Professor Gregory Nagy, director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, begins his opening keynote by examining the meaning of some of the concepts associated with the Olympic games. The English word athletics comes from the Greek 'athlon', which means ordeal, or the testing of human spirit. An athlete is someone who strives for this experience. 'Athlon' doesn't simply signify the ordeal, but also what is gotten from the ordeal, literally making the process its own reward. Another related word, from which we get the English 'agony', is 'agon', which means coming together. Athlon can only be achieved in the presence of others, and is thus connected intricately to 'agon'.
The original Olympic games were at Olympia in Greece. To him, the Olympics and what they represent are as an important contribution of the ancient Greeks to our time as the concept of democracy. Indeed, as the director of the Hellenic Center in Washington, DC, Greg Nagy sees that "athletics and democracy come hand in hand ". To highlight on this, He offers a quote from Nietzsche, "one has to have the antagonistic spirit ".
For the ancient Greeks, athletics were neither a pastime nor entertainment. Instead, athletics were a sacred space. In many ways it was the most serious thing that people did. The way that the Greeks thought of athletics was similar, and shared many of the same concepts, as their perspective on warfare. The same words that describe athletics also refer to the life and death of heroes and warriors.
The first event in the ancient games was always the foot race. It came even before the ritual opening of the lighting of the fire. To understand this, Professor Nagy explains, we have to understand how the Greeks viewed victory. To them, victory at the Olympics wasn't simply a victory, but over all of the other forces of the world, and specifically death itself. The term for the footrace was 'stadion', from where we get the word stadium, which referred literally to the distance between the spaces. Thus the winning of the footrace, as a triumph over death, energized the other competitors and created the space within which the other events could occur. This was symbolized by the opening fire, which was seen as the overcoming of the human spirit over death.
Professor Nagy closes his opening keynote by sharing a poem from Pindar, the premier poet of the 5th century BCE. Bindar was sought out, as a famous poet, by the families of victors to compose a poem celebrating the agon of the athlete. Nagy shares a poem written by Bindar about the agon of a wrestler and explains how his praises that the athlete has "done [his] ancestors proud " is the same ideal that was expressed in the opening film of Harvard in the Olympics by an alumni describing what she felt as she stepped out of the tunnel into the opening ceremony of the games, showing that the spirit of the Olympics is largely the same even after so many years.
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