The palaestra at Olympia (Greek παλαίστρ-α, -αι, "wrestling ground or grounds," Latin palaestr-a, -ae, with Greek ἐν Όλυμπία, Latin in Olympia) is the ground or grounds in ancient Olympia where πάλη, Doric πάλα, "wrestling," was taught and performed for training purposes; i.e., "wrestling-school." Two other martial arts were taught there: Greek πυγμή (pygme), Latin pugnus, "fist, boxing," and Greek παγκράτιον, Latin pancration or pancratium, "any method," which was free-style, or hand-to-hand, including grappling, kicking, punching, or any unarmed method whatever, no holds barred. The latter was sometimes deadly, or disfiguring (with permission), which indicates that the arts were ephebic, or "soldier" training for prospective citizens of the city-state sponsoring the school, such as Elis, but here combined with prospective candidacy for contention in the games. Be that as it may, none of the games were conducted without rules, umpires, and judges, who did not hesitate to stop contests, fine contenders with in some cases amounts prohibiting future participation, or bar flagrant violators.
The architecture of the martial arts school was standard in the Graeco-Roman world: a hollow square bordered all around by a peribolos ("border"), here a roofed portico, which in turn was bordered by rooms looking inward, and another border outside of it consisting of rooms facing outward, back-to-back with the inner rooms. The outer rooms possibly housed the resident population of athletes-in-training. The layout is standard military similar to that of a camp hospital, which placed patients in the outer rooms and grew medicinal herbs in the quadrangle.
Location The ultimate authority on the features of ancient Olympia is generally considered to be Pausanias, who lived and wrote under the "good emperors" in the 2nd century; that is, he was least subject to imperial ideological terror. His Description of Greek covers his first-hand observations recorded during his expeditionary travels, Olympia being described under Elis, Books 5 and 6. Two passages are especially relevant to the athletic training school: The Town Hall (prytaneion) of the Eleans is within the Atlantis, and it has been destroyed beside the exit beyond the gymnasium. In this gymnasium are the running-tracks (dromoi) and the wrestling-grounds (palaistrai) for the athletes. In the gymnasium at Olympia it is customary for pentathletes (pentathloi) and runners (dromeis) to practise, .... There is also another enclosure (peribolos), less than this, to the left of the entrance to the gymnasium, and the athletes have their wrestling-schools (palaistrai) here. Adjoining the wall of the eastern porch of the gymnasium are the dwellings (oikeiseis) of the athletes, turned towards the southwest.
These passages made it possible for the archaeologists to connect the descriptions of Pausanias to edifices and areas of the excavated site.The building was one of the first uncovered in 1876. By 1892, the publication by Friedrich Adler, Richard Borrmann, and Wilhelm Dörpfeld of Die Baudenkmäler von Olympia identifies the building, tying it to Pausanias 6.21.2. The "exit beyond the gymnasium" has to be either the north exit, leading to the town, or the south exit, leading (at that time) across the Alfeios River. The gymnasion contains dromoi, but the main running course, the stadium, is not near either exit or any building that could be construed to have been a prytaneum. The only other dromoi found are in item 20, near the north exit. The prytaneum then falls into place as item 2.
Pausanias says that the gymnasion included both the dromoi and the palaistrai, and that both dromeis and pentathloi trained there. The pentathlon was a "five-contest" event: long jumping, javelin throwing, disk throwing, short running, and wrestling. Unless Pausanias repeated himself, the dromeis must have been long-race runners, which fact would leave the stadium with no purpose, unless the gymnasion were only for training. The show was held in the stadium.
The palaistra, reserved for "confrontative," or martial arts, was on the left of the entrance to the gymnasion, which must therefore have been the passageway between items 20 and 21, which led through an entrance building. Entrants could then turn left to the palaistrai or right to the dromoi, an area dubbed the gymnasion by the archaeologists for convenience. Both sides were the gymnasion, a name which was sometimes applied also just to the palaistra. Along the eastern side of the dromoi was another roofed portico (stoa) and along its eastern edge more foundations and rubble. This alone could have been the remains of the oikeiseis, or the term might also include the same sort of remains on the east of the palaistra. At this point Pausanias becomes enigmatic, mentioning the oikeiseis that "turned to the southwest," one possibility being that they continued around to the south side of the palaistra.
