Today’s Olympic games are the biggest multi-national pastime occurring every four years, determining who is the best athlete at a countless multitude of sports, but the original purpose for the Olympics was to celebrate the birthday of the king of Gods, Zeus. This festival was a huge celebration of the gods who watched over them, specifically Zeus, and was by far the most important festival in the ancient Greek culture. Many festivals were held in ancient Greece and all of them were important to the ancient Greek culture, but the Olympics were of much higher importance than the other festivals. The festivals of the ancient Greeks were held, for the most part, for religious purposes or as a social activity and religious aspects focused on the act of sacrificing food and wine to the gods while …show more content…
Homer depicted a festival dedicated to Poseidon in book three of the Odyssey; The festival consisted of the men there, nine groups of five hundred, butchering nine oxen per group. While they cooked the main course, the men ate the stomach lining of the bulls. The men the burnt the best thigh pieces for Poseidon and spilt their wine for him before they feasted in his name (“Festivals”). Ceremonies of this sort were commonplace in ancient Greece, because it held such cultural importance to appease their gods with offerings of the best meat and wine. Most of the festivals of Greece followed this type of ritualistic behavior of sacrificing meat to the gods, spilling their wine, and then feasting; The Olympics heightened this behavior to an extreme because it was the biggest and most important festival of the time. Anyone from Greece could come and watch or even be a part of the Olympics. The sacrifice at the end of the games was much bigger than the regular sacrifices, seeing as over one hundred oxen. Paul Cartledge, a British ancient historian who was the professor of Greek culture at the University of