Walking to Olympia

“There was a man who thought the journey to Olympia would be too much for him, and Socrates said: ‘What are you afraid of? Don’t you walk around all day in Athens? Don’t you walk home to have lunch? And again for dinner? And again to sleep? Don’t you see that if you string together all the walking you do in five or six days anyway you could easily cover the distance from Athens to Olympia?’”—Xenophon, Memorabilia

Ancient Greek spectators could never be accused of being couch potatoes: They had to be in good shape just to get to the Olympic Games.

Most travelers went on foot, picking their way over rocky trails that curled snake-like through mountains and ravines. Including rest days and stopovers, many people would have allowed two weeks to reach the site of the games at Olympia, located in the Peloponnesus in southwestern Greece, about 200 miles west of Athens. Along the way, ancient travelers passed through a traditional rural world, dotted with temples full of sacred relics, encountering vignettes of eerie piety. According to the second-century A.D. travel writer Pausanias, Olympia was where the aura of divinity was most tangible on earth, and the closer travelers got to their goal, the more the air seemed to glow with a sense of pagan wonder. In this way, the journey was a kind of pilgrimage.