Thucydides, Xenophon, and Lichas: Were the Spartans Excluded from the Olympic Games from 420 to 400 B.C.?
By Simon Hornblower
Phoenix, Vol. 54, No. 3/4. (2000)
Introduction: In this paper, I should like to examine the consequences of one of the most tense and dramatic moments in the history of the ancient Greek Olympic Games. I refer to the exclusion of the Spartans from the sanctuary of Olympia and from the Olympic Games of 420 B.C.by the people of Elis who controlled the games and the festival; and the flogging, by the Elean umpires, of the distinguished Spartan athlete Lichas son of Arkesilas when he crowned his charioteer publicly.
Lichas’ gesture was intended, so Thucydides tells us, to show that the winning chariot was his and not that of the Boiotian state, in whose name the victory had been announced; Lichas thus provocatively exploded a fiction which had been made necessary by the exclusion of the Spartans. Thucydides (who was, it is attractive to suppose, present on the occasion and knew in detail what he was talking about) says that everyone was afraid the Spartans would make an armed attack and force their way in.
Recently discovered archaeological evidence for a pitched battle at around this period in the actual sanctuary of Nemea, on the other side of the Peloponnese, not to mention the fighting at Olympia itselfduring the Games of 364 B.C., shows that this kind of thing could indeed happen at a sacred and panhellenic site. It has been well said that Thucydides describes the Lichas episode in “splendid detail.” Certainly the two rich and in many respects uncharacteristic chapters which Thucydides devotes to it repay close study, for their subject-matter, their architecture, and their vocabulary.
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