Olympian Games Revival Experiments

The ancient Olympic Games, or the ancient Olympics, were a series of athletic competitions among representatives of city-states and one of the Panhellenic Games of ancient Greece.^¹ They were held at the Panhellenic religious sanctuary of Olympia, in honor of Zeus, and the Greeks gave them a mythological origin.^¹ The originating Olympic Games are traditionally dated to 776 BC.^¹ The games were held every four years, or Olympiad, which became a unit of time in historical chronologies.^¹ These Olympiads were referred to based on the winner of their stadion sprint, e.g., "the third year of the eighteenth Olympiad when Ladas of Argos won the stadion".^¹ They continued to be celebrated when Greece came under Roman rule in the 2nd century BC.^¹ Their last recorded celebration was in AD 393, under the emperor Theodosius I, but archaeological evidence indicates that some games were still held after this date.^¹ The games likely came to an end under Theodosius II, possibly in connection with a fire that burned down the temple of the Olympian Zeus during his reign.^¹