Our knowledge of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, throughout their over-a-thousand-year history, is quite rich. It comes from descriptions by ancient Greek writers, depictions of athletic scenes in ancient works of art, and findings from excavations.
The games were connected with the education of the youth and social life in ancient Greece. In the stadiums and wrestling schools, the ancient Greeks cultivated the human personality as a whole to make the individual useful to the state, and thus they managed to shape that wonderful physical type that only Greek antiquity left us, such as the Hermes of Praxiteles, the Antikythera Youth, or the Doryphoros of Polykleitos.
However, if we imagine the ancient Olympic Games as something ideal, a "pristine" athletic institution where young people engaged in noble competition, having harmoniously developed body and mind, to win an olive branch, we are mistaken. The truth is that in this field (sports) various aspects of human behavior are presented: nobility, ethics, culture, but also vanity, greed, bribery, fraud, envy. Philological research, based on the texts of ancient Greek writers, sheds light on the backstage, offering a rich harvest of the unseen sides of the Olympic Games as it brings to the forefront the military conflicts for control of the games, cases of political exploitation of victory, either by states and rulers or by athletes, illegal naturalizations of athletes, briberies and financial transactions, violations of regulations, deceiving of judges, acts of violence, as well as the use of Olympia and the games for the legitimization of illegal acts by rulers, massacres, and acts of conquest.