Text Access
You will be reading two texts, accessed as follows:
- This Study Guide, including instructor's readings (below).
- van Nijf, Onno. 2004. “Athletics and paideia: Festivals and physical education in the world of the Second Sophistic.” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by Barbara Borg, 203–227. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Quiz Response Prompt
- How did athletic agōn figure into constructions of Hellenic identity? Can athletics help us understand what it meant to be Greek under Rome? How?
- Does van Nijf seem to make a convincing case that culturally Greek cities in the Roman East, or at least in the region he studies, namely, Lycia, valued athletic over intellectual achievement? Should we be studying "jocks," not sophists? (Well, we're studying both.)
Introduction
Van Nijf's chapter is useful for two reasons. It helps us appreciate the interconnections and parallels between, on the one hand, sophistic and intellectual endeavor more generally, and, on the other hand, athletic agōn. But it also forces us to reevaluate the role of paideia in elite Hellenic self-definition in the Roman East.
Additional Required Texts (this Study Guide)
On games and sophists, judging and rivalry, competition and its discontents.
Philostratus Lives of the Sophists (1922 Loeb)
Passages selected from the author's Lives, parts of which we read earlier.
Marcus of Byzantium* Persuades the Megarians to Let the Athenians Compete
When, later on, Marcus went to Megara (Byzantium was originally a Megarian colony), the Megarians were still keeping up their quarrel with the Athenians with the utmost energy of their minds, just as if the famous decree against them had been lately drawn up;** and they did not admit them when they came to the Lesser Pythian games. Marcus, however, came among them, and so changed the hearts of the Megarians that he persuaded them to throw open their houses and to admit the Athenians to the society of their wives and children. (pages 105-107)
* One of Philostratus' celebrity sophists. Perhaps mid 2nd century CE.
** That's an allusion to "ancient" history: Athens' "Megarian" decree of 432 BCE, which forebade trade with nearby Megara. Philostratus treats the present situation as if it were a continuation of that famous quarrel.
Polemon as President of the Smyrna Olympics
For the people [of Smyrna] having from his boyhood observed in him a certain greatness, heaped on the head of Polemon all the wreaths of honour that were theirs to give, decreeing for himself and his family the distinctions most sought after in Smyrna; for they bestowed on him and his descendants the right to preside over the Olympic games founded by Hadrian,* and to go on board the sacred trireme.** (page 107)
Again, when a tragic actor at the Olympic games in Smyrna pointed to the ground as he uttered the words, "O Zeus! "† then raised his hands to heaven at the words, "and Earth!" Polemon, who was presiding at the Olympic games, expelled him from the contest, saying: "The fellow has committed a solecism†† with his hand." I will say no more on this subject, for this is enough to illustrate the charming wit of the man. (page 131)
* Under the Empire, there were Olympic games elsewhere in the Mediterranean other than the original Olympics, held in Olympia, Greece. These Smyrna Olympics form part of the explosion, second and third centuries CE, in the number of athletic-competitive festivals Empire-wide.
** The "sacred trireme" was a ship that, after it had come ashore at Smyrna, was pulled on land and conveyed to one of the public squares of the city; it became, in other words, a parade float. This seems to have formed part of a festival of Dionysus during February and/or March. (I would love to have been there to see Polemon on board, waving to the people!)
† Zeus is a sky god.
†† A solecism is a grammatical mistake.
Olympic Champions and Olympic Judges
Cassius Dio 79.10.2–3, Loeb
This and the following concern Aurelius Helix, Phoenician wrestler and pancratiast: how those running the Olympic Games (217 CE) once contrived to deny him a shot at an Olympic triumph.
Sardanapalus* was conducting games and numerous spectacles in which Aurelius Helix, the athlete, won renown. This man so far surpassed his competitors, that he desired to contend in both wrestling and the pancratium at Olympia, and actually did win in both events at the Capitoline Games.** But the Eleans† were jealous of him [phthonēsantes autōi, "envying him"; compare phthonos, "envy"], fearing that he might prove to be "the eighth from Hercules," as the saying has it,‡ and so would not call any wrestler into the stadium, even though they had announced this contest on the bulletin-board; in Rome, however, he won both events, a feat that no one else had accomplished.
