Which country hosted the first modern Olympic Games?

Greece hosted the first modern Games, held in Athens in 1896, and the choice of country was the whole point. Pierre de Coubertin, the French educator who drove the revival, wanted a direct line back to the ancient festival held at Olympia, and staging the opening edition in Greece supplied that lineage. The main venue was the Panathenaic Stadium, an ancient marble arena excavated and rebuilt for the occasion, funded largely by a wealthy Greek benefactor after the government pleaded poverty. The event was small by later standards: a few hundred athletes, all men, from a little over a dozen nations, many of them tourists and students who happened to be in Athens and entered on the spot. The marathon was invented for these Games, not inherited from antiquity, and a Greek runner won it, which did more than anything else to secure public enthusiasm for the revival.

Athens hosted again in 2004, more than a century after the revival.