Robert Dover

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Gay

DOB: 7 June 1956

Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish

Nationality: American

Occupation: Olympic equestrian athlete, entrepreneur, presenter, reality star, activist, coach

Baron de Coubertin's 1892 speech was what led to the establishment of the modern Olympic Games, beginning in 1896.  But it wasn't the first time someone had suggested it.  In 1833, Panagiotis Soutsos, a Greek nationalist, published Dialogues of the Dead, in which the ghost of Plato spoke to the Greek nation, which had recently gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire.

Where are all your theatres and marble statues?

Where are your Olympic Games?

Soutsos wrote to the Minister of the Interior, suggesting that they revive the ancient Olympics and hold them every four years, with four rotating host cities – Athens (the new capital), Tripoli (in the heart of the Peloponnese), Messolongi (a resistance stronghold during the war), and the island of Hydra (which had provided naval forces that had been essential in fighting the Turks).  Olympia was not an option – it was a ruin, with only a few walls and columns left, and covered up in silt.

For the last three centuries, European had been reinterpreting and reimaging the ancient Olympics, in various forms and for various causes, using its imagery and language and even staging their own Olympic Games.  Soutsos' idea was tied to the Greek nationalist cause, but there were many others.  Soutsos, however, was the first to call for an actual revival of the games, and Coubertin was the one who made it happen.

The usual history of the Games says that the Roman Emperor Theodosius I banned the games in 392 AD by an edict.  Over the next two centuries, Olympia was destroyed by fire and neglect.  In the 400's and 500's, earthquakes and river flooding broke down most of the site, and buried it deep in alluvial silt.  The remains of the buildings were scavenged for stone, and the metal braces & dowels that held the columns together.

However, Theodosius' real target was pagan practices, in particular Rome's old polytheistic state religion, with its temples, sanctuaries and oracles, and its offerings & sacrifices to the gods.  His edict was not fully enforced, as the army was dealing with a civil war, and also a border war with the Goths.

So the Games probably continued on a lower level, and gradually petered out, due to the hostility to its religious practices & associations.  A Byzantine historian called Lucian (date unknown) wrote, “The Olympic Games...existed for a long time until Theodosius the younger, who was the son of Arcadius.”  This suggests that the Olympics finally ceased under Theodosius II, around 436 AD.

George Kedrenos (1000's Byzantine chronicler) says that the huge gold & ivory statue of Zeus had been taken from its temple at Olympia to the palace of Lausas (in Constantinople), and was destroyed in a huge urban fire around 475 AD.  By then, the Olympian cult was already dead.  Lucian continued, “After the temple of Olympian Zeus had been burnt down, the festival of the Eleans and Olympic contest were abandoned.”

Earthquakes and river flooding in the mid-500's finished it off. However, recent analysis of sediments suggests that tsunamis sent massive waves up the Kladeos River (which runs past the sanctuary). The silts are too thick to have been caused by the river alone, and marine micro-organisms have been found in them.

In the 1500's AD, translations and editions of Greek & Roman texts began to become more widely available in Europe.  For example, in England, in the last quarter of the century, translations of Homer's Iliad, Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, and Herodotus' Histories were made.

The Iliad gave an account of Patroclus' funeral games at the wall of Troy, showing that athletics could be a sacred rite.  Plutarch's Lives told of Alexander the Great's Olympic career.  Herodotus wrote in his Histories that Olympic champions received glory, but not cash prizes: the Persians cry: “Mardonius, what kind of men are these that you have pitted us against?  It is not for money they content but for glory of achievement!”

Later on, Pausanias' Description of Greece gave detailed first-hand accounts of Olympia and the Olympic Games.  (Pausanias was a geographer during the 100's BC.)  “Many are the sights to bee seen in Greece, and many are the wonders to be heard; but on nothing does Heaven bestow more care than on the Eleusinian rites and the Olympic games.”  Europeans at this time didn't quite know why the Olympic Games were held, or exactly why there so important, but they did know that they were extremely important.

This is shown in two of Shakespeare's plays.  In Henry VI, Part 3 (1591/1592), Prince George is trying to rally his Yorkist troops:

And, if we thrive, promise them such rewards

As victors wear at the Olympian games.

In Troilus and Cressida (1602), the elderly Greek Prince Nestor is describing his Trojan rival Hector in battle:

And I have seen thee pause, and take thy breath,

When that a ring of Greeks have hemm'd thee in,

Like an Olympian wrestling.

Michael Drayton (1563-1631) was one of 33 contributors to Anallia Dubrensia (published 1636), a collection celebrating Robert Dover's Cotswold Games.  He hailed Dover as the “great inventor and champion of the English olimpicks.”

Dover was born in Norfolk in 1582, as part of the Catholic gentry.  England was under the rule of the Protestant Elizabeth I (died 1603).  He was educated at Cambridge, and practised law at Gray's Inn at London for a while.  Then he retreated to his small country estate.

He began the Cotswold Games in 1612. They were held in the natural amphitheatre formed by Dover Hill in Chipping Camden (west England), as an act of local patronage and national politics.  Although rural contests & fairs were very common at the time, with local patrons quietly supporting them, the Cotsworld Games were much larger.

There were sports and contests with cash prizes, but also feasting, dancing, games and gambling.  A fake castle was set up on the hill, where a large crowd would gather to watch horse-racing, hare-coursing, wresting & shin-kicking, stick-fighting, and hammer-throwing.

A woodcut of the Cotswold Olimpick Games, originally published on the cover of Anallia Dubrensia (Annals of Dover).  Dover is on horseback, holding a wand.