* Cassius Dio likes to disparage the emperor Elegabalus (r. 218-222 CE) by referring to him that way.
** Greek-style festival games est'd 86 CE by the emperor Domitian, and in honor of Capitoline Jupiter/Zeus. They were held in what is now the Piazza Navona, in Rome. Dio refers to the games of 218.
† The Olympic Games took place in the territory of the Eleans, who had a key role in running them.
‡ He would have been only the eighth to win in both events, the first being the hero-god Hercules/Heracles, founder of the games.
Philostratus On Heroes 15.8
Speakers: a Phoenician merchant and a vinedresser, i.e., a tender of grape vines.
Phoenician Merchant. Amazing, vinedresser! I suppose you will relate what happened at Olympia.* For he [Helix] had won one victory already, when as a man among boys** he won the wrestling contest. At the Olympiad after that he stripped himself for wrestling as well as for the pancratium. The Eleans were displeased at this and decided to exclude him from both these events by making accusations that he had violated Olympic regulations. Nevertheless, they grudgingly crowned him for the pancratium. And Protesilaos† told him beforehand to be on his guard against this kind of envy [phthonos], because he knew that Helix was a rival of choice athletes.
Vinedresser. You have made a most excellent interpretation of the oracle, my guest. (Philostratus, On Heroes, Center for Hellenic Studies, trans. Ellen Bradshaw Aitken and Jennifer K. Berenson Maclean)
* The Olympic Games of 217 CE.
** He had just aged out of the boys' wrestling classification (213 CE) and was competing against adults.
† A hero god who foretold the future.
Philostratus On Athletic Training (Gymnasticus) 46
One should train boys in movement (kinēsis), as in the palaistra (wrestling school); by movement I mean the kind of passive movement produced in the legs by a softening massage and the kind of movement produced in the arms by a hardening massage. And the boy should keep time by clapping, since that makes these exercises more energetic. This was the type of exercise used by the Phoenician Helix, not only when he was a boy, but also when he had come into the men's age category, and he was an indescribably wonderful athlete, more so than any of those whom I know to be practicing that kind of relaxation. (Loeb, with slight revision)
Lucian In defense of Images
I often hear, she said, — but whether it is true, you men know better than I — that at Olympia (the Olympic games) the victors are not allowed to have their statues set up larger than life; the Stewards (the Hellanodikai, the Elian referees of the games) see to it that no one transgresses this rule, examining the statues even more scrupulously than they did the competitor's qualification. Take care that we do not get convicted of false proportions, and find our statue thrown down by the Stewards. (Trans. Fowler)
Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana (5.7)
On the emperor Nero's (r. 54-68) "triumphant" tour through Greece and participation in the athletic festivals there. (He won every contest he entered, and even some he didn't.) Apollonius of Tyana (quasi-legendary miracle man, 1st cent. CE) ridicules Nero's pretense that the Eleans at the Olympics will begrudge him victory.
The conversations which Apollonius held about things which met his eyes were, according to Damis, many in number, but the following he said deserve to be recorded. On one occasion they were sitting in the temple of Heracles, and Menippus gave a laugh, for it happened that Nero had just come into his mind. "And what," he said, "are we to think of this splendid fellow? In which of the contests has he won wreaths of late? Don't you think that self-respecting Hellenes must shake with laughter when they are on their way to the festivals?"
