What kind of food did Greeks have to eat?
The Entrance to the Stadium at Ancient Olympia
For the Olympic athletes in Sochi, nutrition is a science, and diet is a central focus of the competitors. Nutrition was just every bit important to the start Olympians, some 2,700 years agone. And for Ancient Greeks, nutrient was near much more than than diet.
What Aboriginal Greeks Ate
The ancient Greeks did non have many foods that today'due south Greeks take for granted: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, corn, potatoes, chocolate, and many types of fruit and spices. These foods would remain sectional to the New Earth or to Asia for a long time into the hereafter.
Aboriginal Olympians ate unproblematic foods. For meat, they had mutton, beefiness, goat, and pork. Greeks who lived by the bounding main ate fish, although for many centuries fish was considered a food of the poor. Access to fresh fruit was express; accordingly, Greeks ate a lot of dried fruit. Dried figs were a staple of the Greek diet. They ate a flatbread made of wheat, barley, or rye. Honey was their sweetener. They used herbs intensively in their cooking, which was done in earthen ovens or roasting fires. And Greeks loved their wine and olive oil. Athletes really bathed themselves in olive oil before competitions.
Justin and Kayla in Hellenic republic
Milo of Croton, the Wrestler
One of the original Olympic champions, Milo of Croton, was the greatest wrestler of Aboriginal Hellenic republic. He won a golden medal at half-dozen consecutive Olympics games, and a silver in his seventh competition. To finally defeat him, a new school of wrestling, called standing or long-armed wrestling, was invented. The long-armed wrestling kept Milo on his feet and at arm's length until the old man could be worn down and finally pinned afterwards near thirty years.
At one of the Olympic Games, Milo picked up a iv-year-old bull and carried it around the stadium on his shoulders in front end of 50,000 screaming spectators. Then he butchered it, cooked it, and ate the entire thing in front of his fans. I would hate to have to wrestle that guy.
Milo ate upwards to twenty pounds of meat per day, only Milo was the exception. Greek athletes typically sought balance in their diet, and they were very careful nearly what they ate.
The Original Olympic Field
Food Fads in Ancient Greece
The food, along with the training regimen of the competitors, continually evolved over time. Occasionally, a great champion would sally who ate a peculiar nutrition, and this diet would launch a food trend across Greece that lasted sometimes for decades.
Once, when a great champion emerged who ate a meat-simply diet for a year prior to the games, a meat-only diet craze spread across Greece. This fad lasted for a long fourth dimension. If a champion appear that he never ate bread prior to a competition, Greeks across the country would shun bread until a new athlete emerged who swore by breadstuff. In some years, eating honey became a fad, and honey was sought in neat quantities to give free energy to athletes. In other years, love was avoided because it was believed that sugar slowed downward an athlete.
These nutrient fads differed from modern fad diets, because at that place was non a lot of marketing and commercialization involved, just rather a quest for perfection and purity in the diet. While the great philosophers were thought leaders in Greece, the Olympic athletes led the food trends.
Justin at a Temple to Zeus
The Sacred Truce
Thirty days before each Olympic contest, a Sacred Truce was declared, and runners were sent all over Hellenic republic with a special deejay which declared complimentary and safe passage to the games, no matter what kind of wars the city-states might exist waging. The Sacred Truce was held so dear that it was never violated for 800 years, which says a lot nearly how important the Olympic Games were in Greece.
As the games increased in popularity, every element of the competition was honed to the highest level of perfection, including the food. Winning a gold medal was the highest accolade in the Greek world, and the champions of Aboriginal Hellenic republic were bigger than the stone stars of today. A great champion might spend the residuum of his life beingness entertained by the wealthiest Greeks, and having honors heaped upon him. He would likely be hired to railroad train young Olympians in the fine art of competition, and he would make a lot of coin at this. Part of this grooming was diet.
Kayla at Olympic Ruins with the Entrance to the Stadium to the Right
Perfection of the Parts
The diet of ancient athletes was simple, merely the purity of their food was of paramount importance. The ideal of Greek philosophy was perfection in forms: perfect laws; perfect statues; perfect athletes. To achieve this ideal for the whole, the parts must first be perfected. Sculptors, for this reason, went to great lengths to obtain the finest marble for their statues of the gods.
Athletes besides demanded the purest foods in their diet, to build their muscles, to chisel their bodies. The farmers considered themselves artisans, no less than sculptors. Their tools were sun, rain, seed, and soil. Farmers, similar the athletes they partnered with, strived for greatness.
