The Greek island of Thasos is located in the northern part of the Aegean Sea, near the Thracian coast, and its capital, also called Thasos, is located in the north of the island. It was founded around the year 680 B.C. by settlers who came from the island of Paros.
There he lived during the 5th century BC. one of the most famous athletes of antiquity, who reached his greatest glory between 480 and 460 BC. His name was Theagenes of Thasos and he excelled mainly in pankration and boxing. We know of his life through Pausanias, Athenaeus of Naucratis, Lucian of Samosata and Plutarch.
Pausanias echoes in the last book of his Description of Greece , written in the second century AD, from the legend of the Thasians, according to which Theagenes would have been the son, not of his mortal father, but, by means of tricks often attributed to the gods, of Hercules himself. So strong must he have been, and so strong must be the memory that the islanders had of him seven centuries later.
At that early age he was already known for his voracity and immense appetite, which led him to devour oxen by himself, as a kind of Obelix (whose figure, if you think about it, seems based on Theagenes). The fact is that those from Thassos had to solve the problem that the boy represented and his great strength, and for this they entrusted him to the care of a coach who would teach him to channel his energy in sports.
It paid off and Theagenes won the boxing competition at the 74th Olympiad in 484 BC. (to Eutimo, another famous athlete whose statue at Olympia has been found). He also won the pankration competition, but the judges determined that he had mistreated Euthymus in his previous victory and disqualified him by fining him one talent, which he paid at the 76th Olympiad in 480 BC. (Another version says that he was so exhausted from the fight against Eutimo that he was fined for presenting himself to the pancratium in such conditions.)
Two years earlier, in 486 B.C. he had achieved the double in boxing and pankration at the Isthmian Games. In the Pythian Games he triumphed in boxing three times, in 482, 478 and 474 BC. He obtained nine victories in the Nemean Games and a total of ten in the Isthmians.
Pausanias says that in the homeland of Achilles, in Phthia (Thessaly), he performed a great deed for a heavy athlete. like him, win the dolic the race of approximately 5,000 meters that was usual in the Panhellenic Games.
In total, according to Pausanias, Theagenes won 1,400 victories throughout his lifetime. Plutarch attributes only 1,200 to him and further says that most were of little importance. But the most curious thing is that his fame spread over time due to an event after his death.
The Thasians had erected a statue to him. An old rival, who had never been able to defeat him, came every night to hit her with sticks, until one night the statue collapsed on him, killing him.
It turns out that in Thasos there was a law that ordered everything to be thrown into the sea, including things and objects that, when falling, would have killed someone. The statue was tried and condemned, and consequently thrown into the sea. It seems that a period of bad harvests and drought then began and, after consulting the oracle of Delphi, they recovered the statue, returning it to its original place.
The drought ended and Theagenes began to be revered as a healing god. Interestingly, the base of this statue was found in the agora of Thasos, on which a catalog of victories is engraved.