Every four years in ancient Greece, boys and men traveled to Olympia to honor the god Zeus by competing in the Olympic Games. There’s evidence that another sporting event was held at the same stadium every four years—this one for young women and girls.
The event was called the Heraia, and it was a footrace to honor the goddess Hera. Participants competed in different age categories on a shortened version of the men’s Olympic track. The winners received olive-leaf crowns like Olympic victors, and also got a portion of a cow sacrificed to Hera. While there’s little evidence for the Heraia, scholars theorize it may have been a prenuptial initiation ritual.
“I think that Heraia probably is a social rite,” says Nancy Serwint, a professor of ancient art and archaeology at Arizona State University who has written about the Heraia for the American Journal of Archaeology.
“A social introduction rite is, you are leaving childhood and are ready to make the next step into being inducted into a marriageable category,” she says. For unmarried girls, the Heraia may have been “a social introduction into adult society.”
Racing Into Adulthood
Written evidence of the Heraia (sometimes called the Heraea or Heraean Games) comes from an account by Pausanias, a geographer from the second century A.D. who wrote about his travels throughout the Greek world. He wrote that the Heraia dated to “ancient times,” and was associated with Hippodameia, the mythological queen of Pisa, and her desire to thank Hera for her marriage to Pelops.
The only other known evidence for the Heraia are statues that appear to depict female runners wearing the specific costume that Pausanias says Heraia runners wore. One statue is a bronze figure dating from 520 to 500 B.C., and another statue (of marble) dates from 30 B.C. to A.D. 68, suggesting that the Heraia may have lasted for several centuries.
The Heraia runner’s costume is notable because it was normally only worn by men performing strenuous activities like farming, sailing or anything “where you’d build up a sweat,” Serwint says. The outfit was a short tunic or dress that ended right above the knee, and left the right shoulder and breast exposed.
Serwint argues the costume is significant because “cross-dressing is really always part of initiation festivals.” She says the Heraia’s specific outfit suggests “that the Heraia was not just a bunch of girls running around,” but rather an important social ritual in an unmarried girl’s life. At this time, girls may have married by age 14 or 16, so the runners were probably no older than their teens.
“One of the aims of the Heraia was that you hoped to get a good husband, a good marriage,” says Thomas F. Scanlon, an emeritus professor of classics at the University of California, Riverside who has written about the Heraia. The sporting event’s deity, Hera, was the goddess of marriage, even if her own marriage to Zeus was rocky at best.
Some scholars believe the Heraia only involved local girls and women, but Scanlon thinks the Heraia involved free female athletes from all over the Greek world, just as the Olympics brought together free boys and men from different Greek city-states. Even though Pausanias doesn’t specify who could attend the Heraia as a spectator, both Scanlon and Serwint believe only girls and women could attend.
Some scholars have questioned why there is far less evidence for the Heraia compared to the Olympics, which ran from 776 B.C. to A.D. 393. Yet Scanlon argues that we should not see this as unusual. He points to a similar lack of evidence for other girls’ festivals and events, which male Greek authors may have considered less important than those for boys and men.
Footraces for Girls, Horse Training for Married Women
In addition to the Heraia, there is evidence of other local races for unmarried girls throughout the Greek world, especially after the founding of the Roman Empire in 27 B.C. In Sparta, where girls as well as boys received physical education, ancient sources appear to mention races for Spartan girls. Archaeologists have also discovered an inscription at Delphi from around the first century A.D. in which a father honored his three daughters and celebrated their victories in different sporting events.
There was likely no place for married women in sports in ancient Greece, with the notable exception of horse training. Chariot racing was one of the sports men competed in at the Olympics, and although women could not race themselves, they could train horses in preparation for the race.
This opportunity was only open to wealthy women who could afford to sponsor chariots, but it was also the only way women could “win” an Olympic event. The first known woman to win an Olympic race by sponsoring a chariot was the Spartan princess Cynisca, who was victorious at the Olympics in 396 and 392 B.C. She commemorated her achievement by commissioning a statue that celebrated her as “the first woman of all the Greek women to win an Olympic victory,” Scanlon says.
Cynisca wouldn’t have been able to attend the Olympics to watch her chariot race, nor would any other female chariot sponsor. Although Pausanias wrote that unmarried girls and the priestess of Demeter Chamyne could attend the Olympics, the punishment for any married woman other than the priestess caught attending the games was to be thrown to her death from a mountain.
However, Pausanias also wrote that no woman had ever received this punishment. Apparently, the only known woman caught sneaking into the Olympics had received a pardon from death because her father, brothers and son were all respected Olympic victors.