And Apollonius replied: "As I have heard from Telesinus, the worthy Nero is afraid of the whips of the Eleans; for when his flatterers urged him to win at Olympia and to proclaim Rome as the victor, he answered: 'Yes, if the Eleans will only not depreciate me (mē baskēnōsin, "let them not envy me/hate on me"; compare baskania, "envy/evil eye"), for they are said to use whips and to look down upon me.' And many worse bits of nonsense than this forecast fell from his lips. I however admit that Nero will conquer at Olympia, for who is bold enough to enter the lists against him? But I deny that he will win at the Olympic festival, because they are not keeping it at the right season. For custom requires that this should have been held last year, but Nero has ordered the Eleans to put it off until his own visit, in order that they may sacrifice to him rather than to Zeus. (Loeb)
Inscription Celebrating the Career of Marcus Aurelius Asclepiades (IG IVX 1102. IGR I 153. Moretti 79)
Asclepiades, probably born 157/158 CE, was a champion pancratiast and periodonikēs. This inscription, in Greek and found in Rome, dates from around 200 CE. Asclepiades came from a wealthy family in Alexandria (Egypt), and had a career of only six years, during which he was undefeated. Asclepiades here speaks in the first person. He begins with his father, Demetrius, then focuses on himself. Note especially his reasons for retiring, given toward the end of the text
Of Marcus Aurelius Demetrius, high priest of the entire guild of which he was president for life, in charge of the Imperial Baths, citizen of Alexandria and Hermopolis, periodonikēs in the pancratium, eminent wrestler: I, his son, Marcus Aurelius Asclepiades, also known as Hermodorus, senior temple warden of the great Sarapis, high priest of the entire guild of which I am president for life, in charge of the Imperial Baths, citizen of Alexandria, Hermopolis, Puteoli, and Naples, council member at Elea and Athens, and citizen and council member in many other cities, undefeated periodonikēs in the pancratium, one whom no one could dislodge, who never called foul against another, nor did others dare to call foul against me or decline to fight me,* nor did I share the victor's crown (with another), nor did I ever enter a protest against a competitor, nor did the emperor ever declare a victory in my favor, nor did I ever fight a rematch because of a foul; rather, having been crowned victor in the ring in all the contests that I had entered, and having always passed the preliminary trials for those contests, and having competed in contests in three nations — Italy, Greece, Asia — and having won in pancratium in every one of the games listed below [then, a list of games in which he was victor, including the Olympics (the original festival of that name), the Pythian Games, the Isthmian Games, the Capitolea at Rome, the Augustan Games at Naples, etc. etc.] — after competing for a total of six years, I retired from the ring at the age of twenty five because of the dangers and envies (phthonous) to which I had been exposed. Several years later, I was compelled** to compete at the sixth Olympic Games in my native Alexandria, where I was victorious in the pancratium.
* An inferior competitor might, when facing a superior, decline to fight and thereby concede victory.
** By popular demand?
Historical Overview
Bibliography
The following overview is drawn largely from the following sources:
Golden, Mark. Sport in the Ancient World from A to Z. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Online book link.
Miller, Stephen G. Ancient Greek Athletics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Print.
Remijsen, S. The End of Greek Athletics in Late Antiquity. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2015. Print.
General Observations
Agōn means "contest," and we cannot rightly explore contest in an Imperial Greek context without reference to athletic contest. As we shall see, there were numerous intersections between athletics and sophistic as elite fields (in the bourdieusian sense). The one field, athletics, could in fact be viewed as offering parallels to the other, sophistic. At the same time, both athletics and rhetoric were viewed as central to an elite education and to Hellenic identity.
It will, however, be important to take care how we treat competition, especially athletic competition, in the Greek-speaking world. The Greeks did not invent athletics, nor are athletics or competition so distinctively Greek as to set Greeks apart from everyone else in that respect. Nor will it do to accept without question various other assumptions sometimes made about Greek athletics, for instance, that during the "golden" age (776-323 BCE), athletics were the preserve of amateurs dedicated to the pursuit of excellence for its own sake, while later Greek athletics were corrupted by professionalism and greed.
East versus West
And yet, certain aspects of Greek athletic competition did set it apart, and those aspects will be useful to review. Notably, they have to do with contest and show, and with how those two were regarded in the (largely) Latin-speaking West and the (largely) Greek-speaking East.
