There remains a desire and a wish to read a monograph on Hellenistic sports, written by a single author (…), capable of sketching a complete and, above all, consistent picture of the phenomenon.
1.1 Why Hellenistic Athletics?
There is a gap in the history of Greek athletics. Whereas the cultural history of Archaic and Classical sport as well as its Roman Imperial counterparts have been comparatively well studied,Footnote 1 Hellenistic athletics have not received the same scholarly attention. Only one volume exists on the topic in question.Footnote 2 In most of the benchmarks on ancient athletics, the subject is at best a marginal issue and the same is true for the standard works on Hellenistic history.Footnote 3 In the field of sport history, the reason for the neglect of Hellenistic athletics as an epoch in its own right has to be seen at least in part in the fact that this period has long been considered a “dark age” of ancient sport.Footnote 4 According to the old master narrative, Greek athletics saw their heyday in the Late Archaic and Early Classical periods and underwent a serious decline in the Hellenistic and Roman periods due to the rise of new athletes from lower strata of society. In contrast to the “golden age” of athletics in Pindar’s times, when wealthy aristocrats who competed solely for the purpose of achieving noble glory dominated the scene, the majority of Hellenistic athletes practiced their sport in order to earn money. In consequence, the games suffered from a moral decline in terms of a “commodification,” brutalization, and professionalization of athletics from the fourth century BCFootnote 5 onward. This “old orthodoxy” based upon the notion of athletic decline has been a very powerful idea in sports history for a long time. At its core stood the sharp dichotomy of “amateurism” versus “professionalism.” Yet neither of these concepts can be found in the ancient evidenceFootnote 6; they are products of the nineteenth century, which invented the concept as “a tool to keep the working class out of the gentlemen’s ‘good’, not-for-profit sport.”Footnote 7
Since the 1970s, however, the notion of athletic decline has been deconstructed by social historians and epigraphists like Harry W. Pleket, who was able to demonstrate that Greek aristocrats dominated the games until the “end of athletics” in Late Antiquity.Footnote 8 David C. Young and others have made it very clear that the concept of athletic decline represented a projection of the ideas of Pierre de Coubertin and the modern Olympic movement imposed on antiquity.Footnote 9 Yet, although it has become quite uncontroversial among scholars by now that the Hellenistic period must not be understood as an age of decline with regard to athletics (and neither with respect to other areas of the history of that period as well),Footnote 10 this observation has not yet provoked a new trend in the study of Hellenistic athletics. Most of the standard works on Greek athletics still mainly focus on the Archaic and Classical periods.Footnote 11
This is not to say, however, that this study cannot rely on any preliminary works. The first who repeatedly emphasized the importance of the topic was the tireless Louis Robert.Footnote 12 His main observations were that the total number of agones increased and that the entire system of contests became more complex in the Hellenistic period, when several athletic festivals set themselves apart as agones stephanitai.Footnote 13 Robert also pointed out that Greek poleis found new ways of financially supporting their local athletes.Footnote 14 In 2009, Hans Langenfeld paved the way for future research by authoring an article on the Hellenistic age as an epoch of sports history.Footnote 15 Following Robert, he stressed the expansion of Hellenistic contests in terms of their mere number and of the amount of the victory prizes the athletes were awarded with.Footnote 16 As a second major factor of the period, Langenfeld saw the Hellenistic kings striving to gain acceptance by means of athletics.Footnote 17 His third and last observation states that Hellenistic games became more entertaining and spectacular,Footnote 18 an observation that is also highlighted by recent archaeological research.Footnote 19
A 2016 volume, then, including the papers of a Mannheim conference of 2015, contains different historical, archaeological, and philological perspectives on the role athletics played in the Hellenistic world.Footnote 20 In his introduction to the volume, Christian Mann summarizes the current state of research on Hellenistic athletics and points to future research perspectives. As such, he refers to the study of similar athletic motifs in Hellenistic literature and art which generally seem to have become more detailed and specific in their description compared to earlier epochs of Greek literature and art.Footnote 21 Mann further refers to the new organizational framework of athletics in the Hellenistic period,Footnote 22 the question of the social origin of the athletes,Footnote 23 the topic of athletics and ethnicity,Footnote 24 and the possible impact of new political developments in the field of athletics.Footnote 25
