Athleticism in Ancient Greece

Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2012

This book, a reproduction of the International Journal of the History of Sport vol. 27 issue 12, consists of five essays bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue all of which address the importance of the legacy of the classical past on sports culture in modern Greece. The essays focus on a range of topics: historiography, female bodily culture and public rituals associated with physical exercise and sporting events. Overall, the greater emphasis is much less on modern Greek sports and much more on the classical legacy. Zinon Papakonstantinou, one of the two co-editors, discusses in his introduction the ways the classical past and the assumption of continuity between ancient and modern Greece have shaped Greek society. His essay sets the scene for those that follow. All of these confirm the significance of the classical legacy in the modern era. This is certainly the case in Christina Koulouri's contribution on the place of sports in Greek national historiography from the establishment of the modern Greek state in 1830 through the early 1980s. Nineteenth century historiography in Greece was at the core of nation building and a central pillar in developing the idea that the modern Greeks were direct descendants of the Ancient Greeks. It was in that light that the major works by Greek historians discussed sports only with reference to Classical Greece rather than any other period of the supposedly continuous trajectory of the history of the Greek people. As Koulouri notes, the concern with sports in those historical works reflected primarily cultural (one could also say " ideological ") concerns rather than any special interest in athletic events per se or physical exercise. A cluster of publications that appeared at the time of the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896, confirmed the overwhelming emphasis on classical Greek sports and their significance. In the twentieth century, historians began filling in the gaps by portraying sport and physical exercise in the eras in between the classical and the modern, as part of a continuum. Those periods were " athleticized " as Koulouri notes, and not always persuasively. Overall, she notes, the history of sports in Greece remained underdeveloped until the 1980s because of traditional academic disdain for physical exercise but even more importantly because modern Greece did not embrace sporting activities and physical activity as part of its contemporary public culture or as part of its educational policies. Koulouri's chapter is placed first after Papakonstantinou's prologue and these contributions combine well to frame the volume and prepare the reader for what follows, a predictable highlighting of the classical symbolism surrounding sports and physical activity in modern Greece, rather than treatments of sports culture or particular sports. As Koulouri notes, the actual history of sports has evolved since the 1980s but has done so relatively slowly and remains in a process of maturation. In the meantime, scholars will have much to reflect upon with regard to the legacy of classical Greece and Greek sports with the help of the rest of this volume. The shadow that ancient Greece casts on modern Greek sports may be predictable yet the ways this unfolds can be quite unexpected. This is the case with Eleni Fournaraki's essay entitled " Bodies that Differ: Mid-and Upper-Class Women and the Quest for 'Greekness' in female Bodily Culture (1896-1940). " Fournaraki focuses on the Greek women's movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the ways it promoted its goals through associating women's bodily culture with the classical Greek paradigm. She

The Classical Review, 2019

This book can be seen as part of a wider trend in modern research that aims to understand better how identities were articulated and negotiated in ancient and modern societies. P. states in the preface that he is not aiming to provide a comprehensive treatment of all subjects related to identity, but to carry forward the discussion of earlier scholarship on the processes of identity construction and to explore the various 'facets of the performance and representation of identities through and by sport in the ancient Greek world' (p. 3). In this pursuit P. widens the scope of research to include aspects of the athletic world that have been usually overlooked in similar studies in the past. Furthermore, the book's main contribution is that it illustrates in detail, and more clearly than others before it, how identity construction in the world of sports was a constant, never-ending and always-evolving performative discourse among the various social strata of the citizen body. Since the beginning of Greek athletics, the athletic track, the gymnasion and the agonistic festivals became an arena for Greekand later Graeco-Romansociety to publicly debate and celebrate the identities of all its communities. The book is divided into seven chapters, including an introduction and an epilogue. After the introduction, which contains a valuable survey of previous scholarship, P. starts Chapter 2 with a discussion of the athletic scenes in the Homeric epics. Athletic practice is envisaged there as a purely upper-class activity, guarded by various formal and informal rules, as exemplified in the athletic competition of Odysseus in Scheria (pp. 26-7). Based on evidence from Archaic and Classical Athens, P. demonstrates that elite citizens tried to hold on to such beliefs, making athletic competition an essential part of what he calls an 'elite cultural koine' (p. 28). Participation in contests, and more importantly the recitation and commemoration of athletic victory, became vehicles for negotiating, affirming and perpetuating the identity of the most distinguished of citizens. At the same time, these prominent citizens had to deal with the 'democraticising' sociopolitical changes of the sixth century BCE, which shifted the focus of athletic victory from the individual to the city, portraying it as the main receiver of its religious and sociopolitical value. To describe these two different mentalities in Greek sport, P. models them as 'Homeric' and 'Civic' (pp. 29-33). These subjects are surely not new ones in research; however, P. treats them in a way that powerfully illustrates the contest for primacy in the Greek polis that lies behind victory commemoration, as expressed through the articulation of the identities. In Chapters 3 and 4 P. turns to sport spectators as well as the regulations and the regulatory bodies and institutions related to Greek athletics. These subjects have been given very little attention in previous scholarship, and the fact that P. studies them extensively under the scope of identities adds to the value of this book. P. believes that the discourses that negotiated legal and other regulatory frameworks are at the heart of the scholarly discussion about identities. The regulations that determined the organisation of festivals, the running of the events and the participation in and function of the gymnasia (all spaces related to athletics), reflected attitudes towards exclusion and inclusion of different parts of the population. In this context, the regulations that P. describes as 'cultural', such as the exclusion of all non-Greeks from athletic competitions, as well as other technical THE CLASSICAL REVIEW

