Were There Women at the Ancient Olympic Games?

Question: Were There Women at the Ancient Olympic Games?

In Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, Donald Kyle addresses the related questions of whether there were women at the Olympic games, whether virgins were allowed, but not more mature women, and the story that a transvestite mother sneaked into the Olympics.

Were women allowed at the Olympic Games?

Answer: The Olympic games were but one of the panhellenic (open to all Greeks) games, but it was the most prestigious. Most of what we think we know about the Olympics is based on legends, the poetry of the victory ode (epinician) writers, dedicatory statues and vases, and the writing of Pausanias, who lived in the second century A.D., well after the heyday of Classical Greece.

The stories of the origins of the Olympics are mythical and we're not even sure when the games began.

1. Priestess and Virgins at the Olympics

   Pausanias mentions a priestess of Demeter Chamyne looking on the Olympic games [See Pausanias [6.20.9]]. Some scholars think the cult of Demeter Chamyne in Elis predates the Olympics. Kyle thinks the mention of the priestess could mean that the priestess was there to make sure the Olympic rituals were done properly. Pausanias also mentions virgins at the Olympics. While some scholars have made various suggestions about the virgins -- perhaps only virgins and not matrons were allowed; perhaps men took their eligible daughters to the events husband-hunting -- Kyle thinks the presence of virgins could mean those girls represented Demeter's daughter Persephone and accompanied the priestess-Demeter, presumably only one at a time.

2. Female Olympic Victor

   There were Olympic victors who were women, but these were the owners of the winning chariots and they were not present at the events. In about 170 A.D. Pausanias (6.1.6, 5.12.5) saw the Spartan woman Kinisca's victory monument. Plutarch and Xenophon also write about her winning the 4-horse chariot race, which she won first in 396 and then in 392. Kinisca was the sister of the Spartan King Agesilaus. Plutarch (Ages.20.1) says Agesilaus persuaded his sister to enter the race to send a message to the rest of the Greeks that all horseracing took was money, not excellence.

3. Transvestite Mother at the Olympics

   In Pausanias 5.6.7-8, there is also a story that a mother named Kallipateira (or Pherenike), from a famous athletic family, dressed herself as a trainer and accompanied her son to the event. In an effort to climb out of the area reserved for trainers, the woman revealed her private parts and was caught. From then on trainers had to be naked. Kyle thinks this is a false etiology of the trainers' nudity. What is particularly significant about this supposed event is that the mother was spared. She could have been tossed to her death from a cliff of Mt. Typaion for even being on the wrong side of the Alpheios River.

In summary, Kyle believes there were a few women possibly present at the Olympics, but the policy of the games was strict in prohibiting them: There were no women physically present and competing in the events at the ancient olympics.