Nemea Stadium: One of the most celebrated sporting arenas of the ancient world

A bronze figurine of the infant Opheltes is displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Nemea, while the principal version of the myth is illustrated by a Roman-period sarcophagus exhibited in the Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth. According to another version of the myth, the games were established by Hercules himself after slaying the lion that was terrorizing the area, thus completing the first of the twelve labours assigned to him by Eurystheus, king of Mycenae.

First held in 573 BC, the Nemean Games were among the four most important sporting events of antiquity, after the Olympic, the Pythian and the Isthmian Games. The stadium of Nemea was built in 330 BC and had a capacity of 40,000 people. Excavations for the discovery of the stadium began in 1974, when the stone section of the starting line that divided the track into twelve lanes was uncovered. 

Looking at the stadium today, one can easily envisage the athletes entering through the surviving vaulted entrance, one of the oldest semi-circular domes in the Mediterranean. Its walls, as a matter of fact, bear inscriptions that the ancient athletes had engraved, as they waited for their turn to compete.