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An Ancient Wonder Made of Ivory and Gold - Part 2

© Suzi Goode

The magnificent statue of Zeus at Olympia did not lend itself to being copied on a small scale. Its richness of detail prohibited such a feat. Since no part of it survives and therefore archeologists and historians are not able to examine it, how is it that we know so much about this statue?

We know of the grandeur of this statue because of a representation of it on the face of a coin made in the nearby city of Elis and of eyewitness reports made by those who traveled to the temple. A geographer who lived about the time Christ lived, described it in great detail as did Callimachus, a Roman poet, who told of its exact measurements two hundred years after the statue had been made. In the second century AD, a Greek traveler, Pausanias, wrote about the statue in great detail and left an account of the buildings and monuments he saw. Today, this account helps archeologists to put names to what they discover during excavations.

In 391 AD, the Christian church was rapidly gaining followers and the clergy attempted to ban the practice of what they believed to be pagan rituals, such as the worship of Zeus. Emperor Theodosius I banned these practices that year. The temple at Olympia was abandoned. The Olympic Games came to an end until they were reinstituted in 1896 as the Games we know today.

Eight hundred years after the statue had been built, it was moved to beautify a palace in Constantinople. In 462 AD, the palace, and consequently the statue of Zeus was destroyed by fire. Thirty-seven years earlier, the temple at Olympia had been destroyed by fire.

In the sixth century AD, the Alphaeus river changed its course and the whole of Olympia was destroyed by landslides, floods and earthquakes. Archeologists had to sift through a thick deposit of mud, sand and debris to find what remained of the great temple in the late nineteenth century.

The physical glory of Olympia is gone but the tales of mythological heroes lives on. What incident is attributed to the beginning of the Olympic Games in 776 BC? There is no consensus as to any single incident but two incidents are possible although neither have much to do with Zeus as the main character. The beginnings of the Games might simply have been the Ancient Greek propensity to indulge in athletic games at funerals because physical activity spent much of the mourners' grief

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