Ancient athletes could have held their own in the first modern Olympic Games of 1896. Phayllos of Croton, for example, hurled the discus 95 feet in the Pythian games around 500 B.C.

Ancient Greece’s Olympic champions were superstar athletes. The first Olympic winners became celebrities with social and political heft—and even the power to heal.

OLYMPIC URBAN LEGEND: Athletes during the Ancient Greek Olympic Games were amateurs. Until the 1970s, competition in the Olympic Games was reserved for amateur athletes, which in this sense is ...

GREEK00_061.JPG Photo taken on 5/6/04 in BERKELEY. UC Berkeley classics professor Stephen Miller, in his office, reviews a copy of his recently published book.

He has written widely on Pindar and ancient Greek athletics, and was an advisor to the BBC TWO programme 'First Olympians'. Top «; More Greeks. Hands on History: Ancient Britain.

At the ancient Olympics in Greece, athletes weren’t the only stars of the show. The spectacle also attracted poets, who recited their works for eager audiences. Competitors commissioned bigger ...