The three latter aspects condense more or less what the following study is about. As the short introductory survey of existing studies has shown, the focus of most previous works on Hellenistic athletics has been on the agones and the organizational aspects of Greek sport.Footnote 26 This study, in contrast, takes a different approach. It looks at Hellenistic athletics from the perspective of the athletes (or more precisely: from the perspective of the sporting victors) themselves.Footnote 27 Therefore, the possible connection between trends of representation in literature and art and the organizational framework of Hellenistic athletics will not systematically be dealt with in the course of this study.Footnote 28 Instead, a detailed analysis of the self-presentation of Hellenistic victors, that is, the way these successful athletes and horse owners wanted their victories to be understood, stands at the center of this book.Footnote 29 A comprehensive study from the perspective of the agones is not intended, although they are naturally also part of this book.Footnote 30
The question remains what “Hellenistic” means in terms of chronology in this study. Angelos Chaniotis recently voted for the notion of a “long Hellenistic Age” for precisely the reason that “the joint treatment of these two periods (i.e., the Hellenistic and the Roman Imperial periods up to AD 138) contributes to a better understanding of social and cultural developments.”Footnote 31 As with many cases of periodization in history, such an approach is arbitrary to a certain degree, and different cultural phenomena may implicate different caesurae. Yet with regard to athletics, one can actually make a compelling argument in favor of the conventional terms of the period beginning with the reign of Alexander in 336 and ending with the death of Kleopatra VII (and the fall of the last Hellenistic empire) in 30: It was precisely Alexander’s campaigns that led to an enormous expansion of the Greek world that resulted in an expansion of the framework of Greek athletics and paved the way for a “new society of victors” consisting of kings and queens, princes and courtiers, women and non-Greeks.Footnote 32 The end of the period on the battlefield of Actium culminating in Kleopatra’s death belongs to more or less the same time frame (or is slightly later) as the earliest attestation of athletic guilds,Footnote 33 which significantly changed the organizational structure of athletics in the Roman Imperial period and brought about an increase in the athletes’ mobility. Whereas in the Hellenistic age, Southern Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor still represented three more or less separated areas of athletic competition, this strict separation ceased to exist at the beginning of the Imperial era when Philippos Glykon from Pergamon appears as the first athlete known to us who won victory in all three areas.Footnote 34 Moreover, the possible pool of athletic victors (used here in the narrow sense of “gymnic” victors) seems to have expanded in terms of gender in Roman times. It was not earlier than in about AD 45 that we find the first female victors in a running event honored by a public inscription at an important place of competition.Footnote 35 In other words, female athletic competition at the “big four” no longer remained “especially shocking,” as Antony Spawforth once put it.Footnote 36
1.2 Why (Just) the Athletes?
Doubtlessly, a detailed study on the self-presentation of Hellenistic performers (poets, actors, musicians, and dancers) would have constituted a very promising topic. Yet to incorporate the analysis of the self-presentation of the so-called thymelic artists would have been too large a scope for one single scholar to cover. Moreover, Greek writers clearly saw the athletic and equestrian contests as a unity and “tended to group together” these events by the common formula gymnikoi kai hippikoi agones.Footnote 37 What is more, musical events were not – or only at a comparatively late point in time and to a very limited degree – part of the most important Greek festival, the Olympic Games.Footnote 38 Last but not least, it was no uncommon behavior for a young athletic victor to engage in equestrian activities after his victory in order to enhance his personal prestige. The same, however, is not equally true with regard to musical competitions. The only Hellenistic performer-athlete I know of stemmed from Tegea.Footnote 39 His single success in the boxing finals at the Ptolemaia (in addition to a long catalogue of musical victories) shows that this was not a first-class agon compared with other athletic events in this period,Footnote 40 and thus cannot be interpreted as an indication for regular participation in both musical and athletic contests.
