'Give life and animation to those noble games... create in our breasts, hearts of steel!' You'll recognise the words, of course, the Olympic hymn being so central to a ritual which remains as relevant today as it was all those years ago to agile Socrates, pole-vaulting his way to gold.
But, as we see from the accretion of Olympic traditions, the addition of beach volleyball contests, for instance, and of performance-enhancing drugs, and of money from McDonald's, it is also an Olympic tradition to move with the times. Experts tell us that Baron de Coubertin, the posh monomaniac who revived the games in 1896, thought they should be suited to 'the conditions of modern life'.
Thus London's very 21st-century decision to offer torch-bearing opportunities to celebrities such as Konnie Huq falls entirely within a modernising spirit that once saw the Nazis update Coubertin's rituals with the innovation of this very torch relay. Filmed by Leni Riefenstahl in 1936, it brought the flaming torch straight from a Delphic glade (where it was collected by a Russian boy whom she preferred to any of the available athletes) to Hitler, who stood in the biggest stadium ever built, while a choir of 3,000 serenaded the world not with the sacred Olympic hymn, but with patriotic songs including the Nazi anthem: 'We stand at arms, we're ready for the fight/ Soon Hitler's flags will wave o'er every street and byway.'
Jewish scholar Victor Klemperer commented at the time that Goebbel's triumphant games were 'wholly and entirely a political affair... it's incessantly drummed into the people and foreigners that here you can see the revival, the blossoming, the new spirit, the unity, the steadfastness, the glory, naturally too the peaceful spirit of the Third Reich lovingly embracing the whole world.'
Today, this traditional Olympist blend of ancient hokum and shameless national propaganda is evident once again in the Chinese scheme for the 'sacred flame' to be accompanied on its traditional airborne tour ('the longest in Olympic history') by a squadron of security men, tasked with protecting a 'Journey of Harmony' whose theme is 'Light the Passion, Share the Dream'. So far, according to the official Beijing website, the torch's progress has been a tremendous success. 'San Francisco embraces Olympic flame with pride,' its propagandists announced last week, after the holy of holies took refuge in a warehouse.
Of course, they concede, there has been disruption caused by 'Tibetan separatists', but they quote Olympic committee president Jacques Rogge insisting that 'the torch relay must go on', alongside similar assurances from Colin Moynihan, chairman of the British Olympic Association and an indefatigable opponent of boycotts. 'The athletes should look up at the Olympic flame,' he wrote, after Steven Spielberg absented himself, 'and be proud that, through its strength, there is a real chance for change in the world's most populous country. That flame is undoubtedly shining in the recesses of China.'
Undoubtedly. Thanks to Colin and the athletes, not forgetting Blue Peter's gorgeous Konnie, one pictures that brave little flame, somewhat like Tinkerbell, twinkling in the recesses of innumerable Chinese prison cells, reminding political prisoners everywhere to 'Light the Passion, Share the Dream'.
If history suggests that the Chinese state has not, in fact, taken on the £20bn games as a favour to its domestic enemies, it also reminds us that Olympic officials have traditionally been chosen, or specially trained, to be unable to recognise such simple facts. Old Coubertin, rhapsodising about his 'grandiose and salutary task', at least had the excuse, when he misrepresented competitive sport between hostile nations as a bringer of peace and brotherhood, of doing so before two world wars had exposed just how effective the long jump was going to be in liberating the oppressed.
The modern IOC, however, not only knows how Hitler and his successors exploited Olympic symbolism, with its ghastly flames and flags and massed calisthenics, but perhaps worse, how eagerly its own, high-minded organisation has facilitated this process.
Ever since the Nazis deflected, by lying, a threat by American athletes to boycott the Berlin Games, Olympists have been reciting the manifest untruth, coined by Avery Brundage, then president of the US Olympic Committee, that 'politics has no place in sport'. In 1934, Brundage, a Nazi sympathiser, added that 'certain Jews must now understand that they cannot use these Games as a weapon in their boycott against the Nazis'. He was to make the non-political point again, when, having been promoted to president of the IOC, he stripped Black Power demonstrators of their medals, and once more, after the assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972, with his declaration: 'The Games must go on.'
As the murder of 11 Israelis merited no more than a day's interruption, you can see why IOC officials are so unwilling today to allow a few weeks of sustained international protest deny China's torch of harmony its chance to shine. Over here, Tessa Jowell has already congratulated herself on keeping - unlike certain Parisians! - the sacred flame alight: an old-fashioned commitment to Olympic duty that is sure to be recognised by fellow believers when she joins the sea of deputies and proxies standing in for their superiors at the opening ceremony.
If their achievement does not, as yet, amount to the exposure, after all these years, of the sacred bollocks at the heart of the Olympic ideal, this year's boycotts and protests may at least ensure it is some time before anyone asserts, with a straight face, that politics has nothing to do with sport. Or insists, like Rogge, that 'most statesmen well know that boycotts only punish those doing the boycotting'. It is hard, anyway, to imagine wee David Miliband maintaining, on the eve of a visit to China that 'boycotts are not a right way'.
Although the Miliband-Brown attitude towards China could easily be depicted as routinely and repulsively craven, until last week there was little sign that the British public expected something more principled. On the contrary; the London demonstrations and the speechifying that followed would have been more impressive had they followed weeks of protest over the Brown-Branson China trade trip; or marches expressing outrage over Darfur and Tibet; or even an orderly Chinese knicker boycott, inspired by the country's insults to freedom of expression. With not so much as a vigil or an embarrassing T-shirt between the lot of them, the performance of British celebrities, in particular, has been a poor shadow of the American contribution.
Still, as the Olympics have always shown, symbolism is a powerful thing. If it took China's sacred flame, Jowell's sacred anorak and, most sacred of all, a posse of imported yobs in blue shellsuits to alert millions of people to the true nature of our sporting hosts, then maybe the games have finally succeeded in, as the IOC's 'Fundamental Principles of Olympism' puts it, placing sport 'at the service of the harmonious development of man'. In which case, as the horrible Brundage used to say, they really must go on. Although, as a newcomer to this form of politics, even I can see that much still depends on the athletes. 'Citius, Altius, Fortius' and all that, but a wardrobe of monkish leisurewear might be better yet.