On a raw October day, mud is flying on a fallow field in southern Spain. Four teams of horses gallop around a crude track, hooves digging into the rain-soaked earth, desperate for traction. Behind each pair, a driver strains to maintain control in a tiny, open two-wheeled chariot. Legs braced, reins in hand, the charioteers lean into each turn and hunch forward on the straight-a-way. Crowds cheer. Spectators jump to their feet. No one leaps onto the race track, though. No one casts himself, in a fit of passion, directly into the path of the speeding chariots.

This is, after all, a documentary, not the sports-crazed world of ancient Greece and Rome where such displays of zealous enthusiasm were almost common. Staged by the BBC, this 2002 re-creation of a once-popular spectator sport is accurate in every detail, right down to the wooden spokes of the chariot wheels, with one exception: the modern-day spectators opt only for cheering, leaving the track to the charioteers.

"The producers were historically minded enough to get the details right," says Stephen Brunet, a UNH assistant professor of classics who has consulted on a number of films, including this one. A leading expert on ancient sports, Brunet is currently assisting with the production on a Canadian film scheduled to be released later this year in conjunction with the upcoming Olympic games. He has even taken a turn in front of the camera in a Learning Channel version of the BBC documentary, shot mainly at the California Speedway in Los Angeles.

"We Americans, and the Romans, are the only ones in history who have devoted so much time, effort and money to racing around an oval race track again and again," says Brunet, shouting to be heard on camera above the revving engines behind him. He is right down in the pits, next to the cars, comparing the Circus Maximus racetrack of ancient times with the speedway of today.

Brunet knows an awful lot about sports for a guy who, well, hates sports. To be accurate, what he dislikes is watching modern sports; what he loves is studying ancient ones--and trying to figure out what the Greek and Roman passion for sports can teach us about another place and time. "I'm looking for clues," he says, "that suggest the values and the attitudes of a society."

Ancient chariot races, for example, celebrated speed and danger. They were punctuated with spectacular crashes; always lurking was the possibility of death. Competitors were revered for their skill and courage--all for the sake of winning a race. "The ancient Greeks had no notion of just playing for the sake of competing," Brunet says. "There was no second or third place. Winning for them was everything."

Hero Worship

Milo of Kroton is a guy who could give even the best modern Olympic athlete an inferiority complex. The six-time Olympic wrestler competed--and won--for a quarter century, a record of longevity unheard of today. His feats of strength became the stuff of legend. One account tells of how he liked to impress admirers by tying a cord around his forehead and then, holding his breath, straining until he broke the cord with his bulging forehead veins. In another display of superhero talents, Milo gallantly saved a throng of people by supporting the central pillar of a collapsing building until everyone had fled to safety.

Olympic victors like Milo, who went on to achieve hero status, typically got their start in one of the thousands of regional athletic competitions that were held throughout the Greek world and, later, the Roman Empire. Athletes who achieved local success went on to participate in the most famous of ancient games, the Olympics, which had an incredible 11-century run until they were abolished by Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I in about A.D. 393. The modern Olympics, modeled after these early games, began in 1896 and will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year. (The games were canceled during the world wars.)

In the ancient world, rewards for winning an Olympic first place were relatively simple, involving fame, rather than fortune. The Greeks honored victors like Milo with an olive wreath--and long-lived celebrity. Memorial statues included descriptions of an athlete's accomplishments, a sort of resume in stone. "The Greeks were nuts about writing on stone," says Brunet, who has studied hundreds of inscriptions from tombstones. "These accounts were very complete, including wins and later career moves." Athletic prowess was also immortalized in verse by poets, the journalists of the day. These poems were often committed to memory, recited, and passed down through generations, keeping alive the memory of a particular victory long after the athlete himself was gone.

One Olympic hero, Theagenes of Thasos, is best remembered for a feat he accomplished after death. Memorialized with a bronze statue, the boxer remained a source of aggravation for at least one of his rivals, who came nightly to rant at the feet of his former nemesis. One night, in a plot twist worthy of a good classical myth, the statue toppled onto the opponent and killed him. His sons, understandably outraged, filed charges against the statue for murder. (Prosecuting inanimate objects was standard practice in Greek society.) The killer statue was duly punished with drowning in the ocean. Still, Theagenes would not be defeated. Years later, during a time of severe famine, the statue was hauled out of the ocean and repositioned as a god of sacrifice to help end the famine. Here, finally, the story ends. Theagenes rules.

