INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

mentioned later - but rather focuses on the ideas of the travellers,
explorers and establishers of “Olympic Games”.
This paper is not based on a chronological order; it will reveal
different approaches to the history of the period.
The decline of the Ancient Olympic Games
There was no single cause but many reasons for the decline of the
Ancient games. It starts with the participation of more and more
foreign athletes (e.g. Romans and Greeks from the colonies) in the
festivals. The Greeks lost their identification with the games.
Furthermore, the number of Barbarian raids on the Roman Empire
increased. They even threatened the Peloponnesus and Olympia. The
last and maybe most important was the abolition of the Games by the
edict of Theodosius I, which prohibited all pagan cults. This meant
that the games lost a very important foundation. The edict was
followed later by devastation, destruction 1 and fire, as Olympia sunk
under its own ashes and under waste deposited by the rivers Alpheios
and Kladeos.
Central Sources: Pausanias and Pindar
The most important source for philological science and Greece is
PAUSANIAS and his descriptive work about Greece entitled Periegesis,
he wrote about 175 A. D. 2 It is would be a fault not to mention it here,
before speaking about the following times. The first printed edition of
the Periegesis was issued in 1516; in 1547 a complete Latin edition
was published after only a part of it was edited in 1500. The
publishers of these editions must have dealt with the description of
Olympia. It seems that PINDAR received similar treatment. 3 The first
PINDAR edition was issued 1513 in Venice. Until 1850 every three or
four years Greek, Greco-Latin, Latin editions as well as translations
into modern languages are published. 4
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