Bread, circuses and deep-fried pies: a new stadium joins an ancient tradition

Wednesday, 29 April 2026

Where they all began - the ruins of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, site of the original Olympic Games and the inspiration for our love of stadiums. Pictured is a rehearsal for carrying the Olympic torch on its way to Rome for the 1960 games.

Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.

OPINION: The Olympic Games began 3000 years ago in honour of the god Zeus. The games included wrestling, boxing, throwing things and running races. The athletes were all young, male, naked and oiled. Understandably they excited intense religious fervour and the faithful flocked to ogle.

The blue riband event was the Stadion, a straight sprint over a distance of a little under 200 metres. In order to maximise religious-ogling potential, terraces were built on either side of the Stadion, joined by a curving terrace at the finishing end, where the front-on view was reserved for devout dignitaries. And thus the first stadium was born.

Ancient Greece was a collection of city states. Soon all those states had built their own stadia where they could compete against other cities. From that grew the correlation between a city and its stadium.

One of the great stadiums of ancient times, Rome’s Colosseum, complete with people dressed up as Roman centurions milling about outside.

What the Greeks started the Romans continued. Within the vast Roman empire any city worth the name sprouted a stadium. Inevitably the two greatest stadia were built in the greatest city. At the Circus Maximus up to 150,000 could watch chariot racing. At the Colosseum a further 65,000 could watch gladiators fight each other and wild animals. Both charioteers and gladiators developed followings of fans. The word fan derives from the Latin fanum meaning temple: the stadium has always been a place of worship.

The Olympic Games continued to be held every four years for more than a millennium. It was only when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD and frowned on anything pagan that the games fell into decline. In 393 AD they were finally banned by that wowser of wowsers the Emperor Theodosius. But the link between stadia and a spiritual sense of place persists.

Christchurch’s new stadium during its opening weekend.

It was evident in the opening of Te Kaha in Christchurch at the weekend. For three days the congregation flocked. There was a feeling that by having a proper stadium once more the city was in some way whole again. A void had been filled, a need supplied, an identity affirmed. And there was pride in the knowledge that of the five city states in New Zealand, as defined by the Super Rugby competition, Christchurch now has, and will have for years to come, the best of all the stadia. Its terraces form the exact same U-shape as those of the first stadium at Olympia.

It was Juvenal, the Roman poet, who observed that what the people craved above all else was bread and circuses. Juvenal would not have known the rules of rugby but he would have instantly grasped the appeal of its competitive violence. And he would surely have found his way to the stadium restaurant where the head chef hoped over the course of the weekend to sell a thousand of its signature dish, a deep-fried steak pie slapped between two slices of bread.

Juvenal might also have recognised a cod religious element to the occasion. The Crusaders were somewhat clumsily named 30 years ago, in a nod to the city’s Anglican heritage. The name provided the useful metaphor of the team setting out every season on a Crusade of hopeful conquest. What it ignored was that the original Crusades were unjustified acts of aggression. And most of them failed.

Regardless, two truths emerged from a happy weekend. One is the telling fact that the people’s will has seen to it that a fine new stadium has been built while the cathedral still lies in ruins. And then there’s the exposure of the most pervasive of all myths, which is that human nature progresses over time. It doesn’t. Like gravity, it is a universal constant. Bread and circuses.