Winners Got Everything

Olympic victors received only an olive wreath at the games — but the real rewards came from their home cities.

• Athens granted winners free meals for life at the public hall
• Some cities gave cash prizes worth a lifetime of wages
• Victors had statues erected in their honor and poems commissioned about them
• A few were worshipped as demigods after death

The games ran for nearly 1,200 years — from 776 BC to 393 AD, when the Christian Emperor Theodosius I banned them as pagan festivals. The modern Olympics, revived in 1896, are a sanitized echo of something far wilder and more dangerous.