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THE OLYMPIC GAMES: THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS by M.I. FINLEY and H.W. PLEKET 140 pages. Illustrated. Viking. $14.95.

The modern Olympic Games date from 1896 and were begun to promote sportsmanship and world peace. The original Olympics started in Greece in 776 B.C. and had their roots in the games staged by Achilles outside the walls of Troy to allay his grief at the death of his friend Patroclus. Now, just in time to coincide with the goings on in Montreal, two classicists and sports fans, M.I. Finley of England's Cambridge University and H.W. Picket of the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, have culled through ancient records, reviewed the writings of poets and philosophers from Pindar to Plato to reconstruct just what the first games were like. Their account is enlightening. For sheer ballyhoo, bitterness and confusion, the ancient games resemble the modern Olympics much more than anyone might imagine.

Food and drink peddlers, promoters and itinerant entertainers surrounded athletes and spectators at the foot of Mount Olympus. (There was also competition for the contract to supply the games with olive oil, with which the athletes rubbed themselves before competing.) Professionalism, poor sportsmanship and sheer ferocity were rife. Some of the competitions were more violent than those in the games today. The most popular event was the pankration, a combination of wrestling, judo and boxing in which contestants punched, slapped, kicked and--if they could get away with it--even bit or gouged each other until one or the other quit. In such a struggle, the authors reveal, death was a far more common risk than a pulled hamstring muscle.

But, as in the modern games, athletes considered the rewards worth the risks. Presaging the late Vince Lombardi's dictum that winning was the only thing, the founders of the first Olympics placed little value on participation for its own sake. There were no prizes for second and third place at Olympia; an athlete took first or nothing at all.

For those who succeeded, however, the rewards could be substantial. Winners received handsome pensions and cash prizes from their native cities for their performances. More important, they gained lifelong prestige. Their accomplishments were listed in family records and read aloud at contests and public celebrations. The publicity made it easy for them to get into politics and become local Tyrant, an urban office which had many perquisites.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE by NOEL B. GERSON 218 pages. Praeger. $8.95.

"So this is the little lady who made this big war," said Abraham Lincoln. The President was meeting the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin for the first time, more than a decade after the book's publication in 1852. It was not simply a patronizing remark. Harriet Beecher Stowe really was small: "I am a little bit of a woman," she described herself, "about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff." If Uncle Tom's Cabin did not quite start a war, it ignited the minds of people North and South, both for and against abolition. Tens of thousands of Americans who had not even read the book already knew Simon Legree as the classic slave driver and Uncle Tom as the black victim.*

Harriet Beecher Stowe was a well-known writer well before Uncle Tom's Cabin made her rich and famous. For a time, she and her preacher husband Calvin Stowe were too poor to afford a servant. Mrs. Stowe ran her house, cared for her twin daughters (the first two of seven children), churned out genteel, folksy stories and religious essays to help make ends meet. Uncle Tom's Cabin changed all that. It was the first great American bestseller. In its initial year in print it sold 300,000 copies, and eventually more than 3 million American readers bought the book. Worldwide, sales ran to something like 10 million in 40 languages. In this plain but informative portrait, Biographer Gerson notes that Author Stowe never visited the Deep South before the Civil War. Most of her knowledge of slavery was gleaned from former slaves whom she met while she was living in Cincinnati (one of the busiest stops on the Underground Railway), though she did visit a working plantation in Kentucky briefly in 1833. In spite of the impact on the world of her celebrated novel, it turns out that except for the issue of slavery, she had scant interest in politics.

THE BLUE HAMMER by ROSS MACDONALD 270 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

"There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns--different states, if possible--and write each other letters once a year." This opinion comes from Private Eye Lew Archer, and he should know. As the hero in 19 earlier Ross Macdonald thrillers, Archer has become an expert in cankered genealogical trees; no sooner does he undertake an investigation of one man's family than he turns up the House of Atreus.

In The Blue Hammer, Macdonald is once more obsessed with the sins of the fathers and mothers. Archer is hired to retrieve a stolen painting, the work of an artist named Richard Chantry, who disappeared without a trace 25 years earlier. Or did he? New paintings in the Chantry style begin cropping up; either they are forgeries or reports of the artist's death have been greatly exaggerated. Archer is soon contending with new murders and old graves, not to mention several wayward young people and a host of Chantry relatives, lovers and enemies.

First Love. Macdonald dexterously amasses Implausibly complex evidence. Happily, this book is stripped of the ponderous gothic ruminations that began to infect Archer's thinking several novels ago. Even under the influence of his first love affair in years, the detective manages to toe the line between world-weariness and sentimentality. If The Blue Hammer does not rank with Macdonald's best, the blame can be laid partially to earlier successes. The author's formula has by now entered the public domain. Not only do his characters seem to know this--and to act out their parts according to the rules--but fans are likely to know who did what to whom pages before Archer does. That kind of discovery will not necessarily diminish public appreciation of Macdonald's great skill--but it certainly will not do Archer's business any good.

* Long-suffering Uncle Tom was the embodiment of a Christian virtue--turning the other cheek. It was not until the mid-1950s that the virtue officially became a vice in the eyes of black militants.

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