The Sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia (also known as the Altis) offers a distinct contrast from Delphi, in its setting and buildings and indeed in its personality. Like Delphi, however, Olympia lies in an area outside the mainstream of Greek power politics. It, too, became a Panhellenic sanctuary, with the appeal of its athletic games, held every four years, reaching every corner of the Greek world.
Olympia lies in a flat, fertile, wooded plain in the north-west Peloponnesus some 12km from the sea; the Arcadian mountains rise not far to the east. This attractive spot is marked by distinctive landscape features, the conical Hill of Kronos on the north, and two rivers, the Kladeos and the Alpheios, which join to the south-west of the sanctuary.
Olympia became prominent during the eighth century BC, as the numerous dedications of expensive large bronze cauldrons on tripods attest. Indeed, the ancient Greeks believed the Olympic Games began in 776 BC, a date that became the starting point for their recorded history. In later centuries, Olympia was embellished with numerous buildings, including its two famous temples, to Hera and to Zeus (Figure 15.6). to Roman interest the prosperity of Olympia continued to the end of antiquity, when the Christian emperor Theodosius the Great ended the games in AD 393 as part of a general clamp-down on pagan cults. But major earthquakes had already seriously damaged the site in the fourth century AD; later flooding of the Alpheios and Kladeos in the Middle Ages would leave the ruins buried under several meters of silt. Rediscovered in 1766 by English antiquarian Richard Chandler, Olympia has been revealed to the modern world largely through the excavations of the German Archaeological Institute from 1875 to the present.
As was typical, the sacred precinct was marked off by a low wall. Ritual focused on two places: the tomb of Pelops, a legendary king of Olympia, and the main altar, made not of stone but of ash from burnt offerings, as if to emphasize the remote, primeval origins of the cult. On either
Side stood the temples, to the north at the base of the Hill of Kronos the early Archaic Temple of Hera, and to the south, raised up on an artificial platform, the larger Temple of Zeus, one of the major buildings of Classical Greece (Figure 15.9). In addition to the two major temples and the great altar, the temenos also included a series of treasuries, neatly aligned at the foot of Mt. Kronos. Most were built by city-states of Greek Sicily and South Italy. None has survived well, and none had the elaborate sculptural decoration seen on the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi.
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