The West, that is, that part of the Roman Empire that, for reasons of language (the use of Latin) and history, could boast of chronologically longer and culturally deeper connections to Rome, the Empire's capital, did of course, esteem competition, including athletic competition, especially at higher levels of society. What Rome and its Western provinces could, however, be less comfortable with was competition as spectacle.
Take the most obvious example, that of gladiators. Gladiators were men whose job it was to fight, sometimes to the death, in order to put on a show. Though gladiatorial combat spread throughout the Empire, its birthplace was Italy, Rome and Tuscany — ancient Etruria —to be exact.*
* It's possible that gladiatorial combat came to Rome, the city, by way of Etruscan settlements in what is now Campania, on the southern coast of Italy, perhaps by an indirect route, through Samnium, to the east of Campania. We first hear of gladiatorial combat happening at Rome in 264 BCE. Initially, it formed part of the funeral celebrations of important personages; later, it became popular entertainment sponsored by elite politicians. Gladiatorial combat was not a particularly "Greek" form of spectator sport, but Greeks and others throughout the empire flocked to see these monomakhoi, Greek for "gladiators," fight in shows sponsored by wealthy patrons seeking prestige and approval. Within the Roman mindset, gladiatorial combat was rationalized as serving to inculcate military values, a fearlessness of death. Not all fights were to the death, however, and after three years, a gladiator might retire with a rudis, a wooden sword serving as a souvenir. Christians had their reasons to disapprove of gladiatorial combat (it smacked of paganism). Evidently, though, it died out in the 400s CE mostly due to the difficulty of finding gladiators and of paying for shows. We won't have a chance to focus closely on this distinctly Roman phenomenon, but it does figure in some of the evidence pertinent to this course. Learn more at Brill's New Pauly and at the Oxford Classical Dictionary.
So, on the one hand, gladiators obviously competed. On the other hand, they were showmen, and often very popular — super-stars, some of them. But as showmen, they, if free and citizens (not all gladiators were slaves), could never hope for a status higher than that of infamia. What was infamia? Under Roman law, infamia involved a loss of rights; it attached to, among others, citizens who accepted money for performing in public, or who otherwise entertained for monetary gain. That included actors, musicians, sex workers, and pimps, as well as gladiators. As for the scope of civil liabilities, Remijsen writes:
This legal state of infamia denied performers the full rights associated with Roman citizenship: they were for example not protected from corporal punishment, did not have the right to lay an accusation in a public court, could not become members of city councils, and could not contract legal marriages.
Turning now to athletic competition, it wasn't, to be sure, quite the same thing as gladiatorial combat. But evidence suggests that what lay behind social and political strictures against paid entertainers also produced ambivalence toward citizen participation in athletic competition in the Latin West. During our period, athletic festivals proliferated all over the Mediterranean. Indeed, there was an explosion of interest in athletic competition as spectator sport in the Latin West, including Rome, where the exercise areas and gymnasia attached to bath complexes attested to Romans' zeal for participating in exercise and sport.
Still, for a Roman lacking a sense of connection to Greek traditions, competitive wrestling, running, and so on, if done at a festival in front of people, and with rich prizes, could savor of putting on a show. Add to that the fact that Greek athletes mostly competed in the nude, and you have something that many Romans wouldn't have wanted to be seen doing in public. It was no problem entering chariots into an Olympic or similar event, as that involved only sponsorship, not performing in person. Thus Tiberius (emperor 14-37 CE) won an Olympic chariot victory in 4 BCE. Rome, in fact, played a role in the revival of Greek games following Augustus' accession to the purple in 27 BCE; Augustus himself founded the Sebasta, the "Augustan Games," in the Greek-speaking city of Naples, but that's not the same as competing in those games. Nero, on the other hand, was the exception that proved the rule. During his tour of Greece (67 CE), he took part in numerous events, including tragic performance. He also drove his own ten-horse chariot at the Olympics. (He won, despite being thrown from the car.) Roman senators were scandalized; Greeks at least pretended to love it.
