusual, for Greeks trained at the gymnasium nude in their day-to-day lives. Some sources say that Orsippos of Megara was the first to compete nude in 720 BCE, and attribute his winning the sprint with ease to his nudity. Others say that a Spartan sprinter also named Orsippus was killed in a race when his loincloth came loose, unravelled and tripped him on the track. Either way, nudity became de rigueur. It certainly helped to keep a level playing field, and no contact athlete could hide a weapon this way.  

Women were not allowed to compete, though unmarried girls could compete in the Heraean Games at the sanctuary away from the Olympic festival. Apart from the Priestess of Demeter Chamyne, women were also not allowed to spectate, and any woman found trying to even cross the river Alpheios to get close to the stadium could be threatened with being executed. The method was to be thrown from a cliff from Mount Typaion, though Pausanias (writing in the Roman period) says that no woman had ever been killed because of this rule.

One woman was threatened with it though - her name was Kallipateira. Her father, two brothers and two sons were all Olympic victors, but she was ineligible to get involved. When her son competed, tired of being left out, she disguised herself as one of his male trainers so that she could watch him. When he won, she bounced over the fence to congratulate him and accidentally revealed that what was supposed to be under her tunic wasn’t there… She was only spared from execution when the crowds pointed out the stellar legacy of her sporting relatives. After this, a new rule was applied; Olympia became the only festival where trainers were also required to be nude.

During preliminary training at Elis, competitors who realised they had no chance of winning could withdraw without penalty. Many thought it better to withdraw than be humiliated, injured or even killed by superior competitors. Sometimes, if a really intimidating athlete arrived, everyone in that event decided to withdraw. That meant that the top athlete didn’t have anyone to compete against, and won without having to run or fight. He would then be known as an akoniti (‘dustless’) victor, because he didn’t have to oil his body and coat it with dust before competing. This was actually a very prestigious form of victory, because even though the spectators were robbed of seeing the event, they appreciated that the skill and reputation of a dustless victor was so intimidating that he was unchallenged by anyone in the Greek world.

This happened more with contact sports than track, and we know of a few akoniti winners: Akmatidas of Sparta won the pentathlon in 500 BCE this way, and you can see his halteres (long jump weights) in the Archaeological Museum at Olympia. Dioxippus of Athens won the pankration this way in 336 BCE, not that it did him any good. Ten years later he attended a banquet held by Alexander the Great. One of Alexander’s Macedonian soldiers, named Coragus, drunkenly proclaimed that soldiers were superior fighters to pankratiasts and challenged Dioxippus to a fight to prove it. Dioxippus happily accepted. When both were sober the next day, the bout was set.

Coragus wore full armour, and Dioxippus oiled his naked body as usual. The Greeks cheered for Dioxippus, and the Macedonians for Coragus. Coragus hurled a javelin, which missed. Then Coragus lunged with his spear, which Dioxippus swatted away as if it were a mosquito. Finally, Coragus charged with his sword. Dioxippus disarmed him with lightning speed, and brought him crashing to the ground. Only Alexander’s intervention stopped Dioxippus from causing lasting damage. The Macedonians were furious, and conspired to frame him for stealing a golden cup. Dioxippus wrote a letter to Alexander explaining that he’d been set up by Alexander’s men, then fell on his own sword.

Diodorus Siculus, recounting the tale, remarks that Dioxippus was unwise in accepting the challenge, but truly stupid for ending his own life, saying that Dioxippus was incredibly strong, but hardly sensible. Alexander, however, was devastated to learn of his soldier’s duplicity and mourned Dioxippus as the champion he was.  

Once the Games began, withdrawing was banned. Anyone who did was heavily fined and had to pay for a statue of Zeus to be erected in the sanctuary with their crimes detailed on a plaque. Theagenes attempted to win both boxing and pankration in 480 BCE. These events took place on the same afternoon, and Theagenes spent all of his energy on winning the boxing. He was too exhausted to compete in pankration and refused to attempt a single bout. As he’d been officially enrolled, this counted as an illegal withdrawal. He preferred to be fined than humiliated by losing a match in front of tens of thousands of people. 

False starts in races and crossing the line in discus, javelin and long jump events were fouls, and punished with a sound beating from a referee. Contact sports had a sliding scale of rules about illegal moves, but pankration had a mere two: no biting, no gouging of eyeballs. Umpires would not stop a fight to prevent injury or death unless the manoeuvre used was illegal, and several athletes were fatally injured. Some even preferred death to second place, refusing to yield and dying in the process. If someone was killed by an illegal move that the umpires couldn’t prevent, their corpse was crowned victor!