Comment on Facebook: Wretchard T. Cat,"Will the Olympics be postponed?"

Wretchard, "Will the Olympics be postponed? Back in the day wars were postponed for the Olympics. During the second Greco-Persian war in 480 BC Xerxes invasion could not be met because of the Olympic truce. Therefore Leonidas and his 300 were sent ahead as a sacrificial delaying force to allow the Spartans to come after the truce."

Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire described how the Greeks returned to the pass and sanctified it with athletic events and ceremonies and left an inscription on a stone, composed by the poet Simonides.
O xein angellein Lakadaimoniois hoti tede
keimneta tois keinon rhemasi peithomenoi

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws, we lie.

They did not sully the sacred fire, obedient to their laws.
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Mary Renault's "The Praise Singer" is a historical fiction whose central character is Simonides that focuses on the flowering of Greek culture in Athens under the Peisistrades and the fall of the Tyranny.

Words I think were seen as almost magic. A form of power from the gods that enabled time to be controlled by men. When Alexander destroyed Thebes he ordered the house of Simonides rival the poet Pindar spared.

The Olympics were an opportunity for people, both the athletes and the communities that they represented and which commemorated their athletes with odes and statues, to approach the Heroic ideal of the Immortal. The perfection of the Beautiful and the Good made men more than beasts.

Both words and athletics were seen as ennobling. Those with Arete were not only οἱ ἄριστος aristocrats better than the common man but associating with them and remembering them made the οἱ πολλοί commoners better too.

Without the ideal to emulate people as individuals and as communities become a feral mob. As the Bard of England put it, "Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason."

The degeneration of athletics into corrupt spectacles has paralleled the decline of civil and political culture. Where once the challenges of an often hostile world, both by man and nature, were met by active engagement with each heeding Theodore Roosevelt's call to be "The Man in the Arena" now people slink like dogs into caves to self quarantine until their betters tell them that it is safe to emerge.