Of course, being an athlete with Roman citizenship by itself won't have entailed a loss of civil rights (infamia). Still, in the West, the career of athlete may not have carried the cachet that it will have done in the East. Indeed, athletes in the Greek-speaking parts of the Empire were respected and honored, often with privileges, offices, and duties of various sorts. Under the Empire, they, like sophists, were liable to be chosen to act as ambassadors representing their respective cities. Cities paid them homage with victory parades (sometimes quite elaborate), statues, and dedicatory inscriptions.
One can, then, argue that this attitude toward athletics will have set Greeks — and non-Greeks who had embraced Greek culture — apart from others in the Roman Mediterranean. And in fact what we find is that athletics and the gymnasium, very much like the paideia prized by our sophists, played a key role in defining Greek identity (for which van Nijf).
The Briefest of Histories of Greek (and Greco-Roman) Athletics
One imagines that competitive games of strength and skill go back to the very origins of human culture; certainly, they mattered for the Greeks from an early period. We learn of funeral games in the epic poems of Homer and Hesiod (eighth century BCE), while the first Olympics were traditionally dated to 776 BCE, the first secure date of Greek history. But it wasn't until 573 BCE that the Pythian (at Delphi), Nemean (at Nemea), and Isthmian games (at Corinth) were all in place to join the Olympics to form that quartet of religious-competitive festivals regarded as preeminent in the ancient Greek world, the so-called stephanitic festivals, named after the fact that victors at each won a wreath (stephanos). Together, they formed what the ancients called the periodos, the "circuit." Later, victors in all four festivals of the periodos were called periodonikai (sing. periodonikēs), "victors in the circuit."
As already mentioned, the festivals in question weren't simply athletic meets; they were religious festivals that, because they attracted worshipers from all over the Greek world, offered participants a chance to test their strength and skills against other Greeks, to see who was best. Note that there were no team sports; it was all individual competition.
Festivals of the original periodos featured the following types of competition:
- The gumnikos agōn, which consisted of events in which athletes competed in the nude (gumnos). Included were:
- footraces
- long jump (halma, to music, and using weights for extra distance)
- discus throw
- javelin throw (akōn)
- wrestling (palē)
- boxing (pux)
- pancratium (pankration, the "all-powerful": boxing plus wrestling)
- pentathlon (pentathlon, the "five events": stadium footrace, discus, long jump, javelin throw, wrestling)
- The hippikos agōn, featuring various types of horse or chariot race.
- The mousikos agōn, featuring poetry, music, and drama. Though never part of the Olympic Games (exception: the games organized specially for Nero in 67 CE), the mousikos agōn did figure at the other three stephanitic festivals. By the first cent. CE, the Pythian Games even offered prizes for what Plutarch calls logographoi, "speech writers" (Moralia 674e).
- One popular form of theatrical entertainment that eventually joined the competitive circuit was the pantomime. Under the Empire, it typically involved a tragic story told through solo dance movement accompanied by singing. See the article in the Oxford Classical Dictionary.
- Other events, including those for best herald (public crier) and trumpeter (more a military role than a musical one).
So they weren't all what we would call athletic events, but they were all competitive events. At first, they were restricted to ethnic Greeks, but that restriction loosened up under the Roman Empire. These were not, however, the only such festivals in the Greek world, and as time went on, more and more were added to the list. With the appearance of Greco-Macedonian kingdoms south and east of Greece (Alexander the Great and successors, 336-30 BCE), gymnasia and organized athletics, along with the other aspects of Greek culture, spread through wide swaths of the non-Greek world.
This proliferation of games only accelerated under Rome. To quote Remijsen, "The second and third centuries in particular were marked by an astounding increase in the number of games" (Remijsen cites Leschorn for "over 500 contests in the Imperial period"), with "most new games . . . founded in Asia, Syria, and Egypt, but athletics spread to the West as well, first to Italy and then also to southern Gaul [France] and northern Africa."
Professionalism. From early on, athletic victory could pay off handsomely, but by Imperial times, athletics could be a career, with bonuses to top contenders for entering an event, state pensions, fiscal exemptions, and other incentives, not to mention the value of the prizes themselves. For the most glorified of victors, celebrations welcoming the returning hero might feature the opening of a breach in the city's walls, purely for the purpose of letting the victor in.