So, when I limit myself to a close analysis of the self-presentation of sporting victors for this study, this is not simply inspired by my own personal interests (which admittedly play a role), but is also rooted in ancient reality as documented by our evidence. Therefore, this book focuses on successful participants in athletic and equestrian events only. By “athletic” and “equestrian” events, I refer to the “gymnic” and “hippic” disciplines of ancient Greek terminology. To simply transfer the Greek terms into English, however, would generate terminological confusion because “gymnastics” is a particular set of athletic events in modern sports. So it does not appear as a suitable generic term for all events that were practiced nakedly in antiquity. The term “athletics” and its derivatives, however, can either refer exclusively to the “gymnic” disciplines or to “gymnic” as well as “hippic” events in a broader sense of the word. In this study, I will make use of both understandings in that I tend to employ “athlete” in opposition to “horse owner,” whereas a reference to “athletics” usually includes the equestrian events as well (in opposition to “musical” contests). At any rate, the meaning will be unambiguous in each individual case due to its context.Footnote 41
1.3 Methodological Approach
After having sketched the outline of the topic, I shall now turn to the question of how to deal with the evidence. When I started working on the subject, I first collected all the existing evidence on Hellenistic athletes,Footnote 42 an endeavor that resulted in the compilation and online publication of a Mannheim database of Hellenistic athletes.Footnote 43 Yet clearly not all of the collected evidence can be of equal importance for this study. So in the following subsections, I will first deal with the key medium for the presentation of athletic fame in the Hellenistic period: the victor epigram. I will then unveil the interpretative tools I intend to use, while also describing my methodological approach to the topic.
1.3.1 Victor Epigrams as the Characteristic Genre for the Study of “Economy of Praise” in the Hellenistic Period
The victor epigram experienced a heyday in the Hellenistic period.
When at some point by the end of the second century Kritolaos from Aigiale on Amorgos lost his son, he came up with an innovative idea to honor his son’s memory. With a donation of 2,000 drachmae, he established a yearly festival that included the usual athletic events.Footnote 44 In one of these events, however, no athletes competed, for Kritolaos’ son Aleximachos was announced as the victor in the men’s pankration every year.Footnote 45 Funeral contests as such were certainly not an innovation: Contests like this had frequently been organized for deceased aristocrats, since – and especially in – the Archaic period.Footnote 46 What constituted an innovation, though, was the creative form of athletic representation that Kritolaos established for his son: Aleximachos became a (multiple) winner without a victory.Footnote 47 This way, Kritolaos did not only ensure that his son’s name was connected to an activity appropriate to honor the gods – like athletics had been from the beginning – but he even found a way to permanently link Aleximachos’ name to athletic success.
We do not know for sure whether Kritolaos was the first to come up with such an idea. We can assume, however, that the notion of a champion without a victory was unparalleled later.Footnote 48 No comparable case is known at least for the Hellenistic period, which may be due to the fact that Aleximachos’ permanent victories stood in stark contrast to one of the most important principles of Greek athletics: Victories had to be earned. Unlike in other ancient cultures, being a sole ruler was not enough to claim athletic superiority.Footnote 49 Even powerful Hellenistic monarchs had to invest a lot of money to make sure that their horses won victory. It is true that the kings did not have to compete themselves, because it was the owner of the horses and not the jockey (Figure 1.1) or charioteer who was announced as a victor in Greek horse races. Nevertheless, they had to behave according to the general rules that applied in the field of athletics.
Figure 1.1 Life-size jockey and horse from a wreck off Cap Artemision (second half of the second century bc; cf. Stewart Reference Stewart2014:130).
