Sanctuary of Zeus, Olympia

The third wonder

Inside the Temple of Zeus sat the masterpiece of Phidias, the same sculptor who made the Athena of the Parthenon. His Zeus was a seated figure about 12.4 metres high, of ivory flesh and gold robes over a wooden core, holding a winged Victory in one hand and a sceptre in the other.

It was so large for its temple that the geographer Strabo joked the god would take the roof off if he stood up. Commissioned by the Eleans around 435 BC, it became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The original Games

Olympia was first of all a sanctuary, and the Olympic Games were a religious festival held there in Zeus's honour every four years from 776 BC.

For the duration a sacred truce was declared across the Greek world. Athletes competed naked in running, wrestling, boxing, the brutal pankration, and chariot racing; victors won only a wreath of wild olive, but glory and honour at home. The festival ran, remarkably, for more than a thousand years.

How both were lost

In AD 393 the Christian emperor Theodosius banned the Games as a pagan rite, and the sanctuary declined.

The great statue was reportedly carried off to Constantinople and later destroyed by fire; the temple was toppled by earthquakes and buried. In 1954–58 archaeologists found Phidias's actual workshop beside the temple, complete with his tools and a small cup scratched with the words "I belong to Pheidias." And the idea of Olympia never quite died: the modern Olympic Games revived it in 1896.