The Lucian reading gives the impression that athletes competed for no more than symbolic prizes, wreaths (stephanoi) and the like. But that ignores cash prizes on offer at a number of festivals, plus rich bonuses for the returning victor. Perhaps as early as Solon's time, Athenian "winners in the periodos [the "circuit" of four stephanitic games] earned a free meal each day in the public dining room in the Prytaneum and a payment of 500 (for an Olympic victory) and 100 drachmas (for an Isthmian) . . ." (Golden). Winners of the stadium race in the Athenian Panathenaea won olive oil — 100 richly-wrought amphoras of high-grade product from Athena's own trees, at a value of about US $100,000.00 (Golden). Yes, the idea seems to have been for the winner to sell it.
One sign of the professionalism of, and of the upsurge of interest in, athletics was growth in the number of athletic guilds, in Greek, sunodoi (sing. sunodos, "synod") or xustoi ("indoor running tracks," "athletic associations"). In the case of the impressively named Sacred Xystic Association of Heracleans at Rome, we're dealing with an association of multiple guilds, one headed by imperial appointees, and with a high priest, a "xystic" president. What did such guilds do? To quote Mark Golden,
Athletic associations sought recognition and privileges for their members: relief from military service, billeting troops and other civic duties, the right to wear purple at festivals, the patronage of the powerful. In return, they founded and organized games in the emperor's honour. Athletes paid a fee to join and received certificates of membership. (Sport in the Ancient World From A to Z)
In terms of social class, the career athlete in the Imperial period likely will not have come from a poor family, one unable to pay for training. Wealth obviously offered an advantage, but natural skill will have, also. Not all career athletes came from the highest echelons of society, but success in athletics could offer a gateway to elite status.
At the same time, there was much competing outside the "big leagues," and some of it was for pay, win or lose, much of it in small-time local festivals or even at private events purely for entertainment. This distinction between major-league competition for big prizes (including money) and small-time competition for wages will have mattered a lot, as it was regarded to be humiliating to have to work in another's employ. Still, the boundaries could be fluid, with local competition serving as a stepping stone to regional and international circuits.
Athletics were not a male preserve. The young women of Sparta participated in athletic training, just like the young men, and together with them. Women were not allowed to attend the Olympic games, but they could still win victories there by sponsoring chariots. And they could attend as spectators at most other games. And even though women could not compete in person at the Olympics, they certainly did compete at the games of Hera (the "Heraea"), a sort of women's Olympics held at the same site. (The Olympics honored Zeus; the Heraea, Hera; both gods had temples at the site.) At the Heraea held at Argos, women also competed, as they did at the Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean, and other games during the Hellenistic period (323-30 BCE). Footraces for girls were, in fact, a wide-spread phenomenon. Note as well that women could compete in certain poetic competitions.
Did athletic victory for women differ from that for men ideologically? A young woman's victory in a footrace could bring honor to her family, though some felt that women's participation devalued sport. Under Rome, female victors in running and wrestling at the Antioch Olympics became priestesses. As for a woman's taking individual pride in a victory, that, notes Golden, seems to have been rare; our only evidence is the record left by Cynisca, Olympic chariot victor in the early fourth century BCE.
From late antiquity survives a mosaic showing young women competing in games and winning prizes. Which festival was this? We'll probably never know, but the find spot for the mosaic, the Villa Romana del Casale, a vast and sumptuous estate on Sicily, and the handling of the subject suggest both the prestige of the prizes being won by these athletes, as well as an element of putting on a show.
Finally, athletic training will have figured in the education of an elite male youth in the Roman East. Part of that was to scout out talent, but not everyone was destined for an athletic career. Indeed, along with lessons with the local grammatikos (school teacher) and, for some, with a rhētōr or sophist (rhetoric teacher), athletics were viewed as an important step toward becoming a properly trained elite male.