The diet of Greek athletes

Abstract

The first difficulty of anyone coming today to the study of any aspect of Greek athletics is to grasp the length of the period over which the tradition persisted. Organized sport appears an inseparable part of modern life, yet its history in modern times goes back for not much more than a century. I n Greece the first Olympic games were held in 776 BC, and the festival continued every 4 years without interruption in peace or war until the end of the fourth century AD, a period of over 1000 years. Even so, the first Olympics were not the beginning; the Homeric poems take the story back a further five centuries.