Ἑλλανοδίκαι

The Hellanodikai were the supreme officials of the ancient Olympic Games, a panel of judges drawn exclusively from the citizen community of Elis — the city-state that administered the sanctuary at Olympia. Their number varied across the centuries: sources record panels of two, nine, ten, and ultimately twelve judges, reflecting changes in the political organization of Elis as much as in the administrative needs of the festival. They were appointed from the Elean aristocracy, trained for ten months before each Olympiad in the customs and rules of the games, and during the festival they were distinguished by robes of purple, the color of authority. Their word was final.

The compound name is built from Hellēn (Greek) and dikē (justice, judgment), making the Hellanodikai literally "those who judge among the Greeks" or "the Greek judges." Dikē was among the most important words in Greek moral and legal vocabulary — it named not only the judicial verdict but the underlying principle of rightness and due proportion on which a just verdict rested. The goddess Dikē was a daughter of Zeus and the personification of justice; her name is the root of the English words syndicate, theodicy, and paradigm. To be a Hellanodikos was to exercise, in a bounded domain, something of divine Dikē's authority.

Their powers were extensive. Before the Games, the Hellanodikai administered the oaths of competitors and determined eligibility — whether an athlete was freeborn, a Greek, and had completed the required ten months of pre-Games training in Elis. During the competitions, they supervised events, observed infractions, and imposed penalties immediately. The principal penalty was flogging, administered on the spot by whip-bearing officials called mastigophoroi. They also heard post-event protests and imposed fines on city-states whose athletes or representatives misbehaved. The fines were used to commission bronze statues of Zeus — the Zanes — which lined the approach to the stadium, bearing inscriptions that shamed the wrongdoer for every subsequent Olympiad.

Their authority extended to the most politically sensitive decisions of the festival. When Alexander I of Macedon wished to compete at Olympia in the fifth century BCE, his Hellenic ancestry was disputed; the Hellanodikai ruled on the question and admitted him. When a competitor in the wrestling at a later Olympiad began to die from a joint-lock but his opponent refused to release him, and the dying man tapped out just before death while simultaneously extending his finger in the submission gesture, the Hellanodikai debated the result and awarded the victory posthumously to the dead man. These were not administrators but adjudicators in the full philosophical sense, exercising judgment where rules ran out.