The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games [Paperback]

Tony Perrottet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 8, 2004

What was it like to attend the ancient Olympic Games?

With the summer Olympics’ return to Athens, Tony Perrottet delves into the ancient world and lets the Greek Games begin again. The acclaimed author of Pagan Holiday brings attitude, erudition, and humor to the fascinating story of the original Olympic festival, tracking the event day by day to re-create the experience in all its compelling spectacle.

Using firsthand reports and little-known sources—including an actual Handbook for a Sports Coach used by the Greeks—The Naked Olympics creates a vivid picture of an extravaganza performed before as many as forty thousand people, featuring contests as timeless as the javelin throw and as exotic as the chariot race.

Peeling away the layers of myth, Perrottet lays bare the ancient sporting experience—including the round-the-clock bacchanal inside the tents of the Olympic Village, the all-male nude workouts under the statue of Eros, and history’s first corruption scandals involving athletes. Featuring sometimes scandalous cameos by sports enthusiasts Plato, Socrates, and Herodotus, The Naked Olympics offers essential insight into today’s Games and an unforgettable guide to the world’s first and most influential athletic festival.

"Just in time for the modern Olympic games to return to Greece this summer for the first time in more than a century, Tony Perrottet offers up a diverting primer on the Olympics of the ancient kind….Well researched; his sources are as solid as sources come. It's also well writen….Perhaps no book of the season will show us so briefly and entertainingly just how complete is our inheritance from the Greeks, vulgarity and all."
--The Washington Post

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Combining a wealth of vivid details with a knack for narrative pacing and subtle humor, Perrottet (Pagan Holiday) renders a striking portrayal of the Greek Olympics and their role in the ancient world. While our modern games certainly pay homage to the Greek festival that was held uninterrupted for more than 1,200 years, the book's title refers to the most pronounced difference between the two: Ancient athletes competed in the nude, adorned only with olive oil. While Perrottet also outlines events ranging from the merciless chariot races to the pankration—a sort of early predecessor of ultimate fighting in which strangulation was seen as the surest means of attaining victory—he also puts the games in their heavy religious context and gives readers a strong sense of what they were like from a spectator's point of view. That they were cramped, hot and dizzyingly unsanitary apparently did little to dissuade throngs of people from the often treacherous journey to Olympia to catch glimpses of their heroes. And their experiences provided by Perrottet are what separate this book from staid history. His goal, he writes at the outset, is "to create the ancient games in their sprawling, human entirety," so readers are treated not only to a thorough picture of the games' proceedings but also to glimpses of the shameless bacchanalia, numerous (and often lascivious) entertainments and even corruption that accompanied them. It's an entertaining, edifying account that puts a human face on one of humanity's most remarkable spectacles.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

This lively account of the classical Olympics portrays them as "the Woodstock of antiquity," and claims that the Games, while taken seriously, were also where Greeks gathered for a five-day debauch. A prostitute could earn a year's wages in the course of the tournament, Thessalonian peddlers sold love potions made from horse's sweat and minced lizard, and pentathletes competed to the accompaniment of flutes, perhaps the ancient equivalent of stadium rock. The festival offered beauty pageants and Homer-recitation contests, numerologists and fire-swallowers, and such culinary delicacies as roasted sow's womb. Athletic events also fuelled a thriving pickup scene: a message etched into the wall of a stadium at Nemea reads, "Look up Moschos in Philippi—he's cute."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (June 8, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081296991X
• ISBN-13: 978-0812969917
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #63,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Miscellaneous > Olympic Games
  • #59 in Books > History > Ancient > Greece

More About the Author

The need for perpetual motion has always been Tony Perrottet's most obvious personality disorder. While studying history at Sydney University, the Australian-born Perrottet regularly disappeared hitch-hiking through the Outback, sailing the coast of Sumatra or traveling through rural India (enjoying a brief and inglorious career as a film extra in Rajasthan). After graduation, he moved to South America to work as a "roving correspondent," where he covered the Shining Path war in Peru, drug running in Colombia and several military rebellions in Argentina. A brief visit to Manhattan fifteen years ago convinced him that New York was the ideal place for a rootless wanderer to be based. From his current home in the East Village of Manhattan, he has continued to commute to Iceland, Tierra del Fuego, Wyoming, Tasmania and Zanzibar, while contributing to international publications including the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Slate, Esquire, Outside and the London Sunday Times.

Perrottet is the author of five books - a collection of travel stories, Off the Deep End: Travels in Forgotten Frontiers (1997); Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (2002); The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Greek Games (2004); Napoleon's Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped (2008); and The Sinner's Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe (2011, Broadway Books). His travel stories have been widely anthologized and have been selected four times for the Best American Travel Writing series. He is also a regular television guest on the History Channel, where he has spoken about everything from the Crusades to the birth of disco.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ideal beach read for the thinking person, June 30, 2004

By 

gary walker (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book for the summer, a surprisingly exciting page-turner that anyone can take to the beach. As both a history lover and avid gym fan, I particularly enjoyed the chapters on 'ancient Greek gymnasium culture;' there is even information on the work-out techniques they used to use! (An early form of aerobics was popular, as many exercises were done to flute music...) The book is packed with wonderful anecdotes from the pagan festival, plucked from Pausanias, Herodotus, Plato, Sophocles and other top authors from the past. It's fun to know that the ancient Games were rowdy, drunken and filled with corruption and shady dealings -- although since they competed naked, athletes would have had trouble providing corporate sponsorships for the latest olive oil merchant. It's a wonderful way to digest excellently-researched history within an amusing (often hilarious) authorial style.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy a couple copies for your friends!, June 28, 2004

By 

Larry Adams (Phoenix, Arizona United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games (Paperback)

A friend asked me to help him find this book in a bookstore. He had heard about it on National Public Radio. The bookstore had 8 copies buried in the Greek history section. They would probably sell more of this book if they stocked it in their sports section, especially with the Olympics coming up in a few weeks.

I didn't express any interest in the book during the search and I didn't skim through the book or read the back cover. Later I discovered that my friend bought several copies. I was surprised when he insisted on giving one to me, but I'm glad he did.

It's a fast, fun, entertaining book. The author starts out with an overview of the subject. In the later chapters, he goes into more vivid detail about each of the games, the rules, the locations, the cultural events, the customs, the hardships, the prices, and the celebrations. He has details about the contestants, the trainers, the judges, the spectators, the local citizens, the royalty, and the gods.

I especially liked all the stories about bribery and corruption and the Greek traditions of justice.

Each chapter has interesting ink sketches to characterize the stories. (The image of Zeus on page 132 should be flipped horizontally to properly show Zeus holding the scepter in his right hand.)

I annoyed my friend by finishing the book before he did (which is rare), and told him a lot of the storylines at our next dinner.

Then I went back to the bookstore to buy some copies for some of my friends and the local library. The facts in this book are alive and more interesting than what you'll hear on TV this summer when the 2004 Olympic Games are broadcast.

Tony Perrottet made many references to the Greek literature that he based his book on. It encourages me to reread these classics that I haven't picked up since high school and college and enjoy them again.

Good work, Tony!

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oil me down, Hippothales!, June 15, 2004

By 

"constanttraveler" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games (Paperback)

I heard the author interviewed on NPR radio recently, and was intrigued. This book is much more than just about the Olympics -- it recreates the whole pagan world, in all its strangeness and human detail (which makes sense, as sports was only one part of that great festival -- there were literary events, artistic events, and plenty of boozing -- maybe that explains why there's more about sex in the book than athletics!). It's ideal for anyone interested in ancient history -- the past really springs to life from its pages!