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August, 2004 Archives
The Games of Antiquity.
August 27, 2004
by John F. Bergin
If there is anything that is for sure about my ideology is that, since my early years at Penn State, I have been a staunch Philhellenist, or someone who admires the ancient Greeks.
I have always said that if you really want to learn something, college is probably the worst place to do it. At least in the college of Electrical Engineering, there was so much information to learn and regurgitate onto exams in so little time that you never really had a chance to absorb the full meaning of the subject matter. This was especially true for some of the non-engineering classes, such as the class on Greek History I took as a sophomore.
I have recently taken the opportunity go back and re-read some of the assigned material for this class. Among the books that were crammed into the 15-week course were Homer's Iliad and The Odyssey, Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Xenophon's On Democracy and Oligarchy, and my favorite, Thucydides' History of he Peloponnesian War. To illustrate how much time can be spent truly savoring these classics of antiquity, this time around it has taken almost 2 years to cover the same material.
Thucydides was especially slow going, since the parallels between the Peloponnesian War, fought between 431 and 404 BC, and modern times is striking; it is timeless wisdom. Just as many recently liberated Iraqi's can do nothing but complain, so too did many of the cities Athens liberated after the Persian War. Thucydides wrote:
"People, in fact, seem to feel more strongly about their legal wrongs than about the wrongs inflicted on them by violence. In the first case they think they are being outdone by an equal, in the second case they are being compelled by a superior. Certainly they put up with much worse under the Persians, but now they think that our government is oppressive."
Thucydides attributes to following passage to the Spartan King Archidamus, who could easily be warning about today's left-wing intelligentsia:
"And we are wise because we are not so highly educated as to look down upon our laws and customs, and are too rigorously trained in self-control to be able to disobey them. We are trained to avoid being too clever in matters that are of no use - such as being able to produce an excellent theoretical criticism of one's enemies' dispositions, and then failing in practice to do quite so well against them."
Being a self-proclaimed Philhellenist and a former amateur athlete who once made it to the Pennsylvania State Championships in backstroke, I was immediately intrigued when I heard that the Olympics would be returning to Greece. The history of the modern games can be fascinating since we know more about them, have photographic and moving images of many of the events going back to 1896, and have lived and experienced many of the games first hand. But seeing the Parthenon and other ancient ruins used as a backdrop for the television coverage of the 2004 Athens Games, the historian in me immediately ponders what it must have been like at the Games of Antiquity.
Informal athletic competitions have been documented as far back as the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians. In the Iliad, Homer speaks of the funerary competitions held during the Trojan War (c.1200 BC) upon the death of Achilles' friend Patroclus. Homer describes the games in great detail, including chariot racing, boxing, wrestling, running, armed combat, discus, archery, and the javelin throw. Homer also describes the competitors and play-by-play of each contest, with the exception of the javelin throw, in which Achilles pre-empts the competition by recognizing King Agamemnon's virtue and declaring him the winner before the start of the event.
Greek vase featuring Chariot Race .
Although there is evidence that the games may have been held as far back as the Trojan War, the first documented Olympic Games were held in 776 BC in Olympia, in the northwestern Peloponnesian district of Elis. Due to it's geographic location, Elis receives more annual rainfall than most regions of Greece, and therefore supports lush forests and vegetation. The ancient Greeks believed that this was due to the favor of Zeus, King of the Gods, so the area was considered to be sacred. The first games were more of a religious ceremony held to honor Zeus than anything else, and the results were documented by the Greek historian Hippias.
During the games a general truce was declared throughout the known world, and athletes were granted free passage through enemy and allied cities alike. The Greeks were very serious about the truce, and all warfare was suspended. Even public executions were postponed until after the games had concluded. Thucydides went so far as to document the provisions for renewing the oath to a 100 year treaty between Athens and her allies each Olympiad:
"9. The oaths shall be renewed by the Athenians going to Elis, Mantinea, and Argos thirty days before the Olympic Games; by the Argives, Eleans, and Mantineans going to Athens ten days before the great Panathenaeic festival ."
During the Peloponnesian War, Sparta was fined and banned from the games in 420 BC for violating the provisions of the truce period by attacking Fort Phyrcus and sending Hoplites into Lepreum.
After 776 BC, Olympic Games were held every 4 years at Elis. The Olympiad became the standard of measure for time for the Greeks. As an example, the Ionian Revolt which marks the start of the Persian Wars, started in the third year of the 63rd Olympiad.
There was only one event for the first 13 Olympiads, a footrace called the Stade. The Stade was the distance down the length of the stadium at Olympia, around 200 meters, and represented the distance Heracles could run on a single breath. Coroebus is credited with winning the first Olympic Stade and received a sacred olive branch for his efforts.
During the games of the 14th Olympiad the Diaulos was added, which was a distance of 2 Stades (down the length of the stadium, around a pole, and back again). The Dolichos was added during the 15th Olympiad and represented a distance of about 3 miles.