As a consequence, it is not surprising that Kritolaos’ way of dealing with his son’s athletic reputation was far from becoming the common way of recording athletic glory in the Hellenistic age. When an athlete won victory at an important place of competition, he usually took care of the erection of a victor statue and commissioned some form of agonistic poetry. But in contrast to the Late Archaic and Early Classical periods, the main literary genre by which the agonistic fame of Hellenistic athletes was praised no longer remained the comparatively long and artful epinician ode which had already seen its “end” by 416 at the latest.Footnote 50 Instead we see the rise of the shorter victor epigram, usually published on stone at the places of competition or in the hometown of the victor (and sometimes at both venues).Footnote 51 Apart from an unsuccessful attempt by Callimachus to revitalize the epinician in the form of what may be called an “epinician elegy” in the third century,Footnote 52 these little poems now constituted the key genre for the representation of athletic glory.Footnote 53 Like the epinician odes, victor poems were poetry on commission that at least included the name and father’s name of the victor, his hometown (sometimes the region of origin instead), the place of victory as well as the event and age class in which the athlete had been successful.Footnote 54 Unlike the epinician, the victor epigram lacks elaborate mythical descriptions. It is only in some really rare cases that we find what Joachim Ebert has called “mythological ornamentation,”Footnote 55 and even in these cases, the ornamentation consists of no more than a short, mostly one-word reference to a mythological episode. Yet this is not to say that epigrams would not include particular features that made the successful athlete stand out among others. On the contrary, if carefully interpreted, these little poems unveil nuanced social, political, and ethnic messages that differed according to time and space. Political circumstances and local, regional, or dynastic discourses were the most important factors that influenced the way a certain athlete was praised.
As historical evidence, victor epigrams have the clear advantage of immediacy. Since they were poetry on commission (and the victors seem to have paid very well for the poet’s work),Footnote 56 they give us deep insight into the world as seen through the athletes’ eyes.Footnote 57 I will argue that it is precisely their point of view that mattered for the final design of the poems.Footnote 58 This means that the design of the epigrams was not so much up to the artistic license of the poets, but needed to fulfill the demands of the commissioners. The many hyperboles the epigrams contain are a clear indication of the validity of this assumption.Footnote 59 As poetry on commission, the epigrams had to be approved by the victorious athletes or horse owners. This is why we can also apply the term “self-presentation” to the topic, since – although the victors did not usually compose the epigrams themselvesFootnote 60 – it was the athletes’ perspective that mattered most for the composition of the poems.
Yet a focus on the athletes’ perspective also entails a first methodological caveat: We have to be aware of the fact that we do not dispose of the monument in most cases. Numerous victor epigrams are lost, but the situation is even worse for the victor statues that crowned the monuments.Footnote 61 So we must take into account that we may not be able to detect the whole message conveyed by the monuments. It is unlikely, however, that the image of the statues would have contradicted the message delivered by the epigrams. Rather, we should assume that, if the image in fact did not correspond to the text, both parts of the monument supplemented each other. So we must take into consideration that the effect of the monuments was originally highly more impressive and that it is very hard – and often impossible – to identify the interplay of different victor monuments at a given site. But the mere existence of literarily transmitted victor epigrams shows that in antiquity at least some of these poems were supposed to work as texts in their own right. It is true that we may not always be able to analyze the whole picture, yet we can learn a great deal by zooming in on the part of the image that we are able to reconstruct.Footnote 62
The starting point for any study on victor epigrams has to be the collection of Joachim Ebert, who edited and commented on these little poems in an exemplary manner.Footnote 63 In his collection, we find twenty-seven Hellenistic epigrams on victors of this period.Footnote 64 In addition, there are at least six other victor epigrams that had already been published by the time Ebert authored his book.Footnote 65 New texts include seven stone epigrams,Footnote 66 and, most significantly, a total of eighteen epigrams on equestrian victors that form the section Hippika of the New Posidippus. The publication of these new poems constituted a scientific sensation in 2001 and extended the corpus of Hellenistic victor epigrams considerably.Footnote 67 Since then book shelves have been filled with articles aiming at establishing the best possible readings of the poems, but the historical examination of the epigrams has, with the exception of the poems on Ptolemaic victors, not significantly advanced yet.Footnote 68
In sum, we have recourse to a total of at least fifty-eight Hellenistic victor epigrams (plus three epinician elegies) that form the main evidence for this study.Footnote 69 The regional distribution of the epigrams is impressive: Hellenistic victor epigrams have survived from the coast of the Black Sea in the North to Alexandria and Cyrene in the South, from Southern Italy in the West to Phoenicia (and beyond) in the East.Footnote 70 With regard to the chronological distribution of the poems, we observe that the number of surviving epigrams reaches a peak in the fourth and third centuries, decreases in the course of the second century, and is actually low in the first century. This brings us to a second methodological caveat: We cannot always assume that our evidence is representative for what existed in antiquity. At Olympia, for instance, the preferred material for the erection of victor epigrams was bronze, a material that was highly valuable in Medieval and Early Modern times, which is why most of these inscriptions were melted down and put to new use later on.
