Sport, Bodily Culture and Classical Antiquity in Modern 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

2014

Most people know that in antiquity, as in our day, the Olympics were celebrated every four years. Most classicists know that in antiquity the Olympics were not the only major athletic festival in existence, but formed a part of the famous periodos (“tour”, “circuit”), a series of four athletic festivals which were scheduled with an eye to each other in such a way that every year saw one or two celebrations of games in this most prestigious group of festivals.1

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 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).

Sport was practised in the Greco-Roman world at least since the second millennium BC. Ancient cultures employed sport in a variety of social contexts. Sport served as an element of ceremonial performance, as a foundation for physical education, and as the dramatic focus of popular spectacles from the local to the imperial level. In recent years, the continuous re-assessment of old and new evidence in conjunction with the development of new methodological perspectives have created the need for a fresh examination of central aspects of ancient sport in a single volume. This book fills that gap in ancient sport scholarship.

2020

The Greek sport of wrestling and the pankration reflect intriguing aspects of identity, iconography, and rituals to achieve manhood. I will look at the Panhellenic game's organization and the development of male identities by reviewing pankration and wrestling iconography on pottery against literary sources. I looked at how the ancient Greek education for the games is structured to envisage a character that can help build and defend a territory against foreign enemies. Additionally, based on the decorated pots, I focus on how male-gendered roles are portrayed and the ideas behind artistic expressions showing naked youths fighting and training for these events. Using spatial analysis, I focused on the academic discourse of how depicting the pankration or wrestling on pottery can be similar or different depending on the available data. I aim to inform my reader how some of these pots should be contextualized as a group and then individually based on general attributes and individual characteristics. In the conclusion, I discuss how this scrutiny shows the importance of depicting the pankration and wrestling in various public forums.