Some of the intricate connections between athletics and ancient society have emerged in the discussion of various aspects of the games. But athletics played a positive, even fundamental, role in society in a number of ways that still affect how we live and what we know about ourselves. History, art, literature, law, and government all owe something to the world of ancient Greek athletics.
Let us start with the Olympic victors’ list, the compilation. Olympiad by Olympiad, of the names of winners in the various events at the Olympic Games. The first edition is credited to Hippias of Elis in about 420 b. c. He probably began the practice of naming the Olympiad after the victor in the stadion. The list was straightforward, consisting of the name of the victor, his hometown, and the event, as we know from papyrus fragments of copies of the list that survive in Egypt (see, for example, POxy II.222; A 129). Throughout antiquity, the list was revised and updated; its editors included Aristotle (ca. 330), Eratosthenes (ca. 225), and Phlegon of Tralles (a. d. 141). By the time of Pausanias —and probably several hundred years earlier—the official updated register was maintained by the Eleans in thegymnasion at Olympia. (Excavations in the 1980s in the gymnasion at Delphi produced fragments of wall plaster with a list of Pythian victors from the Roman period.) Where it is possible to check the extant versions of the list with independent records, it proves remarkably accurate, and the discovery of fragments in Egypt shows how widespread the register of Olympian victors was.
Some modern scholars have questioned the accuracy of the early part of the list: What evidence did Hippias and his successors have for their compilation? Is it likely that there was documentation more than three hundred years before Hippias, when writing was in its infancy? What proof is there that the Olympics were originally quadrennial: might they have been annual local festivals? In that case the four-year span given to each of the first fifty victors should be reduced to a year each and the beginning date of 776 B. c. be “shrunk” to about 630. Whatever the answers to those questions (and we should note that the traditional date of 776 conforms to the archaeological record), the fact remains that from about 600 the list can be verified, and it is
Correct from then on. The chronological framework of the Olympic register is secure.
The importance to the study of Greek history of a securely based chronological outline is tremendous. In ancient Greece each city-state kept its own records in accordance with its own institutions and its own calendar. Thus, for example, the annually elected archon of Athens provided an ongoing chronological framework for Athenian record keeping: “In the archonship of so and so, it seemed best to the council and the people to do thus and so...” By maintaining a list of the archons, the ancient Athenians established a relative chronology, which ultimately allowed scholars to write their history by placing events in their correct sequential and consequential order. But such a system was idiosyncratic to Athens and could be reconciled only with great difficulty, if at all, with the system at Corinth or at Argos or at Thebes — or anywhere else. Further, although all calendars were lunar, the names of the months varied from city to city (though the same names frequently occurred in several cities). Local adjustments to the lunar months to keep them attuned to the solar year meant that a month with the same name in two different cities could, and did, occur at two different seasons of the same solar year.
The Olympic register, however, was international and independent of local variations in the calendar. However great its importance was for reckoning time within the Greek world is arguably insignificant compared to its importance to the whole Western world as a means of relating Greek events to those of other cultures. Thus a series of scholars including the early Christians Eusebius (ca. 320) and Jerome (ca. 410) could begin to synchronize events throughout the ancient world. The purpose of these synchronizations was largely to establish the chronologies of biblical events, but the effect was to unite the world in a recognizable and ultimately widely accepted system that is still in use today. How do we know that Sokrates drank hemlock in 399 B. C.? How do we know how many years passed between the death of Sokrates and that of Jesus Christ? How do we know how long it was after the burning of the Akropolis by the Persians that Muhammad was born? In the final analysis, we knowbecause of the register of ancient Olympic victors.
Athletics also played an important role in the evolution of art. Today, thanks to the camera and other devices, we take for granted the ability to portray our world in a naturalistic and realistic way. But the first efforts to make such portrayals came in Greece in the sixth century b. c. by means of vase painting and, especially, sculpture. Until about 600 b. c. there is no evidence of life-sized or even semi-life-sized sculptures of human beings. But about that time we begin to see a series of portrayals of young men, called kouroi, who clearly owe their inspiration to centuries-old sculptural traditions of Egypt. Rigid figures with legs close together but one foot forward, arms straight down at the sides, facial features and anatomical details stylized and based more on some notional portrayal than on observation, all look back to large-scale figures from Egypt (see fig. 180). There is, however, one very obvious difference: the Greek kouroi are nude.
