Classical reenactments and the new Nemean Games

I was thrilled to discover in this article that the Nemean Games have been revived. They have resisted commercializion and recreate the Greek games as nearly as possible, in dress and procedures.

I'm not sure who I thought was competing in these games (high school and college athletes, maybe?), but when I found out they're open to anyone who registers online, they became a little silly in my eyes. I started picturing them as a version of "Toga Day" at the Junior Classical League, or something. Not that the JCL isn't wonderful, it's just doesn't seem like the best model for an ancient Greek athletic contest.

But I was unexpectedly moved by the last paragraph:

This, for me, is the great moment: in that dark tunnel [of the stadium] there are no cameras, no phones, nothing of the modern world, there are only my feet slapping the same rough hard earth that ancient athletes like Telestas experienced. The tunnel exit is crowded with hands that want to slap me on the back, and smiling, cheering faces.

This drawing back from distractions is what attracts many people to classics, I believe. The classics are (more or less) unchanging: there are no Facebook updates, no news headlines we need to check while we're reading the Apology. Reading Sappho or Plato or Cicero can thus resemble a private conversation, the intellectual equivalent of running through the Nemean tunnel. The world needs more of that, not less.

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'A pageant of parochial hatreds'

Classics lovers already know that the ancient Olympics were far more messy, agonistic and political than popularly perceived. But this article, by an archaeologist who has written a book on the ancient Games, sketches an intriguingly vivid picture. It's nice if you need inspiration for a lecture or just an antidote to the anachronistic purity of the torch lighting ceremony last week:

We imagine the Olympics to have been high-minded and healthy—all about purity of mind and body. Thinking thus, the ancient “Olympic Village” would have come as a shock. With up to 100,000 people camping in the open, it was a sprawling, squalid shantytown of temporary structures, fast-food stalls, drink stands, carts, tethered animals, heaps of refuse, open-air latrines, and heaving, jostling, sweating crowds of people.
Hardly anyone got any sleep, with parties often carrying on until dawn and rowdy groups of drunks stumbling back to their camps in the dark. Citizen-women did not attend the games, but the place was packed with “barbarian” prostitutes, ranging in price from top-of-the-range hetairai to cheap pornai. And that was just the women; ancient Greek men were bisexual. Many attended with their male lovers, while others hoped to make fresh conquests. Despite modern permissiveness, many of those attending the London 2012 Games would probably have been taken aback by the sex-fest of the ancient festival.

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