Olympic Glory for a Princess

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0:04Dana Schwartz:Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Menke. Listener discretion advised. One quick announcement before we start today's podcast. If you are a listener of this show, you might be interested in the fact that I have a book coming out in May. It's a book by S.D. Coverley, which is a pseudonym, very cleverly, of my first initials transposed, that I co-wrote with a friend of mine. And the book is called The Arcane Arts. It's a dark academia, sort of romantic fantasy novel about magic and a graduate student and a professor doing illegal secret magic. It's a really fun, sexy adventure thriller time, not for kids, which is also part of the pseudonym explanation.

0:55But if you're a listener of the show, I really think you would like it. And if you're interested in it at all, I would beg you actually, please, to pre-order it. Pre-orders are the number one way you can support an author. If you have friends writing books, really forgo their Christmas and birthday and anniversary gifts, just pre-order their books. So look it up, The Arcane Arts. It's in the episode description, a link. And if you're interested, please pre-order. Thank you so much. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II of England achieved a major coup. At the Royal Ascot, she won the Gold Cup with her horse, whose name in fittingly nonsensical fancy horse fashion was named Estimate.

1:44The Royal Ascot consists of many different horse races, but the Golden Cup is the oldest and arguably the most prestigious. So winning was certainly a feather in Queen Elizabeth's well-structured pastel-colored hat. But it's not the only race her horses have won. Queen Elizabeth's horses have given her over two dozen Royal Ascot victories across decades, from a horse named Choir Boy in 1953 to, more recently, a horse named Tactical in 2020. Queen Elizabeth II's daughter, Princess Anne, shared the late queen's interest in horses. In 1976, Princess Anne actually competed at the Olympics in Montreal in the equestrian events.

2:36Unfortunately for Princess Anne, though she came in seventh in dressage during the cross-country event on the second day of the equestrian competition, Her horse got bogged in mud and fell, with Anne riding him after hitting a fence. Anne suffered a concussion, but they managed to finish the course, albeit with no hopes of making it to the podium. Even so, I think you'll agree there's still something dazzling about a princess at the Olympics. Romantic, even. But would you believe me if I told you that Princess Anne wasn't actually the first princess to compete in those prestigious games? In fact, someone had beaten her to it by more than a thousand years.

3:26I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Nobleblood.

3:36The Olympics as they exist today, literally today in Italy as I record this podcast, are actually relatively more modern than you might think. The Olympics as we know them only came about in 1896. But a lot of the imagery, like the laurel leaves that are used now on the medals, and a lot of the events purposefully harken back to the ancient Olympics in Greece. Incidentally, in order to pay respect to that, Greece is always allowed to go first in the procession of countries during the opening ceremony, while everyone else mostly goes in alphabetical order. The ancient Olympics date back to 776 BC, when we have the first recorded victor, Koroibos of Elis, who won a foot race.

4:30Technically, the entire competition was known as the Panhellenic Games, with festivals taking place at multiple locations around Greece. But the largest and most prestigious competition was at Olympia, the Olympics, honoring Zeus. It was the festival at Olympia that took place every four years, with the other games at Isthmus, Nemea, and Delphi held in between. The Panhellenic games continued for a millennia, even through the second century after Greece came under Roman rule. In 373, the Roman emperor Theodosius I banned the festivals as pagan, But inscriptions and literary sources indicate that the games continued on into the early 5th century.

5:24And it truly was a pan-Hellenic event, uniting people from various city-states and athletes from all over the Greek Empire, since the competition was open to all free-born Greeks, whether they be Athenian, Corinthian, Spartan, what have you. But it's Sparta that we're actually most interested in today, particularly one Spartan athlete, Siniska, a princess who became the first woman to ever win at the Olympic Games. Unfortunately, as is the case for a lot of women in ancient history, much of what we know about Sinisca's life comes from filling in the empty spaces in the stories of the men in her life.

6:14Her father was King Archidemus II of Sparta, and she was likely born around 440 BC. We're not even certain that Sinisca's real name was actually Sinisca. It's possible it was a nickname. Its translation is like female puppy or little hound, and it's likely the feminization of her grandfather's nickname, which had been Siniskos. If Siniska was a nickname, it probably communicated that she was a sporty and athletic girl who enjoyed hunting. And though as daughter of a king, she was certainly born into a position of exceptional privilege, Spartan women were actually comparatively given more freedom than their Athenian counterparts.

7:04Spartan women could legally own and inherit property, and from anecdotes about Spartan soldiers receiving letters from their mothers, we can infer that women could read and write. A lot of what we know about Spartan women comes from people in other places writing about them. From the outside, their reputation was as promiscuous and domineering, loud, dominant, sexual. The poet, Propacious, wrote about how much he wished his own mistress felt free to openly live with him, like a Spartan woman who would walk out in public with her lover. And, as you might imagine from what ideas you have about Sparta, maybe from a film, and the fact that this episode is about the Olympics, Spartan women were also quite athletic.

