Crowning achievements The MFA looks at the Olympics — and Mount Olympos BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

It has always been a source of nagging bewilderment to me how ancient Greece, the same luminous culture that gave the world the Oresteia, Plato, and democracy, could also be steeped in a cosmology of capricious, small-minded deities. Could the same audiences who thrilled to see Antigone possibly believe that Apollo rode a chariot across the sky each day, or that Zeus, omnipotent and supreme, raped an unsuspecting Leda in the form of a dazzling white swan? How does Greek mythology, forerunner of soap operas and reality TV, square with what many regard as the Western world’s most original and fecund civilization?

A version of that long-standing puzzlement dogged me again as I took in the marvelous new show at the Museum of Fine Arts that celebrates the return of the Summer Olympic Games to Greece starting next Friday. It’s the first time since their modern revival, in 1896, that the games will take place in the land of their origin. And "Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit" offers up an enthralling collection of more than 180 objects, most of them culled from the museum’s own outstanding collection of Greek and Roman artifacts. They pay tribute to the javelin and discus throwers, the sprinters and marathoners, the wrestlers and pugilists who competed in the Olympics of millennia past.

In addition to the delights you’d expect — the stylized red- and black-figure narratives of competing athletes painted onto drinking cups and vases and mixing bowls — are many that you probably wouldn’t. A shimmering gold olive wreath that was buried with a Macedonian aristocrat looks so finely made, you wouldn’t be surprised to see it flit off like a butterfly. No less mesmerizing is an inscribed golden bowl that we’re told was dedicated at Olympia by the rulers of Corinth. A different kind of surprise is in store when you discover the strigil, a curved metal instrument that looks like a bent spatula. Athletes used it to scrape from their bodies the olive oil that, along with a dusting of sand and whatever sweat they worked up, was all they wore in competition. This was before corporate sponsors.

"Games for the Gods" is organized into four categories: the games’ origins; the events themselves (running was the original competition); training and preparation; and victory. And it’s in relation to the games’ origins that one begins to make sense of the presence of Zeus and Hermes and Athena. For one thing, the Olympic Games were actually part of a network of formal, widely publicized athletic competitions. (It isn’t long before you get the sense that the ancient world had as many leagues and divisions per sport as our own.) The oldest and most prestigious event dates back to 776 BC and took place at Olympia, in the northern Peloponnesos. But the competitions at Delphi (the Pythian Games), Nemea, Isthmia, and Athens were close runners-up for the fame and fortune they bestowed on the victors (and their towns).

In each case, the games were dedicated to the god of the city state: Apollo at Delphi, Poseidon at Isthmia, Zeus at Olympia and Nemea, Athena at Athens. (The Athenians embellished their games with such pageants as a male beauty contest and a regatta.) So the almost casual commingling of named deities and anonymous athletes on bas reliefs and vessels and coins comes as no surprise. We learn from the lucid and handsome catalogue for "Games for the Gods" that one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (lost to a fire in Constantinople in the fifth century), Pheidias’s 42-foot gold-and-ivory statue of Zeus, greeted the athletes and spectators at Olympia. Among the highlights of the exhibition is a sober, bearded, seemingly somnolent marble head of a curly-haired Zeus (Late Classical period, 350-340 BC) that’s believed to have been modeled on Pheidias’s colossal statue. However, Zeus looks less like the incarnation of power and wrath than does another marble head in the exhibit, that one a portrait of Socrates from five centuries later (170-95 AD).

The worship of sport in ancient Greece appears alternately familiar and strange. Familiar is the fanaticism, the training rituals (a month of focused preparation that included attention to strict diets touching on food and sex), the notoriety bestowed on the victors, the pursuit of glory and the body beautiful, the vast abundance of sporting events. And yet the depth and the meaning of athletics in ancient Greece also proves foreign and elusive. The same laurel wreaths that crowned Olympic victors appeared on the exterior of Athenian houses when a male child was born — indicating that existence itself was synonymous with being recognized as a prize winner.

It isn’t hard to make sense of the frequent appearance of Herakles (Hercules) as a symbol of manly prowess and thereby as a symbol of the athletic ideal and Greek culture. The son of Zeus and the mortal Alkmene, Herakles was a superhero both by birth and by achievement. His 12 labors ("atholi," or contests), notably his wrestling of the Nemean lion, were regarded as the cornerstone of the games of Nemea. In the exquisite small statue of Herakles, a 22-inch affair in marble that dates from Rome (AD 117-138) and is believed to be based on a Greek original from the fifth century BC, you see both his godliness and his humanity. He’s mature and thickly muscular, with the skin of the Nemean lion draped across his left arm. Only the son of Zeus could have wrestled the lion with his bare hands, and yet the hero has to steady himself on a tree stump. For all his strength, he’s exhausted.

Neither is the presence of Eros difficult to fathom. Only men participated in these games; unmarried women were lucky if they got to watch, and for married women, it was out of the question. Apart from the charioteers, the competitors performed in the nude, and the official older male mentor of the boy athlete was called the "lover" ("erastes") while the boy was called the "beloved" ("eromenos"). As for Hermes, god of travelers, commerce, and persuasion, he appears, svelte and strong if worn away by time, as a figure in the center of an early Roman relief, as a bust in a far simpler and far older style from the Late Archaic period (480 BC), and again as a sophisticated figure in a second-century AD marble Roman statue based on a fifth-century Greek original. Hermes was Zeus’s messenger, an indefatigable runner, so he was important to sprinters and marathoners. But he was even more important to those who traveled; busts of Hermes dotted the crossroads of ancient Greece. He also conducted the souls of the dead to the underworld, serving those who no longer had bodies.

And of course, these games, at Olympia and elsewhere, were rooted in funeral games, as we know from Homer’s description of the many athletic contests that accompany the funeral of Patroklos in the Iliad and from the two large Etruscan frescoes around which "Games for the Gods" is grouped. In other words, the body worship, the skill sharpening, the adulation and the prowess of the Greek athlete, belonged both to this world and to the next. What our own time and culture deny us access to is what the Greeks knew about lastingness: our experience on earth is our only taste of immortality. You have only to compare the bodies and the attitudes of the terra-cotta statue of an athlete tying a ribbon around his head from the Late Hellenistic era (100-50 BC) or the Roman bronze-and-copper boxer (AD 50-70) to the figure of Hermes to appreciate how interchangeable they are. For the Greeks, the strength of every athlete evoked the gods.

"Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit"

In the Torf Gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through November 28.