Intended for readers at all levels--from student to classics buff to serious scholar--this sourcebook looks at sport and recreation in ancient Greece through vivid new translations of contemporary accounts. Covering such diverse topics as the ancient Olympic games, athletic attire, women in sports, hunting and fishing, and weight lifting, the book provides an excellent springboard for the study of ancient Greek history and classical literature. The book includes study questions after each translated passage and a rich assortment of photographs of ancient art and artifacts depicting players, events, and equipment.
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.
Aimed at readers of all levels--from student to classics buff to serious scholars--this sourcebook looks at sport and recreation in ancient Greece through translated accounts of ancient Greek and Latin authors. It examines such diversions as the ancient Olympic Games, athletic clothing, women in sports, dining, dancing, and fishing. Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece offers a wide range of topics geared to students' interests, new translations into readable English that facilitate their introduction to the subject, and a rich assortment of illustrations. The questions following each translation help students understand the passages, while the presentation of contradictory evidence challenges them to evaluate different points of view, both in the study of ancient culture and in their own daily lives. Successfully tested in college classrooms for a ten years, this book provides an excellent springboard for the study of ancient Greek history, classical literature, or sports history.
Despite their influence in our culture, sports inspire dramatically less philosophical consideration than such ostensibly weightier topics as religion, politics, or science. Arguing that athletic playfulness coexists with serious underpinnings, and that both demand more substantive attention, Daniel Dombrowski harnesses the insights of ancient Greek thinkers to illuminate contemporary athletics. Dombrowski contends that the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus shed important light on issues—such as the pursuit of excellence, the concept of play, and the power of accepting physical limitations while also improving one’s body—that remain just as relevant in our sports-obsessed age as they were in ancient Greece. Bringing these concepts to bear on contemporary concerns, Dombrowski considers such questions as whether athletic competition can be a moral substitute for war, whether it necessarily constitutes war by other means, and whether it encourages fascist tendencies or ethical virtue. The first volume to philosophically explore twenty-first-century sport in the context of its ancient predecessor, Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals reveals that their relationship has great and previously untapped potential to inform our understanding of human nature.
In the world of sports, the most important component is the athlete. After all, without athletes there would be no sports. In ancient Greece, athletes were public figures, idolized and envied. This fascinating book draws on a broad range of ancient sources to explore the development of athletes in Greece from the archaic period to the Roman Empire. Whereas many previous books have focused on the origins of the Greek games themselves, or the events or locations where the games took place, this volume places a unique emphasis on the athletes themselves—and the fostering of their athleticism. Moving beyond stereotypes of larger-than-life heroes, Reyes Bertolín Cebrián examines the experiences of ordinary athletes, who practiced sports for educational, recreational, or professional purposes. According to Bertolín Cebrián, the majority of athletes in ancient times were young men and mostly single. Similar to today, most athletes practiced sport as part of their schooling. Yet during the fifth century B.C., a major shift in ancient Greek education took place, when the curriculum for training future leaders became more academic in orientation. As a result, argues Bertolín Cebrián, the practice of sport in the Hellenistic period lost its appeal to the intellectual elite, even as it remained popular with large sectors of the population. Thus, a gap emerged between the “higher” and “lower” cultures of sport. In looking at the implications of this development for athletes, whether high-performing or recreational, this erudite volume traverses such wide-ranging fields as history, literature, medicine, and sports psychology to recreate—in compelling detail—the life and lifestyle of the ancient Greek athlete.
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.
Practiced and watched by billions, sport is a global phenomenon. Sport history is a burgeoning sub-field that explores sport in all forms to help answer fundamental questions that scholars examine. This volume provides a reference for sport scholars and an accessible introduction to those who are new to the sub-field.
A lively survey encompassing the Orient, the Americas, and the classical world From the Olympic Games of Greece to the gladiatorial contests of Rome, sport in the ancient world was fiercely competitive and included a wider range of physical contests than we moderns might suspect. The early Chinese played forms of polo and golf, while half a world away, Hohokam and Maya Indians enjoyed team ball games. Nigel Crowther, a leading authority on classical Greek sport, here casts his net over the entire ancient world to reveal the variety, and often the intensity, of sport in earlier times, from 3000 b.c.e. to the Middle Ages. Taking in twenty premodern societies on five continents--with particular emphasis on ancient Greece and Rome and the Byzantine Empire--he traces connections to modern sporting attitudes, practices, and institutions as he describes how athletics figured in cultural arenas that extended beyond physical prowess to ritual, social status, military associations, and politics. Crowther takes us back to the birth of sumo wrestling in Japan and describes the sports of the Sumerians and Hittites. He documents bull leaping and boxing as recorded on pottery in Crete, as well as running and archery as practiced by the pharaohs in Egypt. He shows the significance of the early Olympic Games, describes the Romans' use of gladiatorial contests for political ends, and analyzes the influence of Byzantine chariot racing on society. He also notes the changing role of women in ancient sports--from their prominence in Egyptian contests, to the mythological Atalanta, to female Roman gladiators. As informative as it is entertaining, Sport in Ancient Times opens new vistas for general readers, students, and sport historians. It offers a broad look at ancient sport and will enrich readers' appreciation of games they enjoy today.
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.
