HELLAS IN A HANDBASKET

If you start digging a hole through the earth, and dig it super-fast, and avoid any magma creatures intent on disrupting your journey, and avoid making a right turn at Albuquerque, and successfully make it to the other side, chances are you'll break through in Peking's Bird's Nest Stadium, named after the popular Chinese soup of the same name. But be careful: your newly emerged head will probably be crushed by the cleats of a passing javelinist, for the Olympics will be in full swing.

Like many other important inventions - the catheter, the toaster oven, the League of Nations - the Olympic Games are of ancient Greek provenance. Though in their modern incarnation the Olympics are a regularly recurring opportunity for the nations of the world to come together in a paper-thin display of temporary bohomie, affixed to the restless machinery of geopolitics by the tenuous clear-drying glue of sports, it was not always thus. During the height of classical Hellenic civilization, the Olympics were a chaotic, anarchic bloodbath, to be feared rather than televised.

Like the Marathon, so called after a soldier of the same name who ran 26.whatever miles to deliver a message to the king of Sparta, only to have his head chopped off for his effort, the Olympics are named after actual figures from Greek history. Most of the time they were normal men who walked the streets of Athens and Corinth pursuing their humble careers - milking goats, writing tragedies, forging the science of philosophy and so forth. At intervals, however, these men were afflicted with a disease unique to polytheistic cultures: with little or no warning they suddenly believed themselves to be gods, and ran amok throwing things at people, chasing them as fast as they could, doing flips over them, and embarking upon all manner of exertions in order to prove their divine provenance.

These so-called Olympiacs played havoc on the emerging city-states of the Peloponnesian peninsula until a young go-getter by the name of Plato, annoyed at being constantly interrupted in his wine-drinking and boy-shtupping by this form of mass calisthenic hysteria, developed a plan. He told the city leaders of Athens to build a giant holding pen on the outskirts of the city, which would eventually be called a "stadium" (from the Greek "sta-" or "stay," and "deus" or "god"). Happy for any opportunity to get Plato to shut up, the city leaders immediately complied.

Once all the spear-chucking, ball-swinging, back-stroking loonies were quarantined, however, a strange thing began to happen. Over a period of a few weeks, they would begin to organize into groups and compete directly with each other in order to prove who was the most godlike. The losers would be bludgeoned to death by the winners with cudgels made of whatever mineral was near at hand - in the case of the wealthy city of Athens, this tended to be gold, silver, and bronze. The victors would wear their cudgels around their necks as trophies. Once all of the losers were extinguished, the remaining competitors would become placid and docile, and long to return to their goat-milking or socratic dialoguing or what have you. Until, of course, about four years later, when the competitive spirit, pent up in common life, would return for another outbreak of this strange mental illness. The four-year schedule on which this happens was discovered by Archimedes, with the help of his Antikytheras Mechanism.

The popular Olympic delusion still exists, but for the most part it is sublimated within the strictures of the modern Games themselves. Every once in a while, though, a flavor of the ancient spirit sneaks through. After witnessing a crowd of Chinese dancers riding roughshod over a scale model of the earth, is it any surprise that a jealous Russian government sent tanks into the peach-growing nation of Georgia to make a big noise over the pisspot backwater of South Ossuary? Nowadays it's not the individuals but the nations who believe that they're gods.