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The Naked Olympics: A Book Review
by Lisa Chavez
Condoms in Athens a sacrilege? Compared to the original Olympics? Hardly. Our present-day Olympic games should be so naked and raunchy. Back in the day, gods and philosophers knew that all good festivals offer rampant sex.
And let’s get the historical picture straight: hoards of pilgrims make an arduous trek toting supplies to an out-of-the-way place, where there are no accommodations, to set up an impromptu shanty city of thousands and bake in relentless heat. The attraction: naked beauty, youth, music, revels, communing with pagan gods, magic acts, sword swallowers, poetry readings, prolific sex, all manner of sporting competition, feasting and partying virtually 24 hours a day...
Actually, it sounds like Burning Man, the annual festival about to take place once again in the Nevada desert. But in fact it was the original quadrennial Greek Olympic Games.
According to travel writer Tony Perrottet, author of The Naked Games, the five-day Olympic event had its down side or sides: poor or non-existent sewage, periodic lack of water, stench, flies, diarrhea, overcrowding, dehydration, gambling, theft and prostitution. Burning Man’s elaborate porta-potty system alone (not to mention the RVs, gas stoves, generators, batteries, and even an airstrip) has the Games beat for elegance. But like Burning Man, people could drop like flies from dehydration if they weren’t careful.
Perrottet’s book is to our view of Ancient Greek life what a DVD of 24 hours of cable television would be to someone 2000 years from now trying to understand modern American life. It’s rich, fascinating, and doesn’t spare us the dirty details: At the Greek Olympic games, philosophers of the day lectured from soap boxes, historians came to tell stories (in fact Herodotus basically gave readings at the Olympics, which, like current day book signings, were meant to promote his history of the Greek world. In fact, it may have been his opportune PR stunting that made Herodotus the historian we know to day). Perrottet suggests that even prostitutes pulled publicity stunts at the Olympic event -- to the tune of Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl.
Perrottet’s picture of the Greek Games at Olympia (which were held continuously for 1200 years starting in 776 B.C) are all about testosterone. Married women weren’t allowed in the stadium and had to camp together on the opposite shore of a nearby river. Single women were allowed in to see the games -- this by way of advertising them for, and sometimes sealing the deals for, marriage -- closely guarded by their fathers. You had upwards of forty thousand male spectators and hundreds of male athletes glistening in olive oil (the only female competitors were girls under 18 participating in the three girls’ races). You didn’t even have the muscular naked, oiled-bodied girl wrestlers of Sparta which you could ogle at during the Spartan games. In short, it was a testosterone bath.
And so it was hey day for whores (Greek word: pornai). They came in boatloads, from Asia Minor, from Egypt, from all points Mediterranean because they could make a year’s wages in the 5 days of the Olympics. Perrottet tells us that prostitution during sporting events was actually encouraged by the thinkers of the day. It supposedly let off steam and made monogamy a little easier to handle the rest of the year round. Perrottet is full of delightful little details, including some impressive ones regarding the hetaeras’ [high class call girls or courtesans] logistical issues during the Games: "Their hair dyed blond, fashionable even then; adorned with gay ribbons with a jewel in the middle of their foreheads; their eyelids shaded with kohl; complexions blanched with white lead" -- they must have looked sort of Marilyn-Monroe-goes-geisha-esque. Later, Perrottet quotes a line from a comedic play to show us how "the heat could wreak havoc with ancient cosmetics." He paints a picture of colors running downward, and the white lead getting into the hair and lightening it even more.
The way Perrottet makes you feel you’re right there in the heat of it all makes the small section on the prostitutes one of the most fascinating in the book. Prostitutes for the common man hung out in makeshift brothels, usually a tent in which the girls would stand in a semi-circle dressed in see-through clothing. Particular girls may even have been well known by the sports fans because they tended to work a circuit that included all the major competitive sporting events up and down Greece. Potential male clients could inspect the body types, pick out someone to their liking, and disappear with her for a fee. The high class call girls, of course, were for the wealthy, who hired them for elaborate all-male after-games parties. Perrottet even explains a sex manual similar to the Kama Sutra that prostitutes used as a pricing guide.
"From fragments, we know that it included lists of positions, and that prostitutes charged different rates for each. The cheapest was , "bent over," but sports fans at Olympia might have opted for the more energetic and expensive , or ’racehorse’ with the woman on top. There are references to another position, which keen historians have translated as ’the lion on the cheese grater’; its details have been regrettably lost."
Of course, brothels (though not street solicitation) are legal in modern day Athens as well. They’re regulated, and as of this year, a little more highly regulated than before in spite of much controversy in Europe over the issue. Early this month, several brothels were served papers and were told to clean up their act or shut down their action.
But despite the "naked" in the title of this book, Perrottet spends enough chapters on the various sports, on techniques and equipment, on recreating tiny aspects of this microcosm of Greek life, to keep his book off the titillation shelves in the book store. After all, the first Olympic games were a pagan religious festival.
The Naked Olympics is a quick, easy, fun read, and if words can create pictures in your mind, these pictures will be steamy. At every turn Perrottet reminds us that this Olympic village was hormone city. And in a culture that encouraged older men to "mentor" younger men -- hold the pickle -- the presence of so many oiled, youthful, hunky, naked men (they competed naked in all events), had these potential mentors, you can bet, in an instructive lather. There was groping, male-to-male flirting, posing and teasing, and lots of action at the baths. Put all that with the sophisticated pornai operations, and you’ve got a picture of undeniable sexuality dripping from the air. It makes our modern hand-wringing about condoms being in the competitors’ welcome bags seem a little, well, sterile.
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