NEH Olympics: Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter

Happy Opening Day of the 2024 Summer Olympics!!

When the Olympics got started up again in 1894 by the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, he adopted as a motto a phrase he'd heard from his friend Henri Didon, the headmaster at Arcueil College in Paris: CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS, a string of Latin comparative adverbs meaning "Faster, higher, stronger." In 2021, the International Olympic Committee decided to add to it: CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS - COMMUNITER.

"Faster, higher, stronger - together...recognizes the unifying power of sport and the importance of solidarity," they said. I just saw these things in action, but not at the actual Olympics. I spent the last few weeks of July co-teaching a K-12 Institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities: the Ancient Olympics and Daily Life in Ancient Olympia: A Hands-on History.

Before I get into the great fun and learning we had, let me back up a couple of years to when my colleague Robert Holschuh Simmons of Monmouth College and I conceived of the project. Bob and I had met at the 2020 summer conference of the American Classical League in New York City. After attending my session on STEM in classics, he approached me to chat. I mentioned that I had read his article discussing his classics day activities. Thus, we forged a professional friendship based on shared interests of approaching classics from a hands-on history perspective. Later, Bob invited me to Monmouth to deliver the 2022 annual Bernice L. Fox classics lecture. Shortly afterward, Bob asked if I had ever thought about sharing my knowledge with teachers in a more substantial way: a summer institute of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I was very familiar with NEH institutes having done a couple of these intense summer workshops myself. I had indeed thought that my Roman technology lessons would make a good summer institute, but I knew I didn't really have a local university to partner with. Bob too had thought about how he could expand the activities he did at his classics day Since the summer Olympics would be starting right before our proposed workshop would happen, we decided that it would be an apt frame for our combined work: Bob would teach participants how to recreate the original Olympic contests, and I would focus on the goings-on around the small religious sanctuary town of Olympia.

As we started looking into the grant process, we realized that we had a MASSIVE project on our hands. We downloaded the application and got started! We had to answer a long series of questions, write a budget, develop a plan of work, and collect letters of support from speakers, all the while as we planned our two-week residential program - the process took about 8 months to complete. Some days, we worked via Zoom or Google Meet, other days we worked alone. By February of 2023, it was all due. We were asking for $175,000!! Then, we waited...for nearly 6 months to see if we got the grant. Our odds were not good. We had heard that fewer than 50% of applications get approved. But when August 15 came around, we learned via email that we had won! Then, the real work started.

First, we needed to promote our institute to teachers whom we thought would want to come. One of my first jobs was to create a Website for the program. Then, Bob and I had a series of meetings with the NEH administrators and other grantees to talk about what we needed to do for the next 8 months to prepare for the arrival of our participants to Bob's school, Monmouth College.

Everyone at Monmouth College, nay the entire town, is a nice human being! Maybe that's part of the town's legacy. Founded by Presbyterians in the 1800s, the school twice focused on women's education when the male students went off to wars. In the early 1870s, two young female students decided that they wanted to have their own fraternity so they founded it. The original Kappa Kappa Gamma House sits right near campus, proving that they succeeded. I had a fantastic time exploring the history of the town and campus.

Bob and I were excited and nervous to welcome our teachers to the school! Bowers Dormitory served as our home away from home - like going back to college. The campus is so, so beautiful. My favorite time of day was 6 PM because that's when the bell tower played a song for us. I spent many an early morning walking around the campus taking pictures of lovely things like stag beetles hanging onto brick walls, the meditative labyrinth, the front columns of Wallace Hall, and the bronze motto plate near the fountain commemorating the school's motto: LUX (Latin for "light"). Participants enjoyed walking all over town the size of which made that practice possible. In addition to being famous for its college, the town also hosted speeches of both 1858 Illinois senate seat candidates, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.

As promised, Bob taught the Olympic contests, and it was so fun to watch our adventurous teachers try them out. Using images from ancient Greek pottery and careful readings of ancient Greek writers, they recreated the methodology of discus and javelin throws, foot positions for running, rein ties for chariot racing, and even pankration-style wrestling. One of the most interesting contests to watch was the long jump. Done in ancient times with special hand weights called halteres, the long jump seemed impossible! The ancient record was 55 feet, an absolute impossibility especially using these hand weights, but that didn't keep our participants from trying. Near the end of our time, Bob led our teachers in recreating the Olympic Games on a large soccer field near Monmouth. (We had to share the Monmouth sports fields with a practicing football team who looked askance at me while playing my home-made AULOS, or double pipes.)

Mornings were for competing in Olympic contests, but afternoons were spent working on hands-on history activities such as weaving, foraging for and using oak galls to mix ink, making and decorating pottery, and talking about how to bring the ancient world to life for students. My favorite activity was an old one from Project Archaeology that has students reflect on how pottery sherds are used to reconstruct the context of an archaeological site. After learning some basics of ancient Greek and Roman pottery identification, our teachers decorated their own tiny terracotta pots with iconography that was meaningful to them. After they turned them in to us, my trusty assistants Megan Dailey and Olivia Matlock (both current classics students) helped me to crack them and remove a couple of sherds. The pots were given back to different participants to reconstruct and make sense of. 

All the while during the two weeks, our teachers were researching and developing their own lessons about the content they were learning. Our K-12 liaison and project specialist Micheal Posey was instrumental in helping them forge these amazing ideas into full-fledged units of study for their students. The culminating projects of our participants were FANTASTIC - Olympic recreations, classics day activities, original Latin stories, and all kinds of wonderful things. You can see all the projects here. By the end of our time together, the COMMUNITER part of the Olympic motto was the most important. Together, we spent two weeks learning about an ancient world with such important influence on our modern world.  As I watch the Olympics during these next two weeks, I'll be thinking about a special group of NEH Olympians that took learning CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS!