Which city hosted the first modern Olympic Games in 1896?

Athens, revived by Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat who had concluded that French military failure in 1870 came from physical unfitness and that organised sport was the fix. Fourteen countries came, all competitors were men, and several events were won by tourists who happened to be passing and entered on the day.

The marathon was invented for these Games rather than revived. There was no such race in antiquity; it was designed to evoke the legend of a messenger running from Marathon to Athens, which is itself a conflation of stories from Herodotus and Plutarch written centuries apart. It was won by a Greek water carrier, Spyridon Louis, which was the outcome the host nation needed. The distance was not fixed until 1921, when the figure of 26 miles 385 yards was adopted from the 1908 London course, whose length was set by where the royal family wanted to watch the start.

Coubertin's own attitudes have aged badly. He opposed women competing, calling the idea impractical and improper, and women were admitted from 1900 only in a handful of events. The ancient Games he was invoking were also a religious festival at Olympia that ran for over a thousand years, in which married women were barred from attending on pain of death, and which was abolished by a Christian emperor as a pagan rite.