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1-05-2015, 01:47

Sports and Entertainment

The first detailed description of sport in the Western world is found in 800 B. C.E., and about two centuries later, drama began to develop in Athens and elsewhere in Greece, as the festivals honoring the god Dionysus became as much public entertainment as religious observance.

Date: c. 800-31 b. c.e.

Category: Sports; theater and drama

The Olympics In Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 b. c.e.; English translation, 1611), the hero Achilles honors the slain Patroclus, his dearest friend, with a lavish funeral. Athletic games are a part of the fUneral celebration, and Achilles awards prizes to the winners. Chariot races, foot races, spear throwing, and wrestling matches are among the contests described. It is possible that games such as Homer describes date from the Mycenaean period because he is recounting events that supposedly preceded his own time by several centuries. However, he may have been projecting backward in time a portrait of Olympic Games with which he was familiar in his day. It is believed that Homer composed the Iliad in the century in which information aboutthe Olympic Games is officially recorded for the first time.

The chronographer Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260-c. 399 c. e.) recorded the winners of each Olympic festival from 776 b. c.e. until 217 c. e. However, the games may well have begun earlier than the former date. The four Panhellenic athletic competitions were the Olympic Games and the Ne-mean Games honoring Zeus, the Pythian Games honoring Apollo, and the Isthmian Games dedicated to Poseidon at Corinth. Of these, the Olympic Games were the most prestigious and were held once every four years at the first full Moon following the summer solstice. The four-year period between Olympic festivals was known as an Olympiad. The various Greek city-states set aside their political disputes during the athletic competitions.

No barbarian (one whose native language was not Greek) was allowed to compete, and initially, only free men could compete. After 632 b. c.e., however, boys were accepted as competitors, and eventually, during the

The Greeks were fond of games and competitions. Here, the winner of a contest is crowned with laurel. (North Wind Picture Archives)

Roman period, the Greek language restriction was waived for the Romans themselves. The earliest Olympian events were foot races, wrestling, and throwing events. By the seventh century b. c.e., chariot racing was featured, and from 472 b. c.e. onward, the games were expanded to include horse racing (the prize was awarded to the horse’s owner, not its rider), the discus throw, the javelin throw, boxing, the pentathlon, and the pankration. Pentathlon, which means “five contests,” consisted of jumping, wrestling, the javelin, the discus, and running. The pankration was a “no-holds-barred” form of wrestling.

The athletic games, like the Greek drama that would develop somewhat later, were acts of worship as well as entertainment. The poet Pindar (c. 518-c. 438 b. c.e.) often emphasizes the religious or mythological aspects of the athlete’s striving in his works. So sacred was the area where the games took place that no slaves or women, excepting the local priestess of

Demeter, were permitted to enter. Any transgressor was hurled to his or her death from the Typaeon Rock.

Athletes were required to train for a minimum of ten months before they competed. During the final thirty days before the festival, they resided in a special gymnasium at Olympia itself. There, under the supervision of the Hellenodicae, a board of ten men who also served as referees during the games, the athletes ran and threw the javelin or the discus. The victory prize was a wreath of olive leaves, but the competing city-states often supplemented the official prize with a monetary award. Ironically, considering the heavy emphasis placed upon the amateurism of the Olympian during most of the twentieth century, the winning athletes of ancient times often received awards that made them rich for life.

Drama In the sixth century b. c.e. or earlier, the Greeks established an annual festival to honor Dionysus (also known as Bacchus and Iacchos), god of fecundity, wine, and bounty. The City, or Great, Dionysia was celebrated in March and featured a chorus of fifty singers and dancers whose performance ofthe dithyramb, a wildly emotional tribute to Dionysus, was a key part of the religious rites. Eventually, to the cosmopolitan City Dionysia was added a second, domestic festival, the Lenaea (“wine press”), held in January. The site of each festival was a large outdoor theater built into a hillside. The spectators-worshippers would enter from above, ranging down the incline, with the priest of Dionysus and city dignitaries seated closest to the performers.

The first evolution of the chorus produced a leader who, presumably, would take occasional solo turns during the performance. However, until a performer existed apart from the chorus to ask its members questions, to be questioned by them, and to perhaps challenge assertions made in their lyrics, no absolute dramatic form was possible. Sometime during the last one-third of the sixth century b. c.e., Thespis, an Athenian of whom little is known historically, is said to have invented this character, the first actor. Thus, the performances were changed from a pageant of song and dance into drama.

The traditional date for the appearance of tragedy as a part of the City Dionysia is 534 b. c.e., and tragedies appear to have been acted as a part of the festival every year thereafter. No comedy is mentioned as having been performed at the City Dionysia until 486 b. c.e. The dramas at the Lenaea were solely comic in 442 b. c.e., and although tragedy was added in 432 b. c.e., comedy continued to dominate.

The third, fourth, and fifth days of the City Dionysia were given over to tragic and comic contests. During the Peloponnesian War (431-404 b. c.e.), tragedies were performed in the mornings, comedies in the afternoons. At the Lenaea, the number of comedies was reduced to three for the duration of the Peloponnesian War. Before and after the war, however, five comic poets and two tragic poets regularly competed.

According to tradition, Thespis won the first dramatic prize awarded at a Dionysian festival in 534 b. c.e. Some classical scholars have speculated that this prize was a goat, a not insignificant award in ancient Greece. Further, the prize may have been appropriate because the etymology of the word “tragedy” can be traced to a word meaning “song of goats,” and Thespis’s performances were perhaps rather crude representations of the doings of satyrs, lustful, mischievous goat-men. Eventually, the winning dramatist received a monetary prize donated by a prominent Athenian. Each donor was chosen by the city government before the competition began.

In the competitions, each playwright produced three tragedies and a satyr play, a burlesque on a mythic theme. The three plays could form a trilogy, portraying successive stages of one extended action, or they could tell quite separate stories. The tragedies were composed as poetry, the meters of which were prescribed according to strict rules. The subject matter was limited to Greek history and mythology, but playwrights were allowed wide latitude in handling the material so as to develop the desired theme. The gods of the Greeks were willful, inconstant in their sympathies, and frequently the source of disorder and strife. To the playwrights fell the lot of supplying a moral dimension to the worship of Dionysus and the other gods. As a result, during the fifth century b. c.e., the great Athenian tragedians dramatized the deepest and subtlest moral conflicts of humankind. Only one satyr play has survived, but it is known that these short plays were bawdy farces, the exact opposite of the three tragedies that preceded them.

Unlike the tragedians, the Greek comedians entered only one play in each contest and were not restricted in their subject matter. They could deal with contemporary affairs. The term “Old Comedy” was coined merely to distinguish it from the comedy that developed later (New Comedy). The later playwrights eschewed the violent attacks on living persons and wrote more of a comedy of situation. This New Comedy of the Greeks served as a model for the Latin comedies that eventually flourished in the Roman world.

The audiences for these plays, including both men and women, were huge—the open-air Theater of Dionysus in Athens could seat seventeen thousand spectators. Closest to the audience was the orchestra, a semicircular dancing place for the chorus. Immediately beyond the orchestra was the acting area behind which was the skene, a tall facade indicating the setting of the play. Still further to the rear was an altar where the priest of Dionysus performed some type of ritual. The actors, all male, wore elaborate costumes and large masks, reflecting the dominant emotion of the character. The kothornos (cothurnus), a high, thick-soled boot or buskin, was worn by each actor to make him appear taller to the audience, many of whom were very far away. The actors entered and exited through openings in the skene.

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