Fig. 286 Diskophoros. Marble Roman copy of original by Naukydes of Argos, ca. 400 B. c. Paris, Musee du Louvre, inv. no. MaSp - 9840323 (head in the Capitoline, Rome), Reunion des Musees Nationaux / Art Resource, New York (photo: Herve Lewandowski).
From about 600 to 480 or so, we can trace a clear progression in the portrayal of the human body toward the ever more anatomically correct. The body appears flexible even as the stone from which it is carved is transformed into the flesh of the real person. The same evolutionary process can he seen in vase painting; compare, for example, the portrayal of the anatomies of the runners in figure 3 with those of figure 52, painted about two hundred years later.
It is, of course, possible to explain much of this progress as owing simply to greater observation and curiosity about the world. Muscles are muscles and can be portrayed without recourse to athletes. But the ability to portray the whole of the male body correctly obviously depends upon the opportunity to observe it, and the custom of athletic nudity provided such opportunities and the beauty of the well-conditioned body might well have aroused interest in portraying it accurately.
The custom of setting up victory statues at Olympia and the other games sites also promoted the development of artistic portrayal. Hundreds of victor statues documented at Olympia provided a clear motive for sculptors to carve nude male bodies, and for other young men, who might never become victors, to wish to appear in the pose of a nude athlete. And another key aspect of athletics played its part: motion. As
Fig. 287 Diskobolos. Marble Roman copy of bronze original by Myron, ca. 460 B. c. London, The British Museum, inv. no. s 524 (gr 1814.7 -4-43) (photo: © The British Museum).
Greek artists developed their ability to show the human body realistically, they started trying to show motion. This was much easier for vase painters, but sculptors tried to solve the problem of motion portrayal as well, and athletes offered them the best opportunity to study it. Most of their work was in bronze and is preserved to us only in marble copies of the Roman period, but we can still appreciate the implicit motion of a diskophoros (diskos holder) who steps toward the line, preparing to cock his arm and twist his body into the corkscrew position that will help his throw (fig. 286).
Perhaps the most famous of all these attempts to introduce motion into lifeless marble was the Diskobolos by Myron (fig. 287). Many copies of this statue survive today, and they show the incipient motion of the diskophoros has been carried a step further. The body is twisted, the diskos raised at the top of the backswing, the arms and legs balanced in untenable positions—the athlete must spin forward or fall, and the viewer mentally completes the motion. Myron, noted for his athletic sculpture, brought from the stadium many advances in sculptural composition that would affect other artistic fields through the ages.
Within a generation of Myron, Polykleitos of Argos was expounding his philosophical definition of the “perfect” in the principle of symmetria (commensurability of
Fig. 288 Diadoumenos. Marble copy (done about 100 b. c.) of a bronze original by Polykleitos, 440-430 B. c. Athens, National Museum, inv. no. 1826 (photo: © Treasury of Archaeological Receipts).
The parts) in a written treatise that does not survive. But several of his statues do survive in the form of Roman copies, and we can see that Polykleitos chose the athlete as a visual manifestation of his philosophy. The Diadoumenos (fillet-binder; fig. 288) shows a nude athlete with his clothes hanging on a bush (functionally, a support for the statue) wrapping a victory fillet (tainia) around his head. One leg is straight, bearing his weight as the other is about to push forward into the next stride—motion and stability in balance. His elbows are bent, and the direction of the gaze from the bent head as well as the missing bits of the tainia reinforce the diagonal line of the shoulders and upper arms. That line is in opposition to the line of hips and knees. This balance of the lines of composition and the similar balance between motion and stability represent Polykleitan symmetria, in a statue that was originally set up as a dedication by a victorious athlete.
