περίοδος

The periodos — literally "the circuit" — was the informal but culturally definitive achievement of winning all four Panhellenic crown games in succession or within a reasonable period. The four festivals were the Olympic Games at Olympia (in honor of Zeus, held every four years), the Pythian Games at Delphi (in honor of Apollo, every four years, offset from the Olympics), the Isthmian Games at Corinth (in honor of Poseidon, every two years), and the Nemean Games at Nemea (in honor of Zeus, every two years). Their combined cycle meant that a Greek athlete of sufficient age and fitness might attempt the full circuit over a period of four to five years. The athlete who completed it was called a periodonikas — a victor of the circuit.

The word periodos is built from the preposition peri, meaning "around," and hodos, meaning "way" or "road." A periodos was originally simply a journey that returned to its starting point — a circuit, a round trip. The word was used for orbits of celestial bodies, for recurring intervals of time, and for the rhetorical device of the well-rounded sentence (which returns, at its end, to the thought with which it began). In English, "period" descends directly from periodos — first as a unit of time (a cycle that completes itself) and then, by metonymy, as the punctuation mark that ends a sentence, since a sentence period was originally the full rhetorical circle of a completed thought.

The periodonikas occupied a unique position in Greek athletic culture. Pindar, the great victory-ode poet, celebrates periodic victors with his highest praise, and the adjective he typically deploys for the greatest champions — those who have won the four — is not merely "victorious" but closer to "luminous" or "blessed by the gods." To win the crown at Olympia (wild olive), Delphi (laurel), Isthmia (pine or celery), and Nemea (wild celery) was to have been present at each of the four great sacred landscapes of Greece: the valley of Elis, the mountainside of Parnassus, the isthmus between two seas, and the plain of the Argolid. The periodos was geographical as much as athletic.

The most celebrated periodonikas of antiquity were Theagenes of Thasos, who reportedly won more than 1,400 crowns across his career, and Milo of Croton, whose six consecutive Olympic wrestling victories became legendary. Diagoras of Rhodes, celebrated in Pindar's most famous Olympic ode, was himself a periodonikas whose sons and grandsons also won Panhellenic crowns, creating a dynasty of circuit victors that prompted a Spartan in the crowd to shout, according to the story, that Diagoras should die now, for he could not ascend higher without becoming a god. The periodonikas was the greatest a mortal athlete could become — and the periodos was the path that led there.