Although there were no women’s events in the ancient Olympics, several women appear in the official lists of Olympic victors as the owners of the stables of some victorious chariot entries. In Sparta, girls and young women did practice and compete locally. But, apart from Sparta, contests for young Greek women were very rare and probably limited to an annual local footrace. At Olympia, however, the Herean festival, held every four years in honor of the goddess Hera, included a race for young women, who were divided into three age groups. Yet the Herean race was not part of the Olympics (they took place at another time of the year) and probably was not instituted before the advent of the Roman Empire. Then for a brief period girls competed at a few other important athletic venues.

The 2nd-century-ce traveler Pausanias wrote that women were banned from Olympia during the actual Games under penalty of death. Yet he also remarked that the law and penalty had never been invoked. His account later incongruously stated that unmarried women were allowed as Olympic spectators. Many historians believe that a later scribe simply made an error copying this passage of Pausanias’s text here. Nonetheless, the notion that all or only married women were banned from the Games endured in popular writing on the topic, though the evidence regarding women as spectators remains unclear.

Demise of the Olympics

Greece lost its independence to Rome in the middle of the 2nd century bce, and support for the competitions at Olympia and elsewhere fell off considerably during the next century. The Romans looked on athletics with contempt—to strip naked and compete in public was degrading in their eyes. The Romans realized the political value of the Greek festivals, however, and Emperor Augustus staged games for Greek athletes in a temporary wooden stadium erected near the Circus Maximus in Rome and instituted major new athletic festivals in Italy and in Greece. Emperor Nero was also a keen patron of the festivals in Greece, but he disgraced himself and the Olympic Games when he entered a chariot race, fell off his vehicle, and then declared himself the winner anyway.

Romans neither trained for nor participated in Greek athletics. Roman gladiator shows and team chariot racing were not related to the Olympic Games or to Greek athletics. The main difference between the Greek and Roman attitudes is reflected in the words each culture used to describe its festivals: for the Greeks they were contests (agōnes), while for the Romans they were games (ludi). The Greeks originally organized their festivals for the competitors, the Romans for the public. One was primarily competition, the other entertainment. The Olympic Games were finally abolished about 400 ce by the Roman emperor Theodosius I or his son because of the festival’s pagan associations.

Revival of the Olympics

The ideas and work of several people led to the creation of the modern Olympics. The best-known architect of the modern Games was Pierre de Coubertin, born in Paris on New Year’s Day, 1863. Family tradition pointed to an army career or possibly politics, but at age 24 Coubertin decided that his future lay in education, especially physical education. In 1890 he traveled to England to meet Dr. William Penny Brookes, who had written some articles on education that attracted the Frenchman’s attention. Brookes also had tried for decades to revive the ancient Olympic Games, getting the idea from a series of modern Greek Olympiads held in Athens starting in 1859. The Greek Olympics were founded by Evangelis Zappas, who, in turn, got the idea from Panagiotis Soutsos, a Greek poet who was the first to call for a modern revival and began to promote the idea in 1833. Brookes’s first British Olympiad, held in London in 1866, was successful, with many spectators and good athletes in attendance. But his subsequent attempts met with less success and were beset by public apathy and opposition from rival sporting groups. Rather than give up, in the 1880s Brookes began to argue for the founding of international Olympics in Athens.

When Coubertin sought to confer with Brookes about physical education, Brookes talked more about Olympic revivals and showed him documents relating to both the Greek and the British Olympiads. He also showed Coubertin newspaper articles reporting his own proposal for international Olympic Games. On November 25, 1892, at a meeting of the Union des Sports Athlétiques in Paris, with no mention of Brookes or these previous modern Olympiads, Coubertin himself advocated the idea of reviving the Olympic Games, and he propounded his desire for a new era in international sport when he said:

Let us export our oarsmen, our runners, our fencers into other lands. That is the true Free Trade of the future; and the day it is introduced into Europe the cause of Peace will have received a new and strong ally.

He then asked his audience to help him in “the splendid and beneficent task of reviving the Olympic Games.” The speech did not produce any appreciable activity, but Coubertin reiterated his proposal for an Olympic revival in Paris in June 1894 at a conference on international sport attended by 79 delegates representing 49 organizations from 9 countries. Coubertin himself wrote that, except for his coworkers Dimítrios Vikélas of Greece, who was to be the first president of the International Olympic Committee, and Professor William M. Sloane of the United States, from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), no one had any real interest in the revival of the Games. Nevertheless, and to quote Coubertin again, “a unanimous vote in favor of revival was rendered at the end of the Congress chiefly to please me.”

It was at first agreed that the Games should be held in Paris in 1900. Six years seemed a long time to wait, however, and it was decided (how and by whom remains obscure) to change the venue to Athens and the date to April 1896. A great deal of indifference, if not opposition, had to be overcome, including a refusal by the Greek prime minister to stage the Games at all. But when a new prime minister took office, Coubertin and Vikélas were able to carry their point, and the Games were opened by the king of Greece in the first week of April 1896, on Greek Independence Day (which was on March 25 according to the Julian calendar then in use in Greece).

Organization