A century later, Lysippos added posthumous portraits of Agias (see fig. 183) and Polydamas (see fig. 243) to the athletic genre. The deeply set, brooding eyes evoke an emotion that does not depend upon the athletic nude for inspiration but shows a more general trend in fourth century portraiture. Portrayals of athletes in the Hellenistic era more typically display the brutality of modern life rather than philosophical justifications for sculptural systems (see figs. 85-87). The contribution of athletics to the development of art was over, but the gifts of the Classical period were recognized in antiquity, for example this anonymous poem in honor of the famous runner Ladas, Olympic victor in the dolichos in 460 {Anthologia Graeca 16.54- 54A; A 254);
As you were in life, Ladas, flying before wind-foot Thymos, barely touching the ground with the tips of your toes.
Just so did Myron cast you in bronze, engraving all over your body expectation of the crown of Pisa.
He is full of hope, with the breath on the tips of his lips
Blowing from within his hollow ribs; bronze ready to Jump out for the crown—the base cannot hold it back;
Art swifter than the wind.
Literature of the Classical period also owes something to athletics. A favorite genre was the victory ode, or Epinikian poetry, at which Pindar and Bacchylides were particularly adept. We learn from these odes details about athletes and competitions, but we also see the larger role played by athletics in expressing the values of contemporary society. Perhaps the following example from the victory ode of 450 for the wrestler Aristomenes of Aigina will show what I mean:
In Megarayou have a prize already, Aristomenes, and in the plain of Marathon, and three victories in Hera’s games in your home of Aigina.
But now you fell heavily and from high and with malice aforethought upon the bodies of three opponents.
For them there was at Delphi no decision for a happy homecoming like yours, nor did happy laughter awaken pleasure in them as they ran home to their mothers.
They slunk through the back alleys, separately and furtively, painfully stung by their loss.
But he who has won has afresh beauty and
Is all the more graceful for his high hopes as he flies on the wings of his manly deeds with his mind far above the pursuit of money.
The happiness of man grows only for a short time and then falls again to the ground, cut down by the grim reaper.
Creatures of a day, what is a man? what is he not?
Man is but a dream of a shadow. .
But when a ray of sunshine comes as a gift from the gods,
A brilliant light settles on men,
And agentle life. [Pindar, Pythian 8.70-98; A 249]
But this obvious connection between athletics and literature does not begin to show the intricate use of athletic metaphors in other types of literature. Some are obvious, some not, and the subject has not been studied thoroughly, but the imagery elicited by the use of athletic terms was vivid, and understood by all audiences, such as Euripides’ use of diauloi to describe the waves in Hecuba (“Now I lie on the shore, now in the surf of the sea, unmourned, unburied, washed back and forth by the many diauloi of the waves”). When Euripides wrote these lines, he had no doubt that the audience in the theater would understand this allusion to the back-and-forth movement of the race. Diaulos was not a strange technical term, but a word that was part of everyday life.
Not surprisingly, the works of Plato, who spent the better part of his life in and near thegymnasion known as the Akademy, are filled with athletic metaphors. At one point in his discourse with Protagoras, who is credited with being the first professional educator of antiquity and the originator of the maxim “man is the measure of all things,” after Protagoras has made a telling point, winning the applause of their auditors, Sokrates admits, “At first I felt as iff had been socked by a good boxer as darkness, and dizziness came over me from his words” (Protagoras 339E). Earlier, when Kallias had begged Sokrates to stay and continue the discussion, Sokrates made use of an extended athletic metaphor (335E-336A); “Now I fear that you are asking me to keep pace with Krison of Himera at the peak of his career, or with some dolichos runner or a hemerodromos. And I wish that I could keep up with them, but I can’t. If you want to see me and Krison running together, you will have to ask him to change his pace for, even though I cannot run fast, he can run slow.” Then as now, athletics, the language of athletics, and intellectual inquiry were inseparable.
