Our knowledge of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, in their long history, is quite rich. It comes from descriptions by ancient Greek writers, from depictions of athletic scenes in ancient works of art, and from the findings of excavations.
The games were connected to the education of young people and to social life in ancient Greece. In the stadiums and wrestling grounds, the ancient Greeks cultivated the human personality as a whole in order to make the individual useful to the city-state, and for this reason they managed to shape that wonderful physical type that only ancient Greece left us, like the Hermes of Praxiteles, the Ephebe of Antikythera, or the Satellite of Polyclitus.
However, if we imagine the ancient Olympic Games as something ideal, an "unbreakable" athletic institution where young people engaged in noble competition, having harmoniously developed their body and mind in order 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, offers 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, bribery and financial dealings, violations of regulations, deception of judges, acts of violence, as well as the use of Olympia and the games to legitimize illegal acts of rulers, massacres, and conquest actions.