Dover would introduce the games dressed in the cast-off clothes of King James I (reigned 1603-25), as a deliberate celebration of his rule, and his attitudes towards popular pastimes and games.  This was a very political act, as puritanical, harsh forms of Protestantism were steadily rising, and they opposed this sort of thing.  By the 1630's, puritan landlords & gentry were banning fairs and games on their lands, and closing down rural fairs.

In 1642, the English Civil War broke out, and in 1645 the Puritan Roundheads defeated the Royalists. Dover died in 1652, and the Cotswold Games stopped.  When the monarchy was restored in 1660, they were revived, but the olympick reference was gone, and they were “just another country drunken festival”, even though they remained popular and enthusiastic.

Olympia still had a place in Europe's literary imagination and popular culture.  In 1667, John Milton published the first edition of Paradise Lost, in which he described the flight of Satan's hordes as:

Part on the plain, or in the air sublime,

Upon the wing, or in swift race contend,

As at th' Olympian games on Pythian fields...

The French philosopher Voltaire visited England for a short time in the early 1700's.  He wrote about a sporting festival on the banks of the Thames, “I fancied that I had been transported to the Olympic games.”

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) was a German polymath during the Enlightenment era.  In his Aesthetic Essays, he used the ancient Olympics as an example of “play as an element of the beautiful”.

In 1786, a “burlesque imitation” of the Olympic Games was held, with women competing to have the ugliest smile.  They were “placed on a platform, with horses' collars to exhibit through”, and over their heads was painted: “The uglies grinner shall be the winner.”  The prize was a “gold-laced hat”.

In 1794, The Times reported a chariot race at Newmarket (Suffolk), between Nanny Hodges and Lady Lads, with a prize of 500 guineas.  It was described as “something like a revival of the Olympic Games to supply the turf gentry and the rapid decay of horse-racing.”

Of course, these last two examples were nothing like the ancient Olympics, and there was more information about them by this time.  Gilbert West's Dissertation on the Olympick Games (1749) and Jean-Jacques Barthélemy's Traels of Anacharsis the younger in Greece (1778) were the two best accounts, and were based on a far more scholarly reading of the ancient sources.  But popular usage & culture didn't care much about that.

For the next half-century, popular knowledge of the Olympics came more from the circus than ancient sources.  Even into the 1850's, Olympic spectaculars and re-creations on horseback were performed – Pablo Fanque's travelling Circus Royal (Britain), Madam Macarte's Magic Ring and Grand Equestrian Establishment (Edinburgh), and Franconni's Hippodrome (New York), for example.

Pablo Fanque was the first black British circus-owner.  His “unrivalled equestrian troupe” offered “new and novel features in the Olympian Games.”  Posters for Madam Macarte's circus stated that “the Extraordinary Evolutions of the Gymnastic Professors will forcibly recall to the Classical mind the old Olympian Games.”

Pablo Fanque (born William Darby).

Pablo Fanque at Astley’s Amphitheatre (1847).

The most ambitious Olympic revivalist was Colonel Charles Random, but he was also the least successful.  He came from uncertain social origins, and had an even more uncertain military career.  He bought the extensive grounds of Cremorne House in Chelsea (western London), and in 1831 created “the stadium” – its full title was “The British National Arena for Manly and Defensive Exercises, Equestrian, Chivalric, and Aquatic Games, and Skilful Amusing Pastimes.”

“It has been suggested that Shakespeare may have attended the games (and made reference to the festivities in some of his work)...”

The First Ever English Olimpick Games by British author Celia Haddon, a journalist and former pet advice columnist for The Daily Telegraph, is a sports event history, free again for a limited time courtesy of publisher Endeavour Press.

This was originally published in 2004 by Hodder & Stoughton.

This gives an account of the Jacobean era attempt to revive the ancient Greek Olympic games as a sporting celebration in the English countryside now known as the Cotswold Olimpick Games, founded by lawyer Robert Dover and sponsored by King James I, as well as its enduring legacy as a recurring event for nearly two centuries, and later revival in the 1950s.

Offered worldwide, available at Amazon.

The Suprising British origins of the modern Olympic Games

The ancient Olympic Games ended in the fourth century, when its pagan rituals were no longer tolerated by Christian emperors and the Roman Empire itself was crumbling under the weight of barbarian invasions. The magnificent shrine where the games were held, Olympia, was repeatedly sacked, its treasures destroyed, and its location forgotten by all but local peasants. It would not be for another 1,000 years, during the Renaissance, that Britons would join the European revival of interest in the classical world. Ancient sagas became grist for Shakespeare, while Pindar’s Olympic odes endowed the name of Olympia with a magical talismanic ring.

It was during this period that an extravagant, history-loving lawyer named Robert Dover convened the “Olympick” festival in the green hillsides of the Cotswolds. At the time, in the 1620s, Puritans were attacking England’s traditional rural festivals for promoting gambling, drinking, and lewd behavior. Dover’s Olympicks were an act of defiance against this dour movement, and as an annual event, it lured thousands of spectators of all social classes to sit on muddy hillsides near the village of Chipping Campden. A motley range of sports was on the schedule, including hammer throwing, bear baiting, shin kicking, and the brutally violent “fighting with cudgels,” which left the contestants bloody and toothless (an accidental echo of the goriest of the ancient Greek body contact sports, the pankration).

The entire festival was marked by heavy imbibing of ale and a genial air of license, though Dover also included a “Homeric harpist” in an attempt to lift the tone and thus attract the gentry. One English poet in 1636 hailed Dover as a “Hero of this our Age.” But the exuberant festival could not last. The Cotswold games were canceled in 1642 due to nearby fighting during the civil war. Dover died heartbroken eight years later.