Therefore, the topic can only be dealt with by a comprehensive approach that includes other inscriptions (such as victor lists, victor catalogues, and honorary decrees) as well as all the available numismatic, papyrological, and archaeological evidence in addition to the scattered passages that we find in literary sources, most notably in the works of Polybius, Plutarch, and Pausanias. Yet, even if we compile all the available evidence in the most diligent manner possible, we will still have to factor in that the state of the surviving evidence in part depends on chance. Whether or not an archaeological site is fully excavated can have a large impact on the representativeness of our results. This is why I will concentrate on clearly identifiable hotspots of athletic activity in what follows, and I will not so much ask why certain black holes of engagement in athletic contests existed,Footnote 71 because there might have been no black holes to begin with in the reality of antiquity. Although it is an exciting idea to think about the question of why we have no evidence of athletic victories for certain areas of the Greek world, it certainly is methodologically sounder to focus on those agonistic cultures that provide us with a fair amount of evidence.
1.3.2 Agonistic Cultures and the Many Identities of Hellenistic Victors
At the local level, close study of individual communities will always pay dividends.
A key concept of this study is the notion of “agonistic culture(s).” It derives from the field of political studies and is similar to the concept of “political culture(s)” which has been fruitfully applied to the study of Classical Athens or the Roman Republic by scholars such as Josiah Ober and Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp.Footnote 72 The concept is based on the assumption that the political culture of a given political unit extends far beyond its constitutional aspects. Therefore, it does not only include the formal aspects of politics, but all informal rules, norms, discourses, and practices which are characteristic for a particular political community.Footnote 73 Therefore, a common definition of political culture is a “set of attitudes, beliefs and sentiments that give order and meaning to a political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behavior in the political system.”Footnote 74 No doubt, the concept of political culture appears in a multiplicity of different forms.Footnote 75 I am particularly interested in the idea that political cultures can only exist in the plural form implying that the set of political rules and norms that shapes political behavior differs from one political society to the other. This may sound like a truism, but it is actually so much more in the world of the Hellenistic poleis which had to survive alongside political superpowers such as the empires of the Hellenistic kings or the Roman Empire. Even though most Greek poleis were not able to uphold their political freedom in the Hellenistic age, they nevertheless maintained their vital political cultures.
In this study, I will investigate the impact those political cultures had on the respective agonistic cultures.Footnote 76 The term of “agonistic culture” has the advantage of being able to refer to a polis, a region, or even an empire (or the dynasty ruling over such an empire) in equal measures. It contains all the typical agonistic features characteristic for a given community including, for instance, the mere existence of unique disciplines or a marked preference for certain events or age classes (sometimes also the deliberate nonparticipation in certain contests or disciplines); in other words, it describes the agonistic profile of a political community. Yet the term also covers the agonistic discourse (and its environment) referring to the way athletic victories were praised and to the question of which rules or restrictions applied to the athletes’ self–presentation. An underlying assumption of this study is that the specifics of the agonistic discourse were not simply a product of chance, but mattered to the people in the Hellenistic age.
