In his monumental study of Greek culture, Jakob Burckhardt characterizes the archaic age of Greece (roughly 776-500) as a culture dominated by aristocrats, who were guided by competitive spirit and values. Modern historians of Classical Greece and Athens have maintained that the elite preserved the Greek competitive ethos well, and that the demos also subscribed to it.1 Among scholars, Alvin Gouldner’s thesis has exerted much influence with its argument that the Greeks looked at their social environment through the prism of the contest, and often of the zero-sum game kind, in which one’s victory is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as another’s defeat, because the resource at stake, whether real or symbolic, is limited. Scholars have found Gouldner’s explanatory model of contest systems useful in analyzing subjects ranging from war, athletics, trials, and politics to issues of honor, sexuality and gender.2
Because these and other competitive activities and concepts were often applied, or restricted, to male participants and took place in front of a mostly male audience, contest and competitiveness served as a means of judging individual and communal worth and manliness. They established or strengthened the victor’s manhood and dictated that the loser’s claim to it and to valor be ranked as inferior or put in doubt. Lysias provides a mythical and somewhat blunt example of this view in a speech eulogizing the Athenian war dead of possibly the Corinthian war (394-387).3 Wars or battles were types of contest, and Lysias describes the war between the valiant men of Athens and the Amazons, who prior to their invasion of Attica had been regarded more like men than women on account of their courage and spirit. The Athenian victory exposed these women’s aberrant masculinity, reversed them back to womanhood, and finally obliterated them (Lys. 2.4-6).4
The following discussion examines the rhetoric of agon (contest) and its relevance to masculinity. Focusing on the Attic orators, it aims to show how speakers both articulated and manipulated competitive values and perceptions in order to claim victories, to validate individual and collective valor and manliness, but also to mitigate any adverse effects that losing a contest might have on the way men were judged.5
World History
