Professor Barringer has attempted the seemingly impossible – a massive overview of our entire assembled knowledge regarding multiple facets of the site of Olympia from its earliest known use as a Hellenic sanctuary, interwoven with a profound understanding of the relevant ancient sources and then into the most contemporary of academic micro-debates. And much of this multifaceted approach is conducted simultaneously and with considerable textual elegance and clarity. Supplemented by numerous black and white and colour panels and illustrations of cultic sites as well as maps, Barringer's cultural history not only achieves its improbable objective but is – in my opinion – nothing less than an instant classic.
Despite writing as something of an outsider - the genre having been traditionally dominated by German archaeological experts, who have been excavating Olympia since 1875 - Barringer has given us a first-in-its-field, English-language analysis that is little short of magisterial. Stating her intent to be one wherein she provides her readership with a ‘holistic interpretive’ (introduction – page 5) study that moves through material, social, historical, political and religious synchronic considerations (i.e. a cultural context or anthropological approach), Olympia: A Cultural History ultimately rewards us with a cumulative diachronic sweep across more than 1200 years of stratified complexity. This is a task she acknowledges ‘has rarely been done for any archaeological site in ancient Greece’ (introduction – p. 5) and given the singular prestige of Olympia to the ancient Greco-Roman world and the vast amounts of knowledge Barringer had to digest to produce this text it might be well be considered self-evident as to why.
To guide her readership through this interpretation of the immense amounts of evidence she has processed, the scholar has imposed a chronological order to her chapters that is prefaced by a simple chronology (page xvii). While the first four of these central chapters cover the earliest known Greek use of the site through to the end of the Hellenistic period, the final two chapters are just as intriguing: respectively entitled ‘Roman Olympia’ and ‘The Last Olympiad’, both chapters richly reappraise the new layers of meaning imposed upon the ancient site with the invasion of a foreign enemy and then their Christian descendants. While nearby Sparta may have become something of a ‘theme park’ for the martially-obsessed Roman visitor to the Peloponnese, Olympia retained its lustre as the premier sporting location for the conquerors of Greece. As she points out on page 296: ‘Earlier scholarly claims of decline in Roman Olympia are unfounded…Roman preferences for artistic display and commemoration required changes, and the shift in power westward to Rome meant that Olympia's substantial renown was now harnessed and exploited by a new population.’ In the final of her six central chapters, Barringer also argues that the prohibition of non-Christian worship by Theodosius in 393 C.E. did not – contrary to many a generalisation – necessarily bring about an abrupt or instantaneous end to the pagan games held in honour of Zeus: ‘There is no clear evidence of a last Olympiad, a final festival, nor is there, unsurprisingly, a single instant when the site stops being pagan and becomes exclusively Christian’ (p. 237).
In actuality, as encouraged as Barringer is to attempt new interpretations of the evidence through her cultural approach, she is also just as forthright with acknowledging the many ‘known unknowns’ that still litter the interpretative fields clustering around this extraordinarily significant location. From the still-misunderstood intersections of the Pelops myth and the founding of the first Games (or should they be attributed to Heracles?) to the ongoing ambiguities hedging around so many aspects of the Altis, to the precise day or even decade when the ancient Olympics were crushed under the weight of a Christian singularity – before they would be so famously revived under Baron Pierre de Coubertin in our modern era – Barringer's openness to posing the right questions is as satisfying as the wealth of answers she provides. She actually ends chapter six with a weighty passage filled with such acknowledged but unanswered mysteries, and then hopes ‘that the holistic, diachronic and synchronous methodology and scope of this study will provide a model for exploration of other Greek sanctuaries and sites’ (p. 244).
As a frequent visitor to the extraordinary site of Olympia (and having now had published a historical fiction novel on the birth of the ancient Greek Games), I eagerly awaited this review dispatch of Barringer's hardcover work. It did not disappoint. In fact, it greatly exceeded my expectations, despite having read a few minor quibbles raised by other reviewers. It was also rarely so dense that it would leave a lay reader confused, while maintaining its scholarly rigour and merits throughout. While Zanes may have been erected at Olympia to permanently shame those caught out cheating at the premier ancient Greek agones, Berringer's work is both a monument to those who once achieved the extraordinary Olympic honour of being allowed to erect semi-godlike imagery of themselves within the Altis and may well be worthy of such kleos itself.
Open access