Some athletes chose another road to immortality--they cheated. Those who were caught were heavily fined, and the money was used to build statues of Zeus on the road to the Olympic stadium. Inscriptions on each statue detailed, for posterity, the specifics of the cheating. Eupolus of Thessaly, the earliest recorded cheater, is remembered for bribing boxers in the 98th Olympiad. Others were noted for buying off competitors or fixing the outcome of matches. "We can't tell how rampant cheating was," says Brunet, "just as we can't determine this issue precisely today, but the most spectacular cases are immortalized, and 2,000 years later, we still know about them."

The pursuit of excellence

Infamous exceptions aside, Greek civilization is credited with giving the world the ideal of excellence, or arete. Greek men were expected to demonstrate excellence in a number of venues: on the battlefield, in politics and in sports. "Your position in Greek society was determined by what other people thought of you," says Brunet. "It was a very, very competitive world."

The Olympic games were an opportunity to demonstrate excellence in public, not only for personal glory, but to please the gods--in this case, Zeus. As part of a major religious celebration, the games took place in the Altis, the sacred grove of Zeus, and featured the sacrifice of 100 oxen on the middle day of the festival.

Along with endless religious ceremonies, the Olympic games included a host of side shows: speeches by philosophers, poetry recitals, parades, banquets and craftsmen selling their wares. The event was also an ideal venue in which to show off. The wealthy attempted to outdo one another with lavish displays: decorated tents, expensive chariot teams, feasts and more. "It was a chance," notes Brunet, "to see and be seen."

One look at an ancient vase or two confirms that the Greeks took this concept of being "seen" to its logical extreme, competing completely in the nude. There were exceptions, of course. Charioteers were fully garbed. The hoplitodromos featured competitors running at full speed clad in armor. But javelin and discus throwers, wrestlers and boxers were naked. Jumpers are depicted in mid-air, arms outstretched, sans clothing. They are, however, gripping halteres, or stone weights, in each hand to increase the length of the jump.

Even the ancient Greeks themselves couldn't explain exactly how the tradition of competing in the nude originated, though they had stories about it--including one about an athlete who lost his pants mid-race and discovered he ran faster. "More important than the question of why this practice developed," says Brunet, "is what it says about being Greek." In contrast to barbarians (literally "those who do not speak Greek"), who wore clothes and did not participate in sports, Greeks practiced athletics and were proud of their bodies. "Being nude became representative of being Greek," says Brunet. "And the Greek concept of beauty is based on what they saw in the gymnasium."

Along with this admiration for beauty, spectators in ancient times exhibited a fascination with danger and drama--thus, the popularity of the high-speed chariot races. There was also the pankration, an event the poet Xenophanes describes as "that new and terrible contest." This grueling combination of boxing and wrestling dished up plenty of violent moments. Rules forbade biting or gouging of the eyes. But punches, kicks in the belly and broken fingers were perfectly acceptable.

Boxing lessons

It was a Roman coin in a New York museum that first caught Brunet's eye--and helped define his scholarly career. The coin bore an image of a boxer wearing gloves. "This was something I'd never seen, never read about," says Brunet, who knew he was in uncharted academic territory. "I wanted to see what could be learned from these boxing gloves."

To find answers, Brunet conducts meticulous detective work. He studies vases, sculptures and mosaics, scrutinizing each figure portrayed for any sign of boxing gloves. He also pores over written texts for chance references to gloves. Gradually, Brunet has compiled details of the boxing story, and he is considered the leading expert on a particular category of the sport--boxing dwarfs, a phenomenon that developed during the Roman Empire. These boxers were skilled athletes and took their sport seriously, says Brunet, despite the fact that the Romans hired them to entertain at dinner parties.

Brunet recently published a scholarly article on dwarf boxing. Another paper--all 20,000 words of it--will be out shortly, based on that original Roman coin, an accomplishment that represents more than a decade of work.

"You pull all this evidence together," says Brunet, "and you attempt to make a judgment about what's true about these gloves and then, what does it represent about the Greeks? What does it say about the Romans, who were even greater fans of boxing? Were they interested in it only for the bloodshed? More likely, it was because it was fast and competitive and required stamina and willpower to withstand pain--qualities both the Greeks and Romans valued highly."

So can we blame it on the Greeks--our own sports-crazed culture, where toughing it out remains a virtue, and violence is tolerated in the name of competition? Where excellence and beauty are ultimate goals? Where victors are worshipped--and often paid--like heroes?

"Sports got overblown in the Greek world, and I think they're overplayed in our society, too," says Brunet. "While we may be reluctant today to go as far as the Greeks and say that winning is everything, the importance of winning remains paramount. And the study of ancient sports highlights that it's been an issue for a long, long time."

Still, every four years a torch is lit, athletes gather, and fans around the globe celebrate, as they did in civilizations past, incredible displays of athletic skill and grace. On this there is no debate. "Let the games begin!" ~