Reviews: The Sporting Life
Five Books on Ancient Athletics
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Every four years sports-obsessed Americans become captivated by a spectacle that traces its origins back nearly three millennia to the shadowy Dark Age of ancient Greece.
We know almost nothing about the first Olympic festival of 776 B.C.E. (or even if it was actually inaugurated on that traditional date). But the athletic-religious festival’s subsequent development and impact on Greek society are the subject of numerous books—some newly published to coincide with the first modern Olympic Games to be held in Greece since their founding in 1896.
The book most obviously pitched at the 2004 Olympics is British classicist Nigel Spivey’s The Ancient Olympics (Oxford University Press, 2004), which examines the military, social, political and commemorative aspects of the games. Like many revisionist scholars, Spivey wants to demonstrate that our view of the Olympics as a peaceful, clean, harmonious, amateur sporting event is completely erroneous; rather, it was characterized by strife, violence, cheating and highly specialized professional training—more NFL than Little League, or what George Orwell called “war minus the shooting.”
Spivey demonstrates how political leaders from the would-be Athenian tyrant Kylon (sixth century B.C.) to the Judean king Herod (37-4 B.C.) used the games to advance their own agendas; the most infamous was the wealthy Alcibiades, who in 416 B.C. entered seven chariot teams at Olympia to assure a victory, which he then exploited to influence a military expedition three years later (it turned out disastrously). The rigorous training of athletes not only allowed them to earn a living but also to be upwardly mobile; much as an Olympic win today means lucrative endorsements, in antiquity victory meant free meals at state expense, tax exemptions and everlasting fame in the form of poetic encomiums and victory statues. Spivey argues persuasively that the remarkable longevity and resilience of the Olympics—over a period of some 1,200 years—were due to its gradual expansion from a purely local festival to one with trans-Mediterranean drawing power. For example, victory lists show local athletes dominating in the early years, colonists from Sicily and South Italy winning events in the sixth century B.C., and competitors from the eastern Mediterranean taking home olive crowns in the Hellenistic period and later.
The best of the new books on the ancient games is Stephen G. Miller’s Ancient Greek Athletics (Yale University Press, 2004). With nearly 300 illustrations, a glossary and an extensive bibliography, this book will serve for years to come as the locus classicus for the history of sport in ancient Greece.
Miller traces the development of athletics from Bronze Age bull-leaping on Crete to the Roman emperor Nero’s ten-horse chariot win at Olympia in 67 A.D. (though Nero quit before finishing the race, he was still awarded the olive wreath). Ancient Greek Athletics also discusses the other panhellenic “crown” competitions held at Delphi, Isthmia and Nemea. (Miller, an archaeologist with the University of California at 051Berkeley, discovered Nemea’s stadium in 1974 and helped reconstruct its starting gate. His article “The Other Games: When Greeks Flocked to Nemea” appears in this issue.) The book’s excellent diagrams help us visualize the mechanics of ancient sport—such as the use of jumping weights (carried by long-jumpers), or the staggered start of the horserace. Liberally supported with quotes from ancient authors, Ancient Greek Athletics is thorough, convincing and lucid—accessible to the general reader and suitable as a textbook for courses on Greek athletics.
Three other books, though not so new, remain useful for the study of ancient Greek athletics and culture. A somewhat quirky but informative book by the German archaeologist Ulrich Sinn—Olympia: Cult, Sport, and Ancient Festival (Marcus Wiener Publishers 2000), an English translation of the 1996 German edition—also deals with the development of the festival. Sinn wants the reader to envision Olympia “without athletes,” in its earlier phase as an important cult center before the contests were formally instituted. He emphasizes the relatively unknown facts that Olympia served as a gathering point for rich agriculturalists (hence its many bronze votive statues of cattle), that it was the site of an important oracle of Zeus (much as Delphi was the site of an oracle of Apollo) and that after the Persian Wars it became an arbitration center where city-states resolved their disputes. With an archaeologist’s eye, Sinn examines Olympia’s altars and temples, the spectator facilities and even the plumbing. Although he pays attention to the female deities worshiped on the site, he fails to mention the footraces for girls held in honor of Hera.
In his thought-provoking Sport and Society in Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press, 1998 [reprinted 2000]), historian Mark Golden does 052not delve into such minutiae as the scoring of the pentathlon; rather, he considers the big issues, like the relationship of athletics to warfare and religion. His wit and timely references—he draws analogies with Shaquille O’Neal, Die Hard 3 and Canadian ice hockey—make for enjoyable reading, and his control of the vast bibliography is impressive.
Judith Swaddling’s The Ancient Olympic Games (British Museum Press, 1980; 2nd edition 1999) is aimed at the interested lay reader. It presents the basic information in a readable form and is illustrated with color photographs of objects in the British Museum, where Swaddling is a curator. The revised edition includes discussion of exercise, diet, sports medicine and drugs—subjects of considerable interest in today’s Olympics—as well as the revival of the Olympic Games more than a century ago at the instigation of the French nobleman Pierre de Coubertin.
Although contemporary culture is clearly saturated with competition of all kinds, this obsession was even more pervasive in antiquity. Mythical or fictional characters, like Sophocles’s Orestes, compete in contests (Orestes participates in a chariot race at the Pythian Games in Delphi). In Plato’s dialogues, men often compete to get the better of an argument. Ancient Greek playwrights competed in drama competitions, and ancient Greek singers competed in singing competitions. Even the apostle Paul—writing, of course, in Greek—tells us to fight the good fight, finish the course and earn the “crown” of righteousness.
Competition is here to stay, and the 2004 summer Olympians will have much in common with their first-millennium B.C. counterparts, including the heat, the flies and the hucksters.
Every four years sports-obsessed Americans become captivated by a spectacle that traces its origins back nearly three millennia to the shadowy Dark Age of ancient Greece.
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