Perhaps the most important contribution of athletics, at least in my opinion, was its creation of the concept of equality before the law, isonomia, the foundation on which democracy is based. In a Darwinian world of survival of the fittest, the notion of isonomia is unnatural, and it was not the first social concept developed, yet it had clearly
Been formed by the early srxth century B. C., just at the time the stephanitic cycle was completed with the addition of the festivals of Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea to the Olympic festival. Within these competitions, the artificial preeminence of the gymnikos agon over the Sport of Kings, the hippikos agon, has been noted, as well as the fact that this situation in the early sixth century reverses the dominance of the chariot races in the earlier Homeric world. The preeminence of the gymnikos agon at the stephanitic games carries with it other characteristics we have noted: winners are determined strictly on the basis of objective criteria—a form of isonomia —and committers of fouls are flogged regardless of social or economic status, another form of it. The last, most obvious equalizer of men in this athletic setting is the fact that they are all nude. Social position cannot be easily discerned in the locker room; economic privilege does not propel one set of legs faster than another. The participants in the gymnikos agon are democrats striving to excel with their beings, not their possessions.
It is, then, no coincidence that Kroton, which developed one of the first democracies, became such a powerhouse in the gymnikos agon. In fact, one of the earliest, perhaps the earliest, uses of the word isonomia comes from the sixth-century physician Alkmaion of Kroton. And it is significant that Kroton has no recorded Olympic victories in the hippikos agon. Horse racing belonged to those with money and rank, and it was exactly for this reason that Alkibiades “ held the gymnic games in contempt since he knew that some of the athletes were lowborn and from small city-states and poorly educated.” The gymnikos victories of Kroton were embedded in the Krotoni-ates’ concepts of democracy.
The vase painting of Athens, which has been so important to our study of the details of individual competitions, provides yet another insight into the connection between athletics and democratic institutions. The year 508/7 B. c. marks the advent of Athenian democracy, although the forces that brought it about had been building for some time. The triumph of democracy can, in some ways, be associated with the defeat of the Persians in 480 and 479 at Salamis and Plateia and the period of recovery thereafter. By the middle of the fifth century, Athenian democracy had begun to take another turn with the establishment of the Delian League, a euphemism for Athenian imperialism. If we look at the portrayals of the gymnikos agon in Attic vase painting (omitting Panathenaic amphoras) we find that nude athletic scenes begin to make up an ever larger proportion of the representations at about 520-510, and the number continues to grow until about 460, when athletic scenes fall off dramatically, a progression that parallels the rise and decline of Athenian democracy. (It was also during the 470s and 460s that one of the most famous trainers of antiquity, Melesias of Athens, was in his prime [Pindar, Olympian 8.54; Nemean 4.93 and 6.65].)
That the popularity of athletics parallels the flourishing of Athenian democracy is no coincidence: the gymnikos agon was for every man —and everyman — and this is the significance of one of the best-known stories about Sokrates. The year was 399
And Sokrates had just been found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. The jury had to decide whether he should suffer the death penalty or an alternative, to be proposed by him. Such alternatives usually included exile, financial penalties, and disenfranchisement. Sokrates made his proposal;
What is a fitting penalty for a poor man who is your benefactor and who needs leisure time for advising you? There is nothing more fitting, men of Athens, for such a man than that he be given free meals for the remainder of his life in the prytaneion. And that is much more fitting than such a reward for one of you who has won the synoris or the tethrippon at the Olympic Games. He makes you think you are happy; I make you happy.
And he does not need free meals; I do. If, then, I have to be penalized in accordance with my just worth, I should be penalized with free meals in the prytaneion. [Plato, Apology 36d-e; A 231]
The jury disagreed with this logic, and Sokrates was sentenced to death. Let us note, however, that in his proposal he contrasts his situation with that of men who win in the hippikos agon. At the same time, he says nothing about the gymnikos agon, even though we know that its victors also enjoyed free meals in the prytaneion and had done so for many years. It seems to me that Sokrates, the poor democrat, is disassociating himself from the wealthy equestrian competitors and, by his silence, even identifying himself with the athlete in the gymnikos agon. This is, in other words, a subtle reminder to the Athenian jury of his humble social status, which can be considered the equivalent of that of the athlete in the gymnikos agon. All three— jury, athlete, and Sokrates — are democrats.
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