Ancient Olympia was very Isolated and Surrounded past Barren Rocky Hills
Food that Traveled
Farmers competed to abound the all-time and purest foods for their athletes. Fauna husbandry, types of fertilizer, management of the soil, found option, and other techniques were employed to continually improve the quality of the food offered to athletes. Not just that, farmers helped with the curing, drying, and packaging of food for the long transport to the Games.
Ancient Olympia was, and nevertheless is, surrounded past barren rocky hills. The small-scale hamlet in Olympia could non brainstorm to supply the 50,000 Greeks who descended on the arena for the competition. There were no crops around Olympia, and at that place was very little grass for animals in the hills.
The Tiny Village at Aboriginal Olympia
The teams had to travel great distances from their homeland to the Games in Ancient Olympia. Some teams had to travel hundreds of miles on foot, and some came past ocean in tiny boats. They had to pack and transport all of their luggage and food. They had to bring enough food to concluding the long journey, a calendar month on location, the Games, the feast that followed the games, and the trip home.
All of the livestock had to be driven to the Games–the cows, sheep, goats–and their forage had to be carried on carts. There was no forage around Olympia, and the animals had to be fed, and information technology was critically important that athletes accept access to fresh meat, and that fresh meat be bachelor for the sacrifices to the gods.
The dried fruit for the athletes had to exist prepared and packaged well in accelerate. All the grains to make bread, the honey, the herbs, and all other foodstuffs had to be packed. Of critical importance, the vino and olive oil had to be prepared and bottled with enough time to age, and then packed carefully into carts to be shipped to the games.
Growing, curing and drying, packaging, and shipping this food was a monumental feat of logistics. Some of the teams came from wealthy urban center-states, like Athens, who could afford the very best in transportation and logistical back up. Some of the teams came from poor areas, and the athletes had to travel to the Games on human foot, carrying all of their baggage and food on their backs. When one of these athletes emerged victorious in the Games, he was duly honored for his greatness in ascent above difficult circumstances.
Farmers partnered closely with athletes and coaches in this process, even though farmers typically were not able to attend the Games. Often, equally soon as the teams returned from an Olympic competition, they would brainstorm planning for the next games, four years abroad.
Olympic Ruins
Cheaters at the Aboriginal Olympics
When the teams got to Olympia, they had to gear up rough camps in the hills effectually the stadium. Tens of thousands of people were closely packed into this space, so there were many opportunities for mischief. Teams had to set up guards on their food and baggage, to make sure they were not robbed of their sustenance. Sometimes there was treachery every bit 1 team attempted to steal from another, to make up for a shortfall in food planning, and this was considered cheating.
Cheating at the Olympic Games was one of the worst offenses of Ancient Greece. The games themselves were a religious festival meant to honor Zeus, and to dishonor the greatest of gods was a grave criminal offense. Cheaters at the games were ordered to build unabridged temples to Zeus, a process that would accept all the money and labor of an athlete for the remainder of his life. Some cheaters who did non pay this penance were executed.
Cheaters also faced the greatest shame possible in Ancient Greece. If an athlete was caught cheating, the athlete's proper name was chiseled into a wall of disgrace close to the main temple to Zeus, nearly the entrance to the stadium. To take your proper noun hammered into that wall was a penalty worse than death. Kayla and I walked down this wall where these names were chiseled, yet showing their dishonor, more than two,500 years afterwards.
Kayla and a Statue of Zeus. She insists she is reading the caption!
Food for Sacrifice
Nutrient was not only art to Greeks; food was an offer to the gods. When a bull was butchered, a priest offset slapped the sides of the bull with barley stalks and the seeds were sprayed on the ground along with the cleansing claret. Next, the fat of the bull was wrapped around the thigh basic and placed on a purifying fire equally a sacrifice to Zeus, and the prayers of the champions mixed with this smoke ascent to the gods. Just the purest food was fit for such a sacrifice.
I wonder what those farmers of sometime would think about our modern methods of farming, with the hormones, steroids, and antibiotics in meat, and the chemicals in conventional vegetables. Interestingly enough, the greatest Olympic champions of today seek out just the purest of foods—a pursuit very similar to the competitors of erstwhile.
Farmers and their Champions
At the ruins in Aboriginal Olympia, the site of the original games, Kayla and I walked down a long wall of beautiful rock panels telling well-nigh the crops and the livestock of the city-states of Greece, and how this food nourished the champions of antiquity. The various metropolis-states were represented with their grains, their olives, their vegetables, their cattle, their fish, their wines.
Those farmers are lost to history, but you can still read the names of their keen champions chiseled into the rock. Those names represent the highest achievement of the Ancient Greece: perfect fine art, perfect food, perfection in concrete forms.
These are the ideals that our athletes of today seek in Sochi.
Source: https://fourstringfarm.com/tag/food-of-ancient-olympics/
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