Pausanias uses both dromoi and palaistrai, plurals. The Greek possibly uses the plural to mean singular in the case of palaistrai, paralleled by English wrestling-grounds for one ground. This may be true for dromoi, but such a view is archaeologically suspicious. The archaeological gymnasion has a south stoa that runs into the brush on the left bank of the Kladieos.
Evidence acquired after 3000 suggests that there was another dromos approximately in the current bed of the river, which is also believed to have been its original, natural location. A water retaining wall termed "the Kladieos Wall" has been found on the right bank of the Kladieos, suggesting that it was once on the left bank, and was for the purpose of rerouting the river to the west, so that the gymnasion could be built into its former location. The wall is classical, but not precisely dateable. When it was no longer maintained the Kladeos broke into its old channel from the north and washed away the western dromos. Most of the wall remains buried, along, no doubt, with foundations of the western portico, now so far below the water table (like the hippodrome) as to be unexcavateable.The wall was long from the north of the gymnasion to the confluence with the Alfeios. It stood high, composed of four layers of oblongoid limestone blocks laid linearly. The base was wide, the top with an outside slope of 77%.
Architecture The question of type The palaestra is very nearly square, missing it but slightly. The length and width are 66.35 m and 66.75 m, with a difference of . The hollow square, however, is square to . Given the tradition of square palaestras, it is safe to say the palaistra was intended to be square by its builders. The square is oriented with its sides approximately perpendicular to the cardinal points (N, S, E, W). However, it missed that orientation by a 2-degree CCW rotation. Some of the features in the plan have the same offset, some have more of an offset, and a few are aligned on the cardinal points. They all seem aligned on something else; i.e., the rotations are not randomly distributed. As they are of different ages, one might conjecture that the builders of each age were capable of better surveying precision and did have a plan in mind.
The tradition that the palaistra was a type of building was already extant in Greek culture before Pausanias. An ideal type was presented by Vitruvius, Roman architect, in De architectura ("On Architecture"), Book 5.11.1 – 5.11.4, although at that time he admitted palaestrae were "not usual in Italy." He thought it best, he said, "to set forth the traditional way," which he believed was Greek. There are certain problems with its credibility. One might well question whether he had actually built any to ideal specifications, or if this is an imaginary model from which to select real features.The sources used here on this topic may be divided into Vitruvius skeptics, who do not offer credibility to Vitruvius when common-sense paradoxes occur, and Vitruvius fundamentalists, who accept what he says as the truth over other evidence and common-sense. The main "skeptics" are and . The reader should beware of the "fundamentalist" habit of presenting hypotheses as though they were the proven truth. An example would be that the gymnasium had a 4-sided portico even though no such conclusion is warranted by the existing archaeology, or that the courtyard of the palaistra was covered uniformly by fine sand when no such sand has been discovered.
Vitruvius constructs a definition of a palaestra, beginning with “a square or oblong peristyle” (peristylia quadrata sive oblonga), which was the preferred plan for any large-area building, as it kept the roof to a minimum and distributed natural daylight to each room.The arch and the dome were known to the Greeks but those elements were limited by failure to solve the sideways-force problem on roof supports, which was finally solved in the cathedrals of the middle ages by buttresses, especially the flying buttress. The ultimate in classical domes was the pantheon, Rome, roofed by a specially lightened concrete structure. Alternatively Greek architects used stone colonnades supporting a wooden pitched roof, but these had to be across the interior, interfering with the space. One answer to the problem was to spread the interior space and the roofing weight over a large area, utilizing the open courtyard, offering a sort of indoor-outdoor style of living. The interior was then available for different purposes, such as a garden in private villas, or a square arena in palaistrai. The square shape of the Olympian palaistra caused a mistaken trend in the classical archaeology of the times to identify any square peristyle as a palaistra. After listing several examples, such as a peristyle room in the building at Paestum dubbed “the asclepion of Paestum,” which turned out on later assessment to have been a dining hall, Emme presents five palaistral plans besides Olympia of which he is certain.These are gymnasia at Amphipolis, Delphi, Delos, Priene, and Eretria.
These six plans (including Olympia) form Emme's base for defining his palaestral type. Four of them are square, one oblong (Amphipolis). Four are aligned with the sides perpendicular to the cardinal direction, one (Delos) with the diagonals perpendicular; i.e., N-S runs from corner to corner. They date from the 4th to the 2nd centuries BC. However, mere quadrature and directionality are insufficient to distinguish the palaistra, as many other buildings have those. Emme goes on to borrow a page from Vitruvius.