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A Visitor’s Guide to the Ancient Olympics

Amazon.com Price:  $5.70 (as of 03/05/2019 07:20 PST- Details)

Description

What was once it like to attend the Olympics in 388 B.C.? Would the experience resemble Olympic festivals as we celebrate them these days? This remarkable book transports us back to the heyday of the city-state and classical Greek civilization. It invites us to go into this distant, alien, but still familiar culture and discover what the Greeks did and did not do all over five thrilling days in August 2,400 years ago.

In the Olympic Stadium there were no stands, no shade—and no women allowed. Visitors sat on a grassy bank within the searing heat of midsummer to watch naked athletes compete in footraces, the pentathlon, horse and chariot races, and three combat sports—wrestling, boxing, and pankration, everyone’s favorite competition, with virtually no rules and considerable blood and pain. This colorfully illustrated volume offers a complete tour of the Olympic website online exactly as athletes and spectators found it. The book evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of the crowded encampment; introduces the quite a lot of attendees (from champions and charlatans to aristocrats and prostitutes); and explains the a large number of exotic religious rituals. Uniquely detailed and precise, this guide offers readers an unparalleled opportunity to go back and forth in time, back to the excitement of ancient Olympia.

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