{"id":3060,"date":"2009-11-02T07:27:45","date_gmt":"2009-11-02T07:27:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/?p=3060"},"modified":"2009-11-02T07:27:45","modified_gmt":"2009-11-02T07:27:45","slug":"pythian-games-and-olympic-games-culture-and-athletics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/pythian-games-and-olympic-games-culture-and-athletics\/","title":{"rendered":"Pythian Games and Olympic Games: culture and athletics"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The Olympic Games should be re-formed on a Delphic or Celtic model<\/p><\/div>\n

According to Wiki the Pythian Games at Delphi: “were founded sometime in the 6th century BCE, and, unlike the Olympic Games, also featured competitions for music and poetry. The music and poetry competitions pre-dated the athletic portion of the games, and were said to have been started by Apollo.’<\/p>\n

So the relationship between the games at Delphi and Olympia equates to that between Athens and Sparta. Athens had a fine balance between cultural and physical prowess. Sparta cared only for the physical and military. So my proposal is to scrap the Olympic Games and replace them with a new series of Pythian Games – which should balance athleticism with cultural competitions, including poetry, music, oratory and dance. It\u00a0 is not so much that these activities have value: it is that mind and body are part of a single organism and we should not over-develop one at the expense of the other.<\/p>\n

Or, since the language and culture of Ancient Greece was Indo-European and Central Asian in origin,\u00a0 perhaps we should re-form the Olympic Games on the basis of Celtic festivals. The Celts represent another great Indo-European tradition and we could look to the Highland Games in Scotland and the\u00a0 Eisteddfod in Wales.\u00a0 Anything would be better than the cynical, commercial, drug-taking body-damaging, militaristic,\u00a0 mindlessness tedium of the modern ‘Olympic movement’.<\/p>\n

Photo of Eisteddfod courtesy Sara Branch<\/a><\/p>\n

See also: 2012\u00a0 Equestrian Olympics in Greenwich Park London<\/a><\/p>\n


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According to Wiki the Pythian Games at Delphi: “were founded sometime in the 6th century BCE, and, unlike the Olympic Games, also featured competitions for music and poetry. The music and poetry competitions pre-dated the athletic portion of the games, and were said to have been started by Apollo.’ So the relationship between the games […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3060"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}