ARETE

W E WANT ouRATHLETEStobe better than they are. We want to follow their exploits and rej oice when they win or break records. They are an extension of ourselves and an unrelinquished claim on our youth, an eternal source of memories of the days when we could run fast and jump far, when our muscles stretched and grew. We look at them and see ourselves as we would want to be seen, and sometimes we fool ourselves that we might have been as good at games as they. They represent an undying hope that we have a share in immortality, and they allow us to step outside ourselves from time to time so that we can return refreshed and revived to our everyday lives.

Our feelings are not new. Was it Plato the philosopher or Plato the sports fan who happily shared a tent with strangers at Olympia? Was it Aristotle the scientist or Aristotle the sports-statistics nerd who revised the list of Olympic victors? Who researched and created the first list of Pythian victors? The mythologizing of athletes we see today in the figures of Michael Jordan, Pele, and Ronaldo — and dozens of others—can equally be seen in Milo, Phayllos, and Theagenes. We have accomplices in our modern mythmaking: sports writers, sportscasters, and sports photographers. Ancient athletes had their own versions of these.

In 464 B. c. the boxing event at Olympia was won by an athlete named Diagoras of Rhodes. This apparently was the culmination of his career for Diagoras, who had already won twice at both Delphi and Nemea and four times at Isthmia in the stephanitic festivals, as well as at a number of chrematitic games including the Pana-thenaia. His victor’s statue was made by a sculptor named Kallikles of Megara and was set up at Olympia; its base has been found. His victory was also celebrated in a Pindar-ian ode, part of which I quote here:

As when a man takes up in his wealthy hand a drinking cup brimming with the dew of the vine, and gives it to his new son-in-law, toasting his move from one home to another

To the Joy of his drinking companions,

And in honor of his new alliance, and thus makes him,

In the presence of his friends, an object of envy

For the true love of his marriage bed;

Just so do I send my liquid nectar, gift of the Muses,

Sweet fruit of my talent to the prize winners,

And please the winners at Olympia and Pytho.

Truly blessed is he who is surrounded by constant good repute, for the Grace who gives the bloom to life now favors one, then another with both the sweet-singing lyre and the variegated notes of the flute.

To the accompaniment of both have I now come with Diagoras to his land while singing of Rhodes, daughter of Aphrodite, bride of Apollo.

I have come to honor his fighting form and his skill in boxing and the great man himself who was aowned by the Alpheios and by the Kastalian spring and to honor his father, Damagetos.

Twice crowned with the laurel has been Diagoras, and with his good fortune four times at famed Isthmia, and again and again at Nemea and at rocky Athens.

Nor is he a stranger to the bronze shield at Argos, nor to the prizes in Arcadia and at Thebes.

And he has won six times at Pellana and Aigina, while at Megara the stone tablet tells the same story.

O father Zeus, give honor to this hymn for a victor at Olympia, and to his now famous arete in boxing.

Grant him grace and reverence among his townsfolk and amongforeigners.

He travels the straightpath which despises hubris,

And he has learned well the righteous precepts of good forefathers.

[Olympian j.1-16 and 80-93; A 248]

In addition to singing the praises of Diagoras’s father and his fatherland, and listing the many victories of this boxer, Pindar interjects two words that are loaded with significance: arete and hubris. In crediting Diagoras with the possession of one and the lack of the other, the athletic excellence of striving for arete and the moral virtue of avoiding hubris are balanced; together they will steer Diagoras through society as a good man, not just a famous athlete.

Pindar’s glorification of Diagoras befits this athlete, who was to found an Olympic dynasty. His eldest son, Damagetos, won the pankration at Olympia in 452, just twelve years after his father’s boxing triumph. At the next Olympiad, Damagetos won again, and this time he was joined by his brother Akousilaos, who won the box-

Fig. 289 Diagoras of Rhodes on the shoulders of his sons, all of whom were Olympic victors. Bronze statue by Nikolaos, ca. a. d. 1970. Olympia, International Olympic Akademy (photo: author).

Ing. They took a joint victory lap carrying their father on their shoulders — an event celebrated in antiquity and again today in a modern rendition of the story (fig. 289). Diagoras’s third son, Doreius, was also an Olympic victor in the pankration in 432, 428, and 424. Doreius was in fact a three-time periodonifees (circuit winner), for he also had four victories at Delphi, eight at Isthmia, and seven at Nemea. Diagoras had two daughters, Kallipateira and Pherenike, each of whom produced a son. One, Eukles, was victorious in the boxing at Olympia in 404 and the other, Peisirodos, in the boys’ boxing at Olympia, probably in the same Olympiad. Statues of these six Olympic victors stood together in a group at Olympia.

Here, then, is an ancient Olympic dynasty whose patriarch was renowned as graceful, reverent, and righteous. It is little wonder that Diagoras lives on today, in the name of a professional soccer team from the island of Rhodes. To be sure, there were some black sheep in the family: both Doreius and his nephew Peisirodos were exiled from Rhodes. But there is no reason to doubt the picture Pindar paints. Nonetheless, we must realize that Pindar was hired to write for Diagoras, and he was not about to add the warts. Pindar himself admits the profit motive when he says that his muse is a

Fig. 290 Portrait of Aristotle. Marble copy of the Roman period. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. asi 246.

