Our modern culture is filled with sports heroes who have achieved superstar status through talent and accomplishment on the athletic field. Athletes could also be considered heroes in antiquity, but not because of their athletic accomplishments. By ancient standards, a hero was the offspring of humans or of a god and a human who achieved a quasi-divine status. Most important, the ancient hero had to be dead, at which point a hero cult would arise. The hero could then use his intimate connection with the underworld to provide a point of contact for his worshipers, who needed it for, among other things, cursing enemies. (A curse had to be carried to the underworld in order to become effective.) The hero also acquired an aura of magic and the supernatural and was considered especially adept at curing health problems. This is the standard we must use in order to determine whether an individual ancient athlete was rated a hero.
Of all the athletes from the ancient Greek world whose names survive the most famous was probably Milo, from the town of Kroton in southern Italy, a wrestler and the strongman of antiquity. His record of success at Olympia began in 536 b. c., when he won in the boys’ category, and it continued for the next five Olympiads. He finally lost on his seventh attempt, in 512. He also amassed seven Pythian victories. And his feats outside the wrestling skamma elevated him to the level of legend (Pausanias 6.14.5-8; Ai63a). It was said that he could hold a pomegranate in his hand, daring anyone to take it away, and after each challenger failed, Milo would release the pomegranate unbruised, so great was his control. He would also invite challengers to knock him off a greased diskos, but none could. Milo could tie a cord around his head and then hold his breath until the veins swelled so hard they broke the cord. He could hold his hand out with the fingers held tight together and no one could pry his little finger away from the others. But for all his strength of body, Milo never became a hero, as the manner of his death shows. Walking down a road near Kroton, he happened on a dried-up tree trunk into which wedges had been driven. Milo, arrogant in his strength, stuck his hands into the trunk and began to pull it apart. The wedges slipped
Fig. 243 Head of an athlete, believed to be Polydamas of Skotoussa. Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Inv. no. 542.
Out and the tree snapped shut on his hands. Milo remained trapped by the trunk until he was devoured by wolves.
Another athlete whose end was similarly foolish became a hero nonetheless. This was Polydamas of Skotoussa, in Thessaly, who won the pankration at Olympia in 408 B. c. (fig. 243). Pausanias claims that his statue at Olympia was the work of the sculptor Lysippos, whose career began only about twenty-five years after Poly-damas’s Olympic victory, and that it was taller than the figure of any other man, presumably reflecting Polydamas’s actual height. His strength, like that of Milo, was legendary, and he was credited with the ability to grab a chariot that was speeding past and stop it with one hand. He was also said to have gripped the foot of a large bull so tightly that when it finally broke free his hoof was still in Polydamas’s hand. This athlete’s ambition to rival Herakles led him to wrestle with a lion on the slopes of Mount Olympos, and his victory over the beast is one of the feats portrayed on the base of his statue at Olympia.
But, as Pausanias warned (6.5.1- 9; A168),
Those who glory in their strength are doomed to perish by it, and so Polydamas perished through his own might. He entered a cave along with his close friends to escape the summer heat. As bad luck would have it, the roof began to crack, and it was clear that the cave could not hold up much longer and would collapse quickly. Recognizing the disaster that was coming, the others turned and ran out; but Polydamas decided to stay. He held up his hands in the belief that he could prevent the roof from collapsing, that he would not be crushed by the mountain. His end came here.
Despite this ignoble death, Polydamas’s statue at Olympia was believed to have magical powers, and Lucian (Assembly of the Gods 12; A165) tells us that it cured worshipers of fever.
Fig. 244 Base of the statue of Euthymos of Lokris displaying a rasura in the second line of its inscription. Olympia, Archaeological Museum, inv. no. A527. After O. Alexandri, ed.. Mind and Body (Athens, 1988). p. 223, no. 114.
The things that could make an athlete a hero in ancient Greece could be even stranger than this. Kleomedes of Astypalaia competed at Olympia in 492 b. c., killing his opponent, Ikkos of Epidauros, in the boxing, for which the Hellanodikai convicted him of foul play and stripped him of the victory. Mad with grief, Kleomedes returned home, where he went into a local school and pulled down the roof killing about sixty children. The townspeople set up a hue and cry, but he hid in a chest in the Sanctuary of Athena. The people could not open the lid and finally smashed in the sides of the chest, but they discovered that it was empty. Puzzled, they went to Delphi to ask the Pythia what had happened to Kleomedes. The oracle responded, “Kleomedes of Astypalaia is the last of heroes. Honor with sacrifices him who is no longer mortal" (Pausanias 6.9.7; A164). This was one of the more unusual beginnings to a hero cult in ancient Greece.
Another athlete who became a hero was Euthymos of Lokris, in Italy. A boxer, Euthymos was victorious at Olympia in 484, 476, and 472. Pausanias (6.6.4; A 166a) tells us that his father was a man named Astykles but the people of his hometown claimed he was really the son of the Kaikinos River, which bordered their territory. (This was another characteristic of ancient heroes: they were usually endowed posthumously with a divine or at least superhuman father.) The base of Euthymos’s statue at Olympia provides evidence that he did indeed make the transition from human to hero (fig. 244). The inscription on the front of the base reads,
Euthymos of Lokroi, son of Astykles, having won three times at Olympia,
Set up this figure to be admired by the mortals.
Euthymos of Lokroi Epizephyrioi dedicated it.
