Preview
Authors and titles listed at the end of the review.
Nikephoros, founded in 1988 by Wolfgang Decker, Joachim Ebert and Ingomar Weiler, stands alone as the premier source of scholarship on ancient athletics. It is a blessing to have such a focused journal, but it can be difficult to find. Current issues are not distributed electronically, though older volumes are available open access on nikephoros.org. Publication seems to run chronically behind-schedule; the volume under review is dated 2014, but it was not actually printed until 2019. Nevertheless, the quality of the scholarship is often very high. Every volume, including this one, seems to hide some jewels that are a delight for scholars to discover.
The volume under review contains 14 articles five book reviews, a bibliography of work on sport in antiquity for 2014-2015, and an appendix containing obituaries, abstracts, author contact information, and color illustrations. The articles were gleaned from a conference held in Graz in June of 2014. Ten of them are in English, three in German, and one in Italian; all have English abstracts. Two of the reviews are in English, the others are in German. The articles, arranged alphabetically by author name, engage a variety of topics, historical periods, and types of evidence—there is no discernable focus beyond ancient athletics and culture.
Venerable scholars of ancient sport such as Wolfgang Decker and Fernando Garcia Romero have contributed to this volume, as have specialists from the next generation, such as Sofie Remijsen and Zinon Papakonstantinou, along with some apparent newcomers to the field. The disciplinary approaches to the subject vary, as does the quality of the scholarship. There is something of interest for and value to almost everyone, however.
Thomas Heine Nielsen’s article, “Foreign Entrants at Minor Athletic Festivals in Late-Archaic and Classical Greece” stands out for its thorough analysis of the evidence and surprising conclusion that foreign participation was a standard feature of ancient Greek athletic festivals. In this, Nielsen sees a reflection of the larger society, which incorporated extensive interaction between citizens of different poleis as well as between city-states themselves.
Zinon Papakonstantinou also achieves political insights by focusing instead on a case study of Athenian athletes in the 5th century BCE. Analyzing the commemoration of athletic victories among elites, he observes a transition from emphasis on the victor’s family to emphasis on his city with the rise of democracy.
As a philosopher, I especially appreciated Aikaterini-Iliana Rassia’s, “On Hero Athletes. Aspects of Ethical and Religious Behaviour,” in which the worship of heroized athletes is connected with moral education. Rassia argues that the mythical narrations surrounding hero-athletes universally contain a didactic message that promotes the virtue of reverence (eusebeia). Georgia Proietti’s, “Annual Games for War Dead and Founders in Classical Times. Between Hero-Cult and Civic Honors” builds upon the topic of hero-cults, revealing that annual games also derived from festivals honoring founders and war-dead.
New treatments of traditional topics include Werner Petermandi’s “The Introduction of Athletic Nudity – Fact or Fiction?” (he concludes it was probably fiction), and Edmund Stewart’s “’There’s nothing worse than athletes’. Criticism of Athletics and Professionalism in the Archaic and Classical Periods.” Stewart reveals that criticisms of athletes, such as the famous assault by Xenophanes (fr. 2), were in fact part of a larger debate over the relative merits of different forms of technē. In a period of increased professional specialization, poets, philosophers, and others berated athletes as a means of promoting their own expertise.
Several essays focus closely on texts. Wolfgang Decker analyzes a 3rd century CE papyrus recounting a contract to lose a wrestling match, and Fernando Garcia Romero analyzes a 4th century BCE fragment of Antiphanes which discusses a ball-game. Daniel Griffin, meanwhile, discusses the term ‘palaistrophylax’ in the context of an obscure letter about Diogenes of Sinope.
Mirjana Sanader and Eva Christof both focus on stones. Christof is interested in architectural stones, specifically the influence that agonothetai (games sponsors) had on the design and decoration of public buildings in 3rdcentury CE Asia Minor. Sanader’s study, by contrast, begins with a gravestone, the inscription on which elucidates the use of stones for sport in the Imperial period.
The articles most relevant to topics in contemporary sport include Reyes Bertolin Cebrian’s “Psychological Characteristics of Ancient Greek Athletes” and Jonathan Vickers’ “The Presence of Tumbling in Ancient Greek Athletics,” both of which draw comparisons between ancient and modern practices. Professional elitism is the topic of Sofie Remijsen’s much more detailed analysis of the tetrarchic law that offered Imperial-era athletes special privileges. Remijsen observes that the privileges were limited to top athletes at the behest of elitist guilds.
In general, the quality of argument and use of evidence is good. In some cases it is excellent, in others merely adequate. Despite minor grammatical infelicities, all of the articles are readable and the scholarly apparatus is extremely useful for anyone interested in learning more about sport in antiquity. The annual bibliography only adds to that usefulness.
It has to be said that for an interdisciplinary and international journal, Nikephoros expects rather a lot from its readers in terms of background and linguistic ability. Not only are the articles themselves written in different languages, Greek and Latin passages are often quoted without translation. Some articles are very narrowly focused on small bits of text, others are extremely broad in terms of both the evidence used and the period discussed. All of this is perhaps to be expected in a fledgling field of study like ancient athletics. We should be grateful that Nikephoros exists as an anchor for that field, but we may also wish for it to become more accessible in multiple ways.
Authors and Articles
Reyes Bertolin Cebrian, “Psychological Characteristics of Ancient Greek Athletes”
Eva Christof, “Die Resonanz kaiserzeitlicher Sportveranstaltungen Kleinasiens in der Architekturdekoration öffentlicher Bauten”
Wolfgang Decker, “Ein abgekartetes Spiel. Zu POxy 5209 (Sport am Nil, Suppl II)”
Fernando Garcia Romero, “Osservazioni sul lessico sportivo greco antico: Antifane, fr. 231 Kassel-Austin”
Daniel Griffin, “An Overlooked Letter of [Diogenes] and the Role of the Palaistrophylax”
Thomas Heine Nielsen, “Foreign Entrants at Minor Athletic Festivals in Late-Archaic and Classical Greece”
Zinon Papakonstantinou, “Family Traditions of Athletic Distinction in Archaic and Classical Athens”
Werner Petermandi, “The Introduction of Athletic Nudity – Fact or Fiction?”
Giorgia Proietti, ”Annual Games for War Dead and Founders in Classical Times. Between Hero-Cult and Civic Honors”
Aikaterini-Iliana Rassia, “On Hero-Athletes. Aspects of Ethical and Religious Behavior”
Sofie Remijsen, “The International Synods in the Tetrarchic Period. On the Limitation of Agonistic Privileges and the Costs of Exclusivity”
Mirjana Sanader, “Welche Fähigkeiten besaß Pomponius Secundinus? Überlegungen zu einer Inschrift aus Salona”
Edmund Stewart, “’There’s nothing worse than athletes’. Criticism of Athletics and Professionalism in the Archaic and Classical Periods”
Jonathan Vickers, “The Presence of Tumbling in Ancient Greek Athletics”
Bibliography
Zinon Papakonstantinou/Sofie Remijsen, “Annual Bibliography of Sport in Antiquity 2014-2015”
Reviews
Wolfgang Decker, Milon de Crotone ou l’invention du sport (Jean-Manuel Robineau)
David Pritchard, Sport, Democracy and War in Classical Athens (Zinon Papakonstantinou)
Scholz Peter, Wiegant Dirk (Hg.): Das kaiserzeitliche Gymnasion (Ingomar Weiler)
Philostratos, Sport in der Antike, Peri Gymnastikes/Über das Training (Ingomar Weiler)
Zeev Weiss, Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine (Sofie Remijsen).
Obituaries, Abstracts, Addresses, Illustrations