Profiteer and hired hand, and that there are “sugared soft-voiced songs silver-plated for sale by Terpsichore” (Isthmian 2.18; A 253). Indeed, Pindar reputedly charged fees for odes in excess of $66,000, and one gift he received in appreciation for a line of poetry in which he praised Athens earned him more than $220,000.

So, too, the wonderful sculptures of athletes hardly tell the whole story. Lysip-pos, commissioned by Daochos to make a statue of his ancestor Agias (see fig. 183), presumably leaves out the scars that the pankratiast must have had. The perfect marble images create an illusion that is far from the oily, sweaty, dusty athletes in whom the arete resided.

What of this arete? The word is used so frequently in the context of athletics or to describe athletes that it sometimes seems that this excellence or virtue —as the word is frequently translated — carries strictly athletic connotations. To be sure, arete can most easily be recognized on the playing field, where outstanding performance can be judged quickly and succinctly. But arete was not the exclusive possession of the winner. Anyone who exceeded the performance reasonably expected of him could be said to have shown his arete, and arete was essentially an individual, rather than a collective, characteristic.

Nonetheless, the precise definition of arete was not even agreed on in antiquity. Aristotle (fig. 290), discussing the proper educational system for the young, argues:

It is clear that there ought to be legislation about education, and that education ought to be conducted on a public system. But one must not forget what the nature of education is, and what ought to be taught. At present there are disagreements about these questions. Not everyone agrees about what the young ought to learn and whether the goals should be arete or the

Good life, nor is it clear whether studies should be directed toward the development of intellect or of character. Troublesome questions arise from the current status of education, and it is not clear whether the student ought to study those things that are useful for life, those that lead toward arete, or those that are theoretical. Each of these has its supporters. Nor is there even agreement about what constitutes arete, something that leads logically to a disagreement about the appropriate training for arete.

It is at least clear that the young must be taught those utilitarian things that are absolutely necessary, but not everything utilitarian. A distinction must be made between liberal pursuits and those that are not liberal; that is, the student ought not to participate in the utilitarian pursuits that lead to vulgarity. It is necessary to define as vulgar any pursuit, craft, or science which renders the body, soul, or mind of free men useless for the practice of arete. Thus we call vulgar crafts that deteriorate the condition of the body and employments that earn wages, for they make the mind preoccupied and degraded. Even liberal sciences are liberal only up to a point, for to devote oneself to them too rigorously and completely can have the damaging result of vulgarity. The purpose of one’s pursuits or studies also makes a great difference. If the purpose is for the inherent joy of the project or for friendship or for arete, it is not illiberal. He who does the same thing, however, because of other people would seem to be acting as a servant or a slave. [PoliticsI337a-i339a; A189]

Aristotle thus considered arete something that was neither a practical nor a theoretical matter but a way of leading an excellent and virtuous life. Further, all parts of the human—body, soul, mind—were needed to practice arete. Hence, arete is not solely an attribute of the athlete. In fact, though Aristotle strongly favors physical education, he condemns athletic overdevelopment:

Since it is clear that education by habit must precede education by reason, and that education of the body must precede education of the mind, it is clear that the children must be turned over to the gymnastai and the paidotribai, for the one works with the condition of the body, the other with its actions.

At the present time some of the states with the greatest reputation for attention to their children produce such an athletic condition in them as to detract from the form and growth of the body. The Spartans, although they have avoided this mistake, turn their children into little animals through their labors, which they think contribute to manliness. But as has often been said, attention must not be paid to just one virtue, nor even to one virtue before all others. Indeed, they do not even consider whether

Fig, 291 Portrait of Plato. Marble copy of the Roman period. Berkeley, Calif., Hearst Museum, inv. no. 8-4213 (photo: Therese Babineau).

Their training leads to that virtue. For we see in these cases of animals and of foreign races that courage and manliness do not belong to the wildest but rather to the more gentle and lionlike temperaments. There are many foreign races inclined toward murder and cannibalism who have no share in manly courage. Nobility rather than animalism should play the leading role, for neither a wolf nor any other animal will risk a noble danger, but only a good man. Those who train their children in athletics to the exclusion of other necessities make their children truly vulgar and available to the state for only one kind of work; and they actually train them worse for this one job than others do.

It is, then, agreed that we should make use of physical education and how we should make use of it. Until puberty lighter exercises should be applied, and forced diets and required work forbidden in order that there be no impediment to growth. There is no small proof that such training can stunt growth. In the list of Olympic victors we can find only two or three who have won in both the boys’ category and the men’s category.

Mind, body, and soul must all be engaged, must all be conditioned to lead a life filled with arete. Athletics must be present, but not dominant, in the whole man. It is no coincidence that the Akademy of Plato was first and foremost a place of exercise for the body, and that the best-preserved portrait of Plato (fig. 291), whom we think of as a thinker, a philosopher, and a man of letters, appears on a herm from his gymna-sion and that he wears the ribbon of an athletic victor. But even Plato knew (Protagoras 3 61 A) that “arete cannot be taught.”