7:58Young men in Sparta were required to train in state-sponsored athletic programs. It's very possible that there were similar programs in place for young women. Though they wouldn't be training in combat, there were laws requiring women to be, quote, fit as their brothers, and young, unmarried women could be horseback riding, wrestling, running, and doing what we consider to be track and field events. Of course, all that gallivanting around stops when you get married. But while other young women in Greek city-states might get married around 14, almost certainly to someone much older, young women in Sparta were getting married around 18 or later.

8:46to men around their age. But before we start imagining Sparta as some comparatively feminist paradise, it's important to remember the only reason young Spartan women were free from the confines of domestic labor in the way their, say, Athenian counterparts weren't was because Sparta had a robust system of slavery, where most of the population was enslaved. So when we're talking about Spartan women, most people aren't thinking of the many, many women in Sparta who were quite literally enslaved and had none of the freedoms we're talking about. But we can imagine that Sinisca, as a free woman whose father was king and whose brothers would be kings after him, grew up privileged, active, athletic, running around and competing alongside other young women, with the relative freedom that came from not needing to marry extremely young.

9:52But Siniska wanted to compete on a bigger stage.

9:59Siniska might have been a Spartan woman, but she was still a woman, which meant that she wouldn't actually be allowed to compete in the Olympics. There's actually a pretty healthy debate among historians today still about whether or not women were even allowed to attend the Olympic festival at all, even as spectators. But there was a loophole for Sinisca. Women could technically compete in the Olympics in the chariot races. They couldn't be the ones driving the chariots, but they could be the ones who owned and trained the horses. And in the chariot races, the person who owned and trained the horses was the actual competitor.

10:47Why did Sinisca enter the Olympics? Well, according to some sources, she was encouraged to compete by her brother, the future king Agesilaus II. It seems like a nice, encouraging, brotherly thing to do. But according to some contemporary sources, Agesilaus was actually a sporting purist who thought that chariot racing as an Olympic event was fundamentally unmanly and only showed off how wealthy someone was. Winning just because you were able to own and train fast horses was, quote, victory without merit. And so, according to some, he encouraged his sister to enter the competition in order to prove that the entire thing was a sham, to shame any men who might want to compete.

11:38After all, how legitimate could their sport be if a mere woman might be able to win? But we have to take those accounts with a grain of salt. The writers almost certainly had their own agendas, and in my personal opinion, that seems like the sort of post-hoc anecdote designed to make Agesilaus look manly and clever after the fact. Because in truth, after Siniska won, he certainly didn't do a see-girl-stink victory lap. She became famous and honored and made their family all the more famous and acclaimed. If he did convince her to enter the chariot race, it's distinctly possible he just believed in his sister, wanted her to win, and wanted to use an Olympic champion sister to bolster up his own career in

12:33Dana Schwartz:politics. Whatever the motivation, in 396 BC, Siniska entered the Olympic competition with a team of four horses that she had trained herself. She won. Four years later, in 392, she entered again, second time, and again, came in first place. Historians aren't sure whether she was actually even allowed to be present at the Olympic event where she won. As I mentioned earlier, there's still healthy scholarly debate about whether women or maybe unmarried girls were allowed to attend the Olympics. But when she did, and in order to commemorate her victory, Sinisca commissioned a set of bronze statues for the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, statues of herself, her charioteer, and the horses that ran them to victory.

13:32She accompanied the statues with a plinth and an inscription, quote,

13:55A monument commemorating her victory with the same inscription was erected in Sparta. And though the hero shrine at the Plaintree Grove in Sparta had previously only ever been an honor granted to Spartan men, mostly kings, Sinisca became the first woman to receive that honor too. It's a legacy that proves that when Sinisca achieved victory at the Olympics, just like today, her countrymen back home were extremely proud of her.

14:37That's the story of Siniska, the first woman to ever win at the Olympics. We'll keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about what made the ancient Olympics special.

14:59It's a commonly repeated misconception that during the ancient Olympics, everyone called off their wars. It's not quite true. Not even the promise of a fun discus event could stop warfare in the ancient world. But the Olympic truce was a real thing. The truce, or echakiria, translates to the holding of hands, and it was inscribed on a bronze disc displayed at Olympia. As I said, it didn't necessarily mean that the countries themselves weren't fighting. That might have been the idea promoting peace among the Greeks, But what the Olympic truce really did was serve to protect athletes and religious pilgrims who were making their way to Olympia to compete or to watch.

15:51Whether they were traveling through enemy territories or war zones, if someone was coming to the Olympics, they were permitted to travel in peace. Grim and mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Height, and Julia Milani The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk with supervising producer Rima Ilkayali and executive producers Aaron Menke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick For more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

17:08Dana Schwartz:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.