The path to Olympia’s stadium once passed a row of bronze statues of Zeus. For ancient Greek athletes competing in the Olympic Games, the figures carried a stark warning: cheating could cost money and public standing. Were rule-breakers forced to pay for statues showing them as thieves? Partly, but the statues showed Zeus, not the athletes.
The monuments were called the Zanes, the local plural form of Zeus. The statues themselves have disappeared in time and history, but stone bases remain near the stadium entrance to this date. The second-century traveler Pausanias described them beside the road from the Metroon, a sanctuary dedicated to the Mother of the Gods, toward the stadium. He wrote that fines imposed on athletes who broke contest rules paid for the bronze images.
What the inscriptions said
Pausanias describes six Zanes set up after the 98th Olympiad, generally dated to 388 BC. He says the first inscriptions did not all tell the same story. One declared that Olympic victory came through speed and strength, not money. Another said the image stood as a warning to athletes who broke the rules. The fifth praised the Eleans for fining boxers, while the sixth warned Greeks against paying bribes to secure an Olympic victory.
That distinction is actually quite telling. The Zanes were not portraits of athletes transformed into statues of shame. They were images of Zeus, with inscriptions that spelled out the lesson behind the penalty. Some inscriptions commemorated particular offenses or fines, but Pausanias’s account does not support the claim that every statue depicted or individually identified a cheater. The surviving bases also do not mean every one carried a full account of a case.
The story belongs to a broader record of bribery and corruption at the ancient Games. Pausanias is the principal surviving literary witness for the Zanes, writing centuries after the earliest cases he describes.
Eupolos and the first six statues
Pausanias says the first six Zanes followed a bribery scandal involving Eupolos, a boxer from Thessaly. At the 98th Olympiad, he bribed three other boxers: Agenor of Arcadia, Prytanis of Cyzicus and Phormio of Halicarnassus, who had won at the preceding festival. Pausanias calls it the first known case of an athlete breaking the rules and says the Eleans fined Eupolos and the men who accepted his money.
Two of those first statues were made by Cleon of Sicyon, Pausanias says, he did not know who made the other four. The verses on their bases turned the fine into a message for everyone heading toward the stadium. They connected athletic victory to ability rather than wealth and made clear that officials would punish attempts to buy a result.
That public warning was part of the Games’ larger system of oaths and enforcement, something that shows us how important it was for officials to monitor conduct at the ancient Olympics.
Callippus and a costly dispute
Pausanias recounts another bribery case involving Callippus, an Athenian competing in the pentathlon at the 112th Olympiad, dated to 332 BC. Callippus bribed his fellow competitors. The Eleans fined him and the other athletes involved. Athens sent the orator Hypereides to seek cancellation of the penalty, then refused to pay and boycotted the Games, according to Pausanias.
The dispute ended only after Delphi’s oracle said it would not answer Athenian questions until the fine was paid. Once payment was made, six more images of Zeus were dedicated, with verses recalling the penalty and the oracle’s intervention. The episode shows how a fine could become a public and political matter as well as an athletic one.
Callippus’s case also sharpens the wording: fined athletes helped pay for statues whose inscriptions recorded or condemned cheating. The penalties did not produce bronze portraits of the offenders.
Today, visitors pass the surviving bases near the stadium’s vaulted entrance. The statues of Zanes are the historical evidence of this row and its place at the heart of ancient Olympia. Because of Pausanias we now have the ancient account of the fines and inscriptions that solve the mystery of the surviving bases.
The bronze figures are gone, but the arrangement still suggests how the warning worked. Every competitor approaching the stadium and spectators moving through the sanctuary could see what cheating had cost.
See all the latest news from Greece and the world at Greekreporter.com. Contact our newsroom to report an update or send your story, photos and videos. Follow GR on Google News and subscribe here to our daily email!