In order to detect special features of the respective agonistic discourses, I will group together clusters of epigrams (and other sources of athletic self-presentation) from a given agonistic culture, and I will analyze them with special regard to recurring motifs. In order to do so, the methodological imperative is to recognize that the most important aspects of victor epigrams are precisely the motifs that exceed the conventions of the genre. In the cases in which we only have one or two epigrams, this will be rather difficult, but fortunately, for poleis such as Miletus, Rhodes, Thebes, Sparta, and Messene, for a region such as Thessaly, and for dynasties such as the Ptolemies and the Attalids, the state of source material is markedly better. For others, such as Athens, Chalkis, and Elis, additional evidence will help out.
The first to deliberately speak of an “agonistic culture” with regard to a particular Greek city state was Stephen Hodkinson.Footnote 77 In his 1999 article, Hodkinson demonstrates that Archaic and Classical Sparta disposed of a distinct agonistic culture that differed from that of other Greek poleis with regard to its specific athletic practices and the rules and norms of its sporting discourse. On a larger scale, however, the concept has not been applied to the study of ancient athletics yet. My study aims at filling this gap with regard to the Hellenistic period.
The study is arranged according to a tripartite structure: After an introductory chapter on the framework of Hellenistic athletics (Chapter 2), I will first analyze the relationship between successful athletes and their hometowns (Chapter 3). I will then deal with the comparably rare cases in which the victors explicitly stressed their regional identity (Chapter 4) in order to study the cases of victorious kings in a third step (Chapter 5). In doing so, I aim at bringing together the three basic units of Hellenistic history – the levels of the polis, the federal state, and the Hellenistic empire – in order to create a comprehensive picture of the self-presentation of this epoch’s victors. Finally, Chapter 6 will focus on the participation of non-Greek competitors in Greek athletic festivals, a practice that set in in the Hellenistic period as a consequence of the expansion of the Greek world after Alexander’s conquests.
The study of athletic self-presentation rests in part on the assumption that it is possible to identify “group(ed) identities” in the agonistic discourse. This, however, is far from being self-evident because athletic success in Greek antiquity was understood above all as an individual achievement. It was individuals who made good use of the symbolic capital inherent in a victory, and one of the major results of recent research on athletic self-presentation in the Late Archaic and Early Classical periods is that the relationship between an athlete and his hometown could at times be problematic and full of tensions, as can best be seen in the case of democratic Athens.Footnote 78 Nevertheless, the hometowns (or sometimes home regions) of the athletes loomed large in all kinds of epinician poetry; and even in cases in which the reintegration of the victor into the polis community was not smooth,Footnote 79 the hometown could still play a decisive role.Footnote 80
In what follows group identity shall be understood as a collective identity shared by different victors from the same agonistic culture for a specific period in time. In this, I follow Rogers Brubaker’s fundamental sociological research on identity and ethnicity.Footnote 81 Brubaker observed and emphasized the fact that not every identity is relevant in every context. Instead, specific circumstances activate a sense of belonging. Since groups are not stable and ever-present entities, Brubaker warns of too strict a use of “groups” (i.e., the Thessalians, the Athenians, etc.) as categories of analysis and prefers the category of “groupness,” the process during which the latent sense of belonging crystallizes or congeals.Footnote 82 For practical reasons, I do not intend to ban the term “group” from this study altogether, but I would like to stress that ever-present elements of the victor’s identity, for instance, his citizenship, depended on the specific circumstances that made the athlete see himself in a certain light. We finally have to bear in mind that identity is not a fact of nature, but a socially construed phenomenon. Therefore, it is crucial to focus on the question of what specific identity a victor (or a group of victors) chose to highlight at a specific moment or period in time.
To sum up, even if my study will probably not be able to draw “a complete picture”Footnote 83 of the entire phenomenon of Hellenistic athletics, it may, however, help to better understand the political and ethnic dimensions of athletics in this period.Footnote 84
