A Gold Medal for Brutality; Today's Olympics are tame next to the ancient Games.(Naked Olympics)(Book Review)

Byline: Michael Meyer

The games begin. Let us brace ourselves for an unprecedented orgy of commercialism, jingoistic hype, logistical chaos and hubristic athleticism. Oops. Unprecedented? Not quite. As it turns out, the Olympics have always embodied such dubious attributes--starting in 776 B. C.

That's the picture Tony Perrottet draws in "Naked Olympics" (214 pages. Random House) --so titled because the original competitions were held in the nude. Laying bare the quaint myth of the ancient Games as a purist Arcadian rite, Perrottet evocatively re-creates the Olympics as the bacchanalian extravaganza it was. Even in antiquity, the Games drew spectators from around the world--some 40,000, from as far away as Spain and the Black Sea, who marched for days from Athens or the port of Piraeus to remote Olympia, 400 kilometers away in the southern Peloponnesus. Awaiting them was basically... nothing.

Yes, there was the famed Temple of Zeus, and the stadium. But Olympic infrastructure, as we moderns call it? The sky was your roof and the fields your bed. When the eager throngs of fans arrived, they simply flung their belongings down and set up camp. For the next five sweltering days, Olympia would become a teeming tent city. The smoke of cooking fires hung over everything. Rivers dried up, and there was little water. Dehydrated spectators dropped like flies. There was dysentery, fever and plagues of biting insects. (Instead of the ceremonial lighting of the Olympic torch--an innovation from the 1933 Games in Nazi ...