2004 Greek Gold Medallist Fani Halkia.
The first major change to Olympic competition was the addition of the Pentathlon in 708 BC, said to have been invented by Jason. The Pentathlon consisted of 5 events, the Discus, Javelin, Long Jump, Wrestling, and a Foot Race. These were the first games to involve events other than running. Over the next 30 years more and more events were added, including the Hoplite Race where competitors ran with armor helmets and a spear, and the Chariot Race, added in 680 BC.
Alcibiades, the Athenian general who led the invasion of Sicily, gained notoriety by winning the Olympic Chariot Race in 416 BC.
Remarkably the Olympic Games continued uninterrupted for over 1000 years, including after the Romans conquered Greece in 146 BC. The Games of Antiquity finally ended in the year 393 AD, when the Christian Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I abolished the games, calling the celebration of Zeus a pagan ritual.
Bust of Leonidas - Hero of Thermopylae
What happened to the Hoplite Race?
August 22, 2004
by John F. Bergin
Sunday's Woman's Marathon retracing the original route Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens in 490 BC was inspirational. The first half of the course was relatively flat, and a large group lead the race. Then came the hills. With a steep increase in elevation that makes the Boston marathon look like a bunny slope, the extra energy needed took it's toll. Far from the fate of Pheidippides, who fell faint and died in the market in Athens after his run, Briton Paula Radcliffe, the fastest woman marathon runner in the world, suffered a devastating emotional breakdown when she suddenly dropped out of 4th place and stopped at the 36Km mark, a victim of the heat and gravity.
The last part of the course was downhill and favored the taller runners. That didn't deter the shorter Mizuki Noguchi of Japan, who broke away from the pack at the 27Km mark and never looked back (well, maybe a couple of times, to see Kenyan Catherine Ndereba, who closed the gap in the last kilometer to finished 12 seconds later).
The biggest surprise in today's race was the third place finish by American Deena Kastor, who came from 8th place to beat out Ethiopian Elfenesh Alemu for a bronze medal.
The Olympics have lost some of their luster with the end of Cold War rivalries, and the entry of professional athletes into competition. I was thinking that we might need to bring back the Hoplite race, where runners wore armor and carried a spear, or the most exciting Olympic event ever, the Chariot Race. Today's Marathon demonstrated the limits of human physical and emotional endurance, and went a long way to restore my faith in the pure Olympic ideals of athletic competition.
Inspiration for a new Blogger.
August 22, 2004
by John F. Bergin
After one week of writing articles for the new Viking Raider Blog, I have discovered that it is not hard, but rather, enjoyable writing and publishing a few paragraphs each day about my thoughts and interests. It might not be the greatest writing in the world, but each day it gests easier to write, and takes less time.
Below is a excerpt from Power Line Blog's article The Blogosphere on Fire which provides inspiration for my new endeavor.
"A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field. But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can't? Nothing. Generally speaking, they don't know any more about primary data and raw sources of information than we do--often less. Their general knowledge is often inadequate. Their superior resources should allow them to carry out investigations far beyond what we amateurs can do. But the reality is that the mainstream media rarely use those resources. Too many journalists are bored, biased and lazy. And we bloggers are not dependent on our own resources or those of a few amateurs. We can get information from tens of thousands of individuals, many of whom have exactly the knowledge that journalists could (but usually don't) expend great effort to track down--to take just one recent example, the passability of the Mekong River at the Vietnam/Cambodian border during the late 1960s."
While Power Line Blog's contributors are Lawyers, I am a Software Engineer with a BS in Electrical Engineering who has single-handedly built a state-of-the-art military strategy game. I would imagine that I can provide a unique insight to a vast array of topics, including Math, Physics, History, Wargaming, and Software Engineering. Oh, I almost forgot, Politics too.
The Parthenon in Athens, Greece.
The Greeks would have made a great Video Game!
August 20, 2004
by John F. Bergin
One of the most difficult math problems that I encountered during the development of Viking Raider had to do with the "Viewing Frustum", which is the conical shape formed by drawing lines from the eye to the edges of the computer screen. The difficulty arose from the distortion created by the curved viewing frustum being projected onto the flat computer screen (figure 1).
Figure 1 - Distortion of Viewing Frustum
You can imagine my amazement when I discovered that the ancient Greeks took this same distortion into consideration when they designed their most famous buildings, including the Parthenon in Athens!
Two men are credited with the architectural design of the Parthenon, Ictinus and Callicrates, with the sculpture being credited to Pheidias. They were all concerned with the aesthetic beauty of the temple, and understood how the distortions of the human eye's viewing frustum could cause a perfectly square object to appear to droop at it's ends. They accounted for this distortion by bowing the center upward and tapering the columns inward to make the building appear to be a perfect rectangle. This architectural technique is known as Entasis, and can be seen in most ancient Greek temples.
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