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Presenting a survey of sports in ancient Greece, this work describes ancient sporting events and games. It considers the role of women and amateurs in ancient athletics, and explores the impact of these games on art, literature and politics.
Sport and Society in Ancient Greece provides a concise and readable introduction to ancient Greek sport. It covers such topics as the links between sport, religion and warfare, the origins and history of the Olympic games, and the spirit of competition among the Greeks. Its main focus, however, is on Greek sport as an arena for the creation and expression of difference among individuals and groups. Sport not only identified winners and losers. It also drew boundaries between groups (Greeks and barbarians, boys and men, males and females) and offered a field for debate on the relative worth of athletic and equestrian competition. The book includes guides to the ancient evidence and to modern scholarship on the subject.
From the eighth century BCE to the late third century CE, Greeks trained in sport and competed in periodic contests that generated enormous popular interest. As a result, sport was an ideal vehicle for the construction of a plurality of identities along the lines of ethnic origin, civic affiliation, legal and social status as well as gender. Sport and Identity in Ancient Greece delves into the rich literary and epigraphic record on ancient Greek sport and examines, through a series of case studies, diverse aspects of the process of identity construction through sport. Chapters discuss elite identities and sport, sport spectatorship, the regulatory framework of Greek sport, sport and benefaction in the Hellenistic and Roman world, embodied and gendered identities in epigraphic commemoration, as well as the creation of a hybrid culture of Greco-Roman sport in the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman imperial period.
Twelve years after the first edition of this book the time has come for an enlarged and improved second edition. This was prompted by the need to update it with the new results of historical and archaeological research on the panhellenic sanctuaries and their games, as well as from the need to replace and supplement the photographic material of the many sites and monuments where excavation and restoration works have provided new insights. In this way readers have in their hands a book that is fully up to date about the Pan-Hellenic games and ancient Greek athletic. Modeled after physical exercises and competitions that existed in earlier Near Eastern cultures, hundreds of athletic games took place in Greek antiquity, extending across every area of the Mediterranean in which Greek culture flourished. Of the vast number of games, four attained the status of panhellenic games: the Olympic games, held at Olympia in honor of Zeus; the Pythian games at Delphi, at the festival of Apollo; the Isthmian games, at the sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia; and the Nemean games, celebrated in the sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea. The Panathenaic games, which took place at the festival of the Panathenaia in Athens in honor of Athena, were, at their peak, equal in brilliance to those held at the panhellenic festivals. In these five games, more than anywhere else, the magnificent culture and ideology of Greek antiquity flourished. The spectacle of the games gave rise to a sporting tradition that engages the world to this day. Founded as early as the 8th century BC, the games held at Olympia, however, were the oldest and most important and surpassed all the others in their fame and glory. Games and Sanctuaries in Ancient Greece celebrates the athletes, the games, the sanctuaries, the cities and, above all, the inspiring spirit of the ancient Greeks over a span of a millennium and a half, from the earliest mentions of athletics in Homer's Iliad and other literary sources, through the Classical age, and into the Hellenistic, Roman and late antique periods. That our modern athletes still compete every four years in such contests as the pentathlon, discus, javelin, boxing, jumping, wrestling and running events, much as their ancient antecedents did centuries before them, is a testament to the longevity of competition, triumph and defeat.
This volume aims to make available - for the first time in a coherent and accessible form - a set of core articles for the study of Greek athletics.
A comprehensive study of how and why athletic contests, a characteristic feature of ancient Greek culture, disappeared in late antiquity.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, proudly presents the original Olympics in all their sweaty, heroic glory. Like today, sports were a vital part of daily life in ancient Greece. "Games for the Gods" unearths the original traditions of athletics, highlighting both the fascinating similarities and the jarring differences between the ancient ways and our own. We might not be used to such Classical customs as associating athletic festivals with certain gods, seeing our athletes compete in the nude, or having them indulge in dirty fighting as accepted practice (then again...), but the excitement of competition, admiration for athletic skill, and adoration of champions--as well as several of the sports--are just as familiar to fans today as they were to the ancients. The Greek Games here come to life in a series of texts that explore the Olympics then and now, the origins of the games and various athletic events, and the ways in which the contests were prepared for and the victors honoured. With stunning illustrations of over 140 sculptures, vases, and coins, as well as photographs of modern athletes, "Games for the Gods" is a unique celebration of the Olympic spirit through the ages.
From the ancient Olympic games to the World Series and the World Cup, athletic achievement has always conferred social status. In this collection of essays, a noted authority on ancient sport discusses how Greek sport has been used to claim and enhance social status, both in antiquity and in modern times. Mark Golden explores a variety of ways in which sport provided a route to social status. In the first essay, he explains how elite horsemen and athletes tried to ignore the important roles that jockeys, drivers, and trainers played in their victories, as well as how female owners tried to rank their equestrian achievements above those of men and other women. In the next essay, Golden looks at the varied contributions that slaves made to sport, despite its use as a marker of free, Greek status. In the third essay, he evaluates the claims made by gladiators in the Greek east that they be regarded as high-status athletes and asserts that gladiatorial spectacle is much more like Greek sport than scholars today usually admit. In the final essay, Golden critiques the accepted accounts of ancient and modern Olympic history, arguing that attempts to raise the status of the modern games by stressing their links to the ancient ones are misleading. He concludes that the contemporary movement to call a truce in world conflicts during the Olympics is likewise based on misunderstandings of ancient Greek traditions.