The true story of the ancient games.
Tony Perrottet is the author ofOff the Deep End, Pagan Holiday, The Naked Olympics, andNapoleon's Privates. He lives in New York City.
“A vivid evocation of the blood and guts, not to mention sheer
guts, that marked the original Olympic Games more than two thousand
years ago. Tony Perrottet tells the gripping story of a festival of
physical attainment during which athletes risked and sometimes lost
their lives. Today's champions have it easy.” —Anthony Everitt,
author of Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest
Politician
“This is the book to read if you want to know what it felt like to
be a spectator or a contestant at the ancient Olympic Games.
Perrottet brings the scene to life in all its pageantry and
squalor, with its beautiful bodies, rotting meat, flies, and
broiling heat. Then, as now, the Games brought out the best and the
worst of human potential, and blood, sweat, tears, sex, and money
were all part of the Olympic experience, along with religion,
bribery and politics.
—Mary Lefkowitz, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities
at Wellesley College and author of Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We
Can Learn from Myths
"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."
--The New Yorker
"Erudite, colorful and frequently hilarious, Perrottet's The Naked
Olympics is a marvelous resource for athletes, spectators, and
scholars alike. I will never watch the Olympic games in quite the
same way again."
—Michael Curtis Ford, author of The Ten Thousand and The
Last King
"I considered myself a pretty solid researcher on ancient Greece,
till Tony Perrottet's The Naked Olympics blew me out of the
water. I never knew (just two among hundreds of delicious
factoids) that there was no separate event for discus and javelin
-- they were part of the pentathlon -- or that the chariot race ran
24 laps and took fifteen hair-raising minutes. (Not to
mention the distinction between various attendant types of
groupies, courtesans, and pornai.) Mr. Perrottet's vivid
cinematic prose not only delivers encyclopedic intelligence of the
ancient games but spirits you back in time with such immediacy that
you can smell the sweat and feel the hot Greek sun. If you're
gonna be glued to the modern Athens Games like I will, you must
read The Naked Olympics. No other book communicates with such
authenticity ' where it all came from, '
back in the days when you didn't need wardrobe
malfunctions to get naked."
—Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire, Tides of War, and Last
of the Amazons
"The Naked Olympics presents the Greeks in all their glory,
brutality, and vulgarity. It is a fascinating picture and popular
history at its best."
—Norman Cantor, Professor Emeritus, New York University, and author
of Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World
" Fans of Tony Perrottet's Pagan Holiday (aka Route 66 AD) will
kill to read his follow-up The Naked Olympics. A seasoned
traveller, Perrottet follows all the highways and byways of ancient
Olympic lore. He really makes you feel what it was like to be at
the ancient Olympics, conjuring up the sights, sounds and smells
(especially the smells) of the Games with a sure and vivid touch.
The Naked Olympics would be just the thing to cover your nakedness
as you watch the 2004 Athens Olympics or go to visit the ancient
site of Olympia - figleaves need not apply. "
—Paul Cartledge, Professor of Classics, Cambridge University, and
author of The Spartans
"Short of building your own time machine, reading Tony Perrottet’s
The Naked Olympics will be the closest you’ll come to experiencing
the blood, sweat, glory, and greed that were the ancient Olympic
Games. And if you do somehow happen upon a time machine, you’d
still be wise to trust Tony Perrottet as your guide. Steeped in
scholarship, leavened by humor, and lighted by the same flames of
history and love of sport that illuminated the works of Homer,
Lucian, Herodotus, Thucydides, Pausanias and Dio the
Golden-Tongued, Perrottet’s The Naked Olympics: The True Story of
the Ancient Games is one of those rare books that you’ll be citing
for years to come."
—Dan Simmons, author of Ilium
"It was the Woodstock of antiquity: a five-day spectacle of heroic
performance and after-hours debauchery dedicated to the Greek gods
and held every fourth year at the rural religious sanctuary of
Olympia. There were no team sports in the first Olympics, no torch
marathon - that staple of the modern games was the brainchild of
Adolf Hitler - and there was certainly no spandex. The original
Olympics , travel writer Tony Perrottet tells us in this fun,
light-hearted primer on the Greek competition that began it all,
competed buck naked. Except, that is, for a generous coating of
olive oil. ('Boy rubbers' were on hand to massage the oil in.)
Wrestling, sprinting, boxing and chariot racing were the
center-ring events of the competition, which ran uninterrupted and
largely unaltered for 1,200 years, beginning in 776 B.C. Released
to coincide with this summer's Athens games, The Naked Olympics is
an engaging history lesson on an event that has apparently always
been as much about pomp and politics as it has about superhuman
strength."
---National Geographic Adventure
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