WI: Olympics Never Banned

What would it take to convince Emperor Theodosius I not to ban the Olympics in AD 394, and how long could they plausibly last if this were the case? In addition, how would the event change?

My uneducated two cents would be to give the tradition a more Christian feel - perhaps it could be another pagan festival co-opted into the Christian canon of holidays. This may well last it up until the Fourth Crusade (if it's explicitly Orthodox), or all the way to the conquest of Greece by the Ottomanns (if more generically Christian), or perhaps even continuation onwards under Ottomann cosmopolitanism.

...But then again, I'm no expert.

What do you think, guys?
 
It's really unlikely they could survive, even with butterflying this.

Even if not formally banned, the christian view on physical esthetism prevent a glorification of it.

Of course, many pagan features were used and disformed by Christian usage, but it was mainly rural features and in lands where christianisation was incomplete (if not totally absent).

Olympics are not only an aristocratic festivity and explicitly based on hellenic religion, but aslo in one of the aeras the most christianized.
 
I wonder if the Olympiad calendar system would be retained, and end up the common calendrical system in common use around the world. It might have been considered prestigious enough to have resisted the onslaught of the "Anno Domini" system.
 
During the late 500s AD, Greece was undergoing intense turmoil from Slav and Avar raids. Given such a crisis, it's bound to die out.

Hell, it probably died out or was vastly diminished before Theodosius.
 
I'm thinking "vastly diminished". The prestige of the Olympic games had already fallen from its height in the Hellenistic age. You will not see people from Syria, Anatolia and Italy coming to compete any more, and it's unliklely a still legal Olympics would draw attendants even from Athens or the Peloponnese. That said, it is quite possible that something like a sporting festival would be continued, especially if it had a form of administrative existence.

Of course, that would require Theodosius to be less Theodosius. Still, it's thinkable. As late as the eighth century, the papal treasurey received taxes paid by Sardinians for permission to continue their (pagan, or believed to be pagan) rituals. A similar arrangement for Olympia might perpetuate something that would otherwise just fall into abeyance. if you pay tax for it, you have to do it, otherwise, why pay the tax? The problem is that the Olympics mighht simply be too high-profile for a solution like that. But who knows. They had strange things happening in the Roman Empire.
 
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