Pythagoras of Samos made it. [fvO 144; A 166b]
However, the second line of the inscription had a different text originally, for the words “to be admired by the mortals” are inscribed in a part of the marble that was erased. When ancient Greeks wished to change an inscribed text, they had to “erase” the original: the stone would be carved down until the inscribed letters disappeared. As a result part of the surface of the stone would be lower than the rest, and within this msum a new text could be inscribed. So although Euthymos acknowledged and continued to acknowledge that his father was Astykles, his image (and therefore he himself) was later removed from the realm of mere mortals.
In 480 Euthymos was defeated at Olympia by another athlete who would become a hero. This was Theagenes from the island of Thasos, in the northern Aegean, who wanted to win both the boxing and the pankration at a single Olympiad. After defeating Euthymos in the boxing, Theagenes was so exhausted that he had no energy to compete in the pankration, which was won by Dromeus of Mantineia akoniti (“dustless,” uncontested) —the first such victory in the pankration. As a result, the Hellan-odikai ruled that Theagenes had entered the boxing to spite Euthymos and fined him a hefty sum —at least $264,000 to be split between Euthymos and Olympian Zeus. Theagenes did not compete in the boxing again at Olympia, but he did win the pankration in 476. His record included three Pythian victories in boxing, and nine Ne-mean and ten Isthmian victories in boxing and the pankration. In addition to these victories at the stephanitic (crown) games, Theagenes is said to have won another 1,376 victories in various chrematitic (money) games, including one in the dolichos, a long-distance footrace.
Theagenes’ athletic success had been foreshadowed by childhood feats of strength: when he was nine he plucked a bronze statue that had caught his eye from its base in the agora and took it home. His posthumous status as a hero, like that of Euthymos, is hinted at by the stories that he was not the son of Timosthenes but the offspring of a phantom of Herakles. The story of his translation to hero status is told by Pausanias (6.11.8-9; A 167a):
After he died, one of his enemies came every night to the statue of Theagenes in Thasos, and flogged the bronze image as though he were whipping Theagenes himself. The statue stopped this outrage by falling upon the man, whose sons then prosecuted the statue for murder. The Thasians threw the statue into the sea, following the precepts of Drake, who, when he wrote the homicide laws for the Athenians, imposed banishment even upon inanimate objects which fell and killed a man. As time went by, however, famine beset the Thasians, and they sent envoys to Delphi, where Apollo instructed them to recall their exiles. They did so, but there was still no end to the famine. They sent to the Pythia a second time and said that although they had followed the instructions, the wrath of
The gods still was upon them. The Pythia responded, “You do not remember your great Theagenes.”
The Thasians were then in a quandary, for they could not think how to retrieve the statue of Theagenes. But fishermen who had set out for the day’s fishing happened to catch the statue in their nets and brought it back to land. The Thasians set the statue back up in its original position and are now accustomed to sacrifice to Theagenes as to a god. I know of many places, both among the Greeks and among the barbarians, where statues of Theagenes have been set up. He is worshiped by the natives as a healing power.
The heroic status of Theagenes has been confirmed by excavations at Thasos, where the circular base of his monument was discovered (fig. 245). This base was originally surmounted by a circular marble block that served as an altar but also had a cavity within to hold money. Inscribed on the block is the proscription that all who sacrifice to Theagenes must also make a monetary contribution toward the maintenance and upkeep of the shrine. The inscription can be dated to about a. d. too, so worship of the athletic hero Theagenes was still going strong more than five hundred years after his death.
But such heroes were the exception, and we know of many successful athletes who were failures in later life and were considered as either stupid or bad men. In the former category belongs Dioxippos of Athens, who won the pankration at Olympia in 336 B. c. Later on he was wrongly accused of stealing a gold cup from Alexander the Great. He became despondent and committed suicide, prompting his enemies to declare that it was a real hardship to have great strength of body but little of mind (Diodorus Siculus 17.100-101; A 172a). Dioxippos had revealed his tendency toward emotional overreaction earlier, at the celebration of his eiselasis (triumphal return) to his native Athens:
A crowd gathered from all around and was watching him, hanging on his every move. In the crowd was a woman particularly distinguished by her beauty who had come to see what was going on. The moment Dioxippos saw her he was smitten by her beauty. He could not look away from her and kept turning to keep her in sight. Since he was blushing, it became clear to the crowd that he was not idly staring. Diogenes of Sinope understood what was happening and said to his neighbors, “Look at your great big athlete, throttled by a little girl.” [Aelian, VH 12.58]
The image of athlete as hero was balanced by the image of athlete as oaf. In addition, there are many examples of incompetent athletes. One such was Charmos, who
Fig. 245 Base of the monument of Theagenes in the agora of Thasos (photo: author).
Was said to have finished seventh in a field of six in the dolichos — a friend had run out onto the track to encourage him. Commentators joked, “If he had had five more friends he would have finished twelfth” {Anthologia Graeca 11.82; A174).
Extremely gifted athletes in antiquity, then, were sometimes considered heroes by their contemporaries but for reasons other than their prowess. A modern equivalent might be the baseball player Lou Gehrig, who set a number of records on the playing field but is better remembered as the catalyst for medical research into the disease that killed him, research that continues to bring hope of a cure. Gehrig is thus something of a curative figure similar to ancient heroes.
There were also athletes in ancient Greece of great prowess who never attained the status of heroes—the Babe Ruths, whose fame is limited to their athletic exploits. The majority of ancient athletes, however, like their modern counterparts, were not heroes; they were not even winners. But without them athletics would have no purpose.
World History
