You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today my guest is James Rom,

who teaches classics at Bard College and has a piece in the current issue of the

LRB on Ancient Olympia and the games and the other things besides games that took place there.

It's a review of Olympia, a cultural history by Judith Barringer.

Hello, James, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hello, it's a pleasure to be here.

So I suppose to begin, we should say where is or where was Olympia?

Olympia is a site in the northwest of the Pelpennes, the big peninsula in the south of what is today Greece.

So it was part of the Dorian world, as far as the Greeks were concerned,

the ethnic region that was dominated by Sparta and other cities that identified as Dorian.

So it was dominated by Sparta, but it's not that close to Sparta, is it?

It's sort of equidistant, but closer to Sparta than to Athens,

but far enough away to have its own identity? Yes, it's far from Sparta, but was politically

under the influence of Sparta, as was all the Peloponnese. It was closest to a city called Elis, E-L-I-S, which is not nearly as familiar

a place as Sparta, but Elis was largely in charge of running the games at Olympia because of its

proximity. And the site itself, that there's the stadium, the stadium, and the Temple of Zeus and other temples around.

Because it's not, it wasn't a town exactly, was it?

It was a religious center.

Yes.

It had a sacred enclosure at its center called the Altus, which included the venues for athletic competition,

but also religious sites like the Temple of Zeus, and a huge altar called the Ash

altar, which is composed of the sort of mound of the ashes of sacrificed animals.

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