in R. Graells i Fabregat, A. Pace, M. Pérez Blasco (eds), Warriors@Play, Proceedings of the International Congress held at the Museum of History and Archaeology of Elche, 28th May 2021, Alicante, University of Alicante, 2022, 169-184

The connection between warriors and play during their pass time is documented by iconography, literary sources and archaeological evidence. In this current study archaeological material from different regions of Northern Greece is being presented, starting from the archaic until the late Hellenistic period with references to the few available ancient texts.

In this paper, i argue that various aesthetic devices associated with Ancient Greek sport determined a certain view of the body. This institutionalised body as it were communicated a Greek conception opf life - one imbued with beauty of the human form, the greatness of the gods and the desire for victory within the sports arena. This then forms a basis on which to reconceptualise modern sport, its relationship to the aesthetic dimension of art and the impact of institutions on conceptions of the body (mind).

Agonistic contests were staged in the Ancient Near East many centuries before the first Panhellenistic games were held in Ancient Greece. The competitions were popular and coincided with particular cultural events and feast days as shown by the iconographic and epigraphic depictions dating back at least to the 3 rd millennium BC. Findings uncovered to date show many sports, including races, wrestling, boxing, archery, and ball games. Indeed, iconographic representations of wrestling and boxing depicted on various media, such as metal and stone artefacts, are widespread. Some iconographic representations depicting competitive sports have attracted interest to this topic. Such images reveal similar styles and the development of techniques across various historical eras and geographical areas and these may be linked to the techniques and rules that gradually came into force in sporting events.

Crowned Victor: Competition and Games in the Ancient World, University of Pennsylvania, 2012

From Herakles’ slaying of the Nemean lion, which is portrayed in a fashion similar to wrestling on Attic vases, to literary references to athletic competition as a substitute for single combat, to the presence of Ares and Agōn side by side on the ivory and gold table at Olympia where the victors’ wreaths were kept, competition and combat have a long relationship and history of tension in Greek myth and culture. Though this does not mean that the origination of athletic competition in ancient Greece was necessarily martial, several literary examples from the Classical Greek through Imperial Roman periods make clear that a belief in an inextricable, etiological link between combat and athletic competition was widespread among ancient authors and observers. This belief, in turn, contrasts interestingly with the shifting role of athletic competition in ancient Hellenic culture, particularly with regard to its relationship with combat. This paper utilizes the hoplitodromos, or race in armor, as an exemplar of that belief, and of the subsequent devolution of Greek athletics as a whole. As the growing prevalence of hoplite warfare reduced the opportunity for warriors to earn kleos aphthitōn on the battlefield, athletic competitions became a partial replacement for the lost opportunities to achieve eternal glory. Further, the rise of a classical “gymnasion culture,” which valued physical beauty, youth, and eroticism most highly, may have sparked a pushback on the part of our ancient sources, who sought in return to emphasize all the more the martial practicality of athletic training and competitive events, which many saw as the proper role and logical origin of athletics within Greek society.

CHS Research Bulletin, 2019

Moral education in ancient Greece engaged in what I call a cultural conspiracy to promote aretē. In order to understand how sport functioned in that system, we need to connect athletic practice with the cultural phenomena that surround it, including myth, ritual, song, dance, literature, and visual art. We need, in short, to understand “The Ancient Greek Athletic Spirit,” and to do that we must articulate it in a way that applies across disciplines and over time. I attempt this by describing a three-stage process linked to the terms athlete, athlos, and athlon. I argue that the process derives from the stories of heroes, and claim that athletic practice represents a ritual mimēsis of that process, which cultivates virtue through experiential learning. I connect the process with the stories of Herakles and Atalanta, suggesting that prenuptial footraces for girls may well serve as an educational mimēsis of the heroine’s race with Hippomenēs. I conclude with some reflections on the importance of competition in archaic philosophy, which lays the metaphysical foundation upon which the link among ethics, aesthetics, athletics is built.