Herakles and the Olympic Games

Olympia, along with Delphi, Nemea, and Isthmia, was host of one of the stephanic games, at which victors were crowned with a wreath (stephanos). The Pythian Games at Delphi honored Apollo and awarded crowns woven from his sacred tree, the laurel. The Olympic Games honored Zeus and used crowns of olive branches. These were awarded in the temple of Zeus, as athletes stood in front of a forty-one-foot, gold-and-ivory statue of Zeus, who was himself wearing an olive crown and holding his eagle staff in one hand and the goddess Nikē (Victory) in the other. The parallel headgear was no accident: Greek gods were seen as ideals of perfection to aspire to. A winner in the Olympic Games came as close to this ideal as a mortal could manage. This ideology was communicated through both art and literature.

The exterior of Zeus’s temple provided context for the crowning ceremony. The eastern pediment, situated in the triangular space under the temple’s roofline, tells the mythical story of the local king, Oinomaos, who offered his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who could beat him in chariot racing. Losers were executed on the spot. One contestant, Pelops, finally won by switching the linchpin in Oinomaos’s chariot for one made of wax. Pelops won the girl, Hippodamaia, and became king of the southern region of the Greek mainland, whose name incorporates his: the Peloponnesus. The story of Pelops served as the archetype for the chariot races at the Olympic Games. The western pediment of the temple of Zeus depicts a local tribe, the Lapiths, who invited their centaur neighbors to a wedding. The centaurs, being only half human, got drunk and start abducting Lapith women. Fighting ensued. This scene, also prominently depicted on the Parthenon, in Athens, provides an allegory for the triumph of fully human civilization (Greeks) over half-human barbarism (non-Greeks). The Olympic Games were crucial to this self-understanding, as every four years Greek city-states, which were often at war with one another, would declare a sacred truce and gather in Olympia for an event so revered that the Greeks used the names of its victors as a way of telling time.³

Situated below the two pediments were groups of six sculptural scenes, called metopes, that depicted the twelve labors of Herakles. As the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alkmene, Herakles roused the envy of Zeus’s wife, Hera, and was sentenced to perform a series of labors (athla, ponoi) for the king Eurystheus.⁴ These labors include slaying and capturing monsters, fetching objects, holding up the sky, and cleaning stables by diverting the course of a river. Like the Lapiths, who overcame the half-human, half-civilized centaurs, Herakles’s battles with monsters embody a triumph of enlightened civilization over the forces of chaos and barbarism. As a reward for his labors, Herakles ascended to Mount Olympus upon his death, where he became a god and took Hēbē (Youth) as his immortal wife.

According to myth, Herakles also founded the Olympic Games. His heroic labors (athla) were replaced by competitions (agōnes) in pentathlon, wrestling, boxing, and chariot racing, for which victors earned rewards (athla) in the form of olive crowns (stephanoi). As Herakles became immortal through his labors, athletes (people who compete for athla) sought to embody the divine through competition. This, however, was not a matter of merely brute force. Just as Herakles outsmarted various opponents, and Pelops won Hippodamia through cunning, Olympic competitions required rigorous training, refined technique, and thinking on one’s feet.⁵

These connections between Olympian artwork and Aristotelian ethics are made explicit in the victory odes of the poet Pindar. Born half a century before Socrates, Pindar weaves together many of the key terms that Socrates would come to question. Pindar’s Odes, therefore, help us see the default assumptions NE’s original readers would have made regarding ideas such as aretē, kalon, athlon, stephanos, and eudaimonia. Aristotle tells us that virtues aim at the kalon, for which Pindar gives us Olympic victory as a model. This slices through the disagreement over whether to translate kalon as “noble” or “beautiful” by presenting certain activities as obviously worthy of pursuit simply because they are awesome.

