It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's

podcast where you might have noticed in the news that the 2021 Olympic Games

they're close at hand and so in today's podcast we're going to be focusing on

the Olympic Games in Antiquity. What we know about the Olympic Games in Antiquity

we're going to Olympia we're going to Ancient Greece and I'm delighted to say

that for this podcast I was joined by an ancient history legend Robin Waterfield

Robin has translated several primary sources including Plato's Republic and

parts of Diodorus Siculus. He's written books including ones on Socrates on

Greek myths on the Wars of the Successors and more recently on the Olympic

Games in Antiquity. So without further ado here's Robin.

Robin thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Well thank you for

inviting me Tristan this is good. Now the Olympic Games and looking at the

ancient origins of the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece this is an amazing

topic looking at the origins of what we could possibly argue is the most

famous sporting event in the world today. Yes as it was then I mean it was

absolutely central to everybody's imagination about what a sporting event

should be it was the first and when other great sporting events arose they

explicitly were imitations of the Olympics. I usually introduced something

different let's say musical contest as well or something like that but

basically the athletic events were modeled on the Olympics and later in

Hellenistic history by the time of the Toulomb is in Egypt for instance Toulomb

the second explicitly wrote round to everywhere in Greece asking them to

...