Thucydides twice uses the name of an Olympic victor to identify a specific Olympiad. In both cases the victors are pancratiasts. Some scholars have taken this as evidence for an early tradition of using pankration victors as eponyms for Olympiads. It seems clear, however, that in the two instances in which Thucydides wished to specify particular Olympiads, he did so by naming the most famous victor at the Olympiad in question. Both victors, by coincidence, happened to be pancratiasts.

At 3.8.1 Thucydides describes a meeting held at Olympia between representatives of the Mytilenians and of the Peloponnesian League:

At 5.49.1 Thucydides discusses the exclusion of the Spartans from Olympia:

The accuracy of the early parts of Hippias' catalog of Olympic victors has been much debated. The most important and conclusive arguments are treated in Sections 2.5 and 2.6. It is also worthwhile to review briefly the other arguments that have been brought forward because some readers will be curious to know how particular issues and evidence have been treated in the scholarly literature. Debate has been driven by the attacks launched by critics against the assumption that the Olympic victor list is trustworthy, and subsequent rebuttals by its defenders. There are seven points to be considered, all of which are based on too little evidence to be conclusive one way or the other.

The first point involves Plutarch's remark about Hippias relying upon untrustworthy sources in compiling the Olympic victor list (Numa 1.4; see Section 2.1 for the text). Critics of the accuracy of the Olympic victor list see Plutarch's remark as indicative of obvious problems with Hippias' work, in part because it is taken to be representative of a long tradition of doubt going back to Eratosthenes, Timaeus, and possibly Aristotle. Defenders of the accuracy of the list see this remark as nothing more than Plutarch's own, uninformed judgment, an “embarrassed phrase” from a scholar with no real interest or expertise in chronology. Defenders of the accuracy of the list also invoke Aristotle, but as a guarantor of its reliability, based on the idea that Aristotle, who produced a version of the Olympic victor list and had access to records at Olympia, would not have put his name on an unreliable document.

There is near-unanimous agreement in the ancient sources that the Coroibos Olympics took place in the year corresponding to 776 bce. There is, however, one ancient author who offers a slightly different date. Moreover, some modern scholars have attempted to prove the existence of variant dates for the Coroibos Olympics. Finally, a different system of numbering the Olympiads, which put Olympiad 1 in the year corresponding to 1581/80 bce, was used at least briefly at Olympia. All these facets of Olympiad dating are considered here.

Velleius Paterculus (1.8) places the first Olympiad 823 years before the consulship of Marcus Vinicius, which is typically dated to 30 ce. This gives a date for the first Olympiad of 793. The text has been variously emended so that it agrees with received chronologies. It is also possible that Velleius had some problems synchronizing Greek and Roman systems of time reckoning.

Dimitri Panchenko has recently argued that Hippias dated the first Olympiad to 744/3 and that this was later adjusted to 776/5 by either Timaeus or Eratosthenes. Panchenko's conclusion is based on the assumption that Hippias calculated his date for the first Olympiad using Democritus' statement that he published his Diakosmos 730 years after the Fall of Troy. There is no evidence of any kind for this assumption, and Panchenko is surely wrong when he writes that “there was no obvious reason to relate the list of Olympic victors with that of the Spartan kings.”

Some scholars believe that Aristotle's view was that Iphitos reestablished the Olympics on his own and worked with Lycurgus only in regard to the truce. These scholars point to the facts that Plutarch (Lycurgus 1.1) mentions only the Olympic truce when discussing the connection Aristotle made between Lycurgus and Iphitos and that Spartans do not appear in the Olympic victor list until the 15th Olympiad. The separation of the founding of the truce and the reestablishment of the Olympics makes it possible to argue that the truce was founded after Iphitos reestablished the Games. Scholars who adapt this position tend to date the foundation of the Olympic truce to around 720, when the Spartans' conquest of Messenia gave them direct access to Elis and when Spartans begin appearing in the Olympic victor list.

One must, however, keep in mind that Aristotle (and almost certainly Hippias before him) used the discus to establish a date for the beginning of the series of continuous Olympiads and that the discus was inscribed with the terms of the Olympic truce and did not offer a lengthy history of the Olympics. The summary given in Plutarch (and Heraclides Lembus; see footnote 32 of Chapter 2) is thus a reflection of a precise statement by Aristotle based on the evidence at hand and the purpose for which that evidence was used.

In the course of bringing this project to completion I have been immeasurably aided by more individuals than I can properly thank. The Class of 1962 at Dartmouth College generously provided a fellowship that made it possible to carry out much of the research for this book. I was also fortunate to spend a summer as a Margo Tytus scholar at the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati and to make use of their wonderful facilities.

Numerous people, most notably Michael Flower, Mark Golden, Donald Kyle, Alden Mosshammer, Max Nelson, Kurt Raaflaub, and Zara Torlone, have taken the time to read earlier drafts and to make suggestions that contributed markedly to the final product. My colleagues in the Department of Classics at Dartmouth, Margaret Graver, Jeremy Rutter, Roberta Stewart, Jim Tatum, Hakan Tell, and Roger Ulrich, also provided helpful comments for which I am most grateful. Along the way I have received advice on specific points and assistance from Richard Burgess, Dominic Machado, Susannah Maurer, Elliot May, Sarah Murray, Peter Siewert, Michael Stone, Elizabeth Sullivan, Meg Sullivan, and Christoph Ulf. William Stoddard edited the manuscript and notably improved it in the process. Peter Katsirubas was immensely helpful in shepherding the manuscript through the various stages of publication. The debt I owe to my family in general and my parents in particular defies simple expression but is no doubt well known to readers from their own experience.

THREE QUESTIONS

The anonymous Christian author who wrote Signs of the Judgement eloquently expresses, albeit in a poetic and slightly confused way, the importance ancient Greeks attached to recording the names of victors in the Olympic Games. Indeed, Olympic victor lists were documents of considerable importance in the ancient world. Nevertheless, they remain largely unknown even among classicists. It may be helpful, therefore, to begin by answering three basic questions I have been repeatedly asked during the time that I have worked on this project: What, exactly, was an Olympic victor list? What sort of textual evidence is available? Why are Olympic victor lists of more than passing interest?

In its original and most basic form, an Olympic victor list was a cumulative catalog of victors at the Olympic Games. These catalogs began with the Olympics held in the year corresponding to 776 bce and ran down to the time they were compiled.

Appendices 1.1–5.11 contain the text of most of the known fragments of Olympionikai. The three Olympionikai that survive largely intact are reproduced only in part. Eusebius' Olympiad chronography, the Chronographia, contains twenty-one separate lists of eponyms and kings. Only one of those lists, the Olympic victor list, is given here, along with short, representative samples from Diodorus Siculus' and Dionysius of Halicarnassus' Olympiad chronicles. The fragments of the Olympionikai of Panodoros and Sextus Julius Africanus are not supplied here, for reasons outlined in the introduction to Chapter 4. Testimonia about the lives of authors are included only in cases in which they are immediately relevant to the author's Olympionikai. Unless otherwise specified, all ancient Greek texts are based on the editions used by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. In the interests of brevity, critical apparatuses are not supplied. The requisite textual editions for the vast majority of the works cited here can be located with ease using the search function at http://www.tlg.uci.edu/. Critical apparatuses can be also be found in Jacoby's Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker, which, along with Müller's Fragmenta Historicum Graecorum, offers excellent commentaries on virtually all of the passages supplied.