Pindar also helps us understand a term that readers of NE have for the most part gotten backward: kosmos. The basic meaning is “order,” such as the way a general would put troops in order.⁶ In Aristotle’s hands, this sense of the word comes to mean “universe” or “cosmos” (in the English sense).⁷ Yet there are another two meanings built on this one. One has to do with imposing order on something from outside through clothes, makeup, or other adornments. This is the root of our term cosmetics. This meaning shows up in Hesiod’s Theogony 586–588 and Works and Days 72–76 as the poet describes the creation of Pandora, whose name means “All-Gift,” since she was adorned by various goddesses and made into a trap for mankind. A kosmos in this sense conceals one’s true nature in a deceptive way. Pindar, by contrast, uses kosmos in the Odes to refer to victory crowns or to the victory ode itself.⁸ In this sense, a kosmos draws attention to inner virtue that has been made manifest through competition. While a kosmos, in the Pandora sense, conceals one’s true nature by covering a woman’s body, a kosmos in the athletic case reveals one’s true nature as men compete in the nude.⁹ Scholars across the board have assumed the cosmetic reading in Aristotle. In doing so they get key passages of NE backward, as I will argue in the chapters to follow.

As a poet for hire, Pindar composed poems to commemorate victories in all four stephanic games. In each ode, he weaves the individual’s victory into a larger context of family history and mythological models, often conveyed through obscure references. Ideas now familiar from philosophy are ubiquitous. Olympian 3 sets these ideas out in a way that is particularly useful for our purposes. The dedicatee is Theron, tyrant of the city of Akragas in Sicily, whose team won the chariot race in 476 BCE. As owner of the team, Theron did not physically compete. Still, his entry into the games, as in many of Pindar’s Odes, is seen as a labor (ponos), since it is voluntary, competitive in spirit, and exposes one to the danger of defeat.¹⁰ The original performance of Olympian 3 was likely at a feast in honor of the children of Leda and Tyndareus: the twin gods, Castor and Pollux, and their more famous sister, Helen of Troy.¹¹ The work begins with a nod to this occasion.

Before her abduction, Helen was queen of Sparta in the Peloponnesus, where Greek was spoken in the Doric dialect. Hence Pindar’s use of it for this poem, where he likens the weaving of a victor’s crown to his poetic weaving of words and music. The poem continues as he turns to the origin of the practice of bestowing victory crowns.

Here we have kosmos used interchangeably with stephanos (crown). While it is “a most beautiful reminder” (Pindar uses the superlative form of kalon), the beauty comes from what it reminds one of: competition. Pindar explains:

Here, Pindar credits Herakles for introducing the olive tree to the Peloponnesus and for establishing the Olympic Games. Meanwhile, aretē in its plural form, aretai, can mean not only virtues but deeds of virtue. Pindar specifies that it is the latter for which a crown is given.¹³ From here, Pindar recounts Herakles’s travels in service to Eurystheus, which eventually brought him face-to-face with an olive grove. The passage concludes:

By invoking Herakles’s presence at their celebration, Pindar highlights the capacity for athletic competition to bring mortals in contact with the divine. This provides the kernel of the idea behind the Olympic Games as formal undertakings:

By calling the gods blessed (makaros), Pindar introduces an idea that figures periodically in NE, either as a synonym for happiness (eudaimonia) or for a state beyond it (chapter 11). Pindar draws the poem to a close by first quoting himself (Olympian 1.1 opens with the phrase “Water is best”) and then drawing all this back to Theron, whose victory is being celebrated.

In short, winning at the Olympics is the best thing a human being can strive for. In the process, Theron, like Herakles, approaches the blessed (makaros) gods and becomes immortal. Crowns (stephanoi), meanwhile, are not mere decoration (kosmos in its cosmetic sense): their beauty (kalon) comes from being won through contests of virtuous deeds (aretai). They are a way to reveal one’s inner worth (thus functioning as a kosmos in its athletic sense). While Pindar does not differentiate between virtues and deeds of virtue as clearly as a philosopher might like, his stress on competition, like Herakles putting his strength to use through twelve grueling labors, captures something close to Aristotle’s insistence that virtue must be put into action. The end result is an aspirational ethic as individuals strive to become more than merely human.

Each of these ideas appears in NE, though it is only by holding Aristotle’s text up against an athletic background that we can see how they fit together in an organic whole.¹⁴