ABSTRACT
Knowledge about the Olympic Games and its signifi cance for ancient Greek society had never faded from the European consciousness, despite the centuries that had elapsed since the prohibition of the festival in 393 AD. Shakespeare’s matter-of-fact reference to the Games illustrates the point that the Olympic idea ‘was a shared, not isolated reference’ in the arts throughout Western Europe (Segrave, 2005, p. 22); indeed, as Littlewood (2000, p. 1179) observed, the Olympics were ‘probably the one’ among the ‘incalculable infl uences of the Greeks in the modern world … of which the general public [were] the most aware’. Much the same applied to Olympia, the place with which the Games were associated. As the English theologian Richard Chandler (1766, p. 308) remarked, its name would ‘ever be respected as venerable for its precious era by the chronologer and historian’, for whom:
Yet despite its reputation, no one was certain as to Olympia’s exact whereabouts.
