ABSTRACT
Athletics is the very activity that most readily links us to the ancient world. It would be quite hard to find proverbial schoolboys who did not know that the Olympic games were named after a Greek festival which happened every four years at Olympia. Classical Greeks were themselves conscious that they were unusual in doing athletics naked - conscious enough that the place where this happened was called the gumnasion. The stories that Pausanias and Isidore tell serve to familiarise doing athletics naked. The link between athletics and sexual relationships between men and youths is not a product merely of a fevered Roman imagination. The heteroerotic and homoerotic sex-appeal of the sporting body, whether male or female, is not unfamiliar in modern western societies. The modern Olympic games circulate around major world cities, but the ancient Olympics were fixed in one place: the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia in the valley of the river Alpheios in the western Peloponnese.
