BMCR 2025.01.37

Money and honor in ancient athletics

, , , Money and honor in ancient athletics. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2024. Pp. 228. ISBN 9783515136341.

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

 

This volume derives from papers presented at a conference held in 2022 at the University of Mannheim. As the title suggests, the key unifying feature of this compilation is attention to the roles played by money and by honor in ancient Greek athletics throughout much of ancient Greek and Roman history. With a strong reliance on epigraphical and philological evidence, the book covers a wide range of subjects, from Homeric epic poetry to Roman Empire charioteers. Despite this variety some common themes emerge, including the political use of athletic honors and diplomacy as tools of “soft power” and the self-representation of athletes and athletic officials.

In the introduction, Christian Mann frames the themes of the conference and this collection of papers, noting that the study of prizes and money in ancient athletics is still trying to shed the modern imposition of “amateur” ideology onto the athletic culture of the past, an imposition which has historically divided athletes into “honor-oriented amateurs and money-oriented professionals” (pg. 13). Further complicating the issue is the difficulty in defining honor as a concept, since it was intrinsically connected with acts of revenge and violence as well as concepts of justice, cooperation, and friendship. The money expended to prepare and host athletic competitions, to award valuable prizes, and to enter and compete in the games also impacted the nature of the contests and their participants. Mann explains that money and honor have often been conceived as “opposites” in studies of ancient sport (pg. 18). However, Mann explains, an “integrated analysis” offers grounds for promising research (pg. 13). With this context established, the contributors use their chapters to tackle several key questions.

Thomas Heine Nielsen begins his contribution with a discussion of the adjective a(e)thlophoros (prize-bearing) as an important descriptor in Homer that alludes to the value of prizes in athletic competition. Nielsen notes that in Archaic Greek poetry, at least, “there is no real opposition between honour and prizes” (pg. 27) and that it was a feature of polis culture that the polis required a share of the victor’s glory. Thus, the polis and the victor came to share the honor that accompanied a prestigious athletic victory. This shared glory is reflected in various epigrams where athletes boasted of their own glory, as well as the glory of their cities.

Georgios Mouratidis takes a more panoramic view, proposing that money and honor should be considered outside of “the context of the social status of athletes and athletics” (pg. 59). This chapter features several key observations, such as the use of athletics to preserve Greek culture during the Hellenistic era and the phenomenon of celebrity athletes—“larger-than-city figures”—who claimed renown throughout the Greek and Roman worlds beyond their cities of citizenship (pg. 60).

Christoph Begass offers an innovative investigation of the role and the significance of the agonothete—that is, the public officials who oversaw panhellenic contests. In their roles as organizers and supervisors, these officials amassed their own honors, recorded in honorific inscriptions. Begass notes the fine line the agonothetes had to tread between scrupulously accounting for their stewardship of public funds while also emphasizing a willingness to spend their own money to produce top-notch festivals.

The “one-off contests” of funeral games rather than the established regular panhellenic festival circuit are the initial focus of Zinon Papakonstantinou’s chapter, which then transitions to an investigation of the prizes of the Panathenaia at Athens. Papakonstantinou astutely notes that only rarely were second-place finishers recognized or rewarded in the regular circuit of athletic festivals. However, both the Homeric funeral games for Patroclus as well as the Panatheniac prize lists (IG II2 2311, edited anew in SEG 53.192, with another at IG I3 1386) offer provisions for multiple finishers. Papakonstantinou argues that the awards in the Panathenaia for second and third-place finishers increased substantially at the end of the fifth century BCE, perhaps to celebrate the expulsion of the Thirty Tyrants in 403 BCE.

Alexis Dhenain traces the history of the modern uneasy relationship between sport for monetary gain and sport for “honor” (τιμή), from the works of E.N. Gardiner in the early twentieth century through David Young’s dismantling of the notion of ancient amateurism in the 1980s and H.W. Pleket’s nuanced view in the early 2000s, of the emergence of professionalized athletes in ancient Greece and Rome. Dhenain uses a statistically oriented approach to demonstrate the relatively modest cash values of the prizes awarded at the Games at Delos. In addition, this chapter examines the value of the crowns awarded at the festival to Artemis Leukophryene at Magnesia on the Menander, the prizes from the Pythian Games that began in the third century CE, and the awards at the Delia festival at Tanagra. The conclusion is that even the most lucrative of these prize-awarding festivals did little to offset the expenses incurred by training for, traveling to, and competing in them.

Athletes’ self-representation is a key theme of Marco Tentori Montalto’s contribution. Montalto tries to uncover “the motivation of the victors” through the honors they received (pg. 145), and notes that during the Roman era prize money increased and this increased athletes’ motivations to compete in the contests. This chapter is especially strong in its examination of Roman-era innovations and terminology for the various festival contests, noting the distinctions invoked by terms such as isopythian, isolympian, neo-periodos, chrematitic, etc.

Arlette Neumann-Hartmann undertakes to understand honor and money from the point of view of epinician poets and their poetry. Neumann-Hartmann identifies two groups of honors in epinician poetry: honors from the organizers, including the prizes, and “informal celebrations” from  onlookers, spectators, and friends (pg. 189).  Epinician poetry mentions a wide variety of prizes that were awarded to athletic victors in addition to the wreaths of the Crown Games. Neumann-Hartmann suggests that this variety of prizes helped to make the various contests stand out from the others and to attract competitors to them.

In the final chapter, Maria Letizia Caldelli examines the connections between material culture and athletic honors. Three letters from the Emperor Hadrian, discovered at Alexandria in the Troad, offer insights into the Roman sporting world. In these, Hadrian offers explicit instructions on awarding money to victors in the stadium and the theater, in full view of the spectators. Hadrian’s letters do not provide any information on awarding prizes to the victors in the hippodrome; for that Caldelli turns to a mosaic in Ostia Antica which depicts several victorious charioteers and to other portrayals of victorious Roman equestrian victors holding crowns and victory palms. Caldelli notes that these depictions must have conveyed “meaningful” information to anyone who viewed them, but the extent of that meaning requires additional investigation (pg. 209).

This wide-ranging approach to the question of the roles of money and honor in ancient athletics shows its origins in a conference setting. Identifying the role of money and the variations of types of honor in ancient sporting contexts is a worthwhile aim, but some of the contributions offer more than others. It is always difficult to argue from absence. Although Papakonstantinou gamely tries to figure out why ancient Greek athletes commissioned epinician poetry to commemorate their victories in the Crown Games, but not in one-off funeral games, a satisfying answer is difficult to pin down. (He suggests the ability to plan ahead for the Crown Games and the Archaic-period standardization of the Crown Games as possible factors).  Mouratidis’s contention that we should conceive of athletic prizes and honors as “facilitators of relationships” is a bit too vague as stated to be of much use (pg. 71), but of course suggests possibilities for future research.

Nevertheless, despite the challenges presented by defining a term like honor (in four modern languages, no less), and by the vast chronological extent of its chapters, this collection of papers offers much food for thought. The emphasis on “soft power” exerted by a polis in honoring its victorious athletes and in recognizing athletes from other cities is an appealing avenue for further research. Begass’s investigation of the office of the agonothetes—officials who were in attendance at all of the contests but have rarely received much scholarly attention—struck this reviewer as immensely practical and innovative. Indeed, the strong emphasis on the ancient sources throughout these essays is enough to recommend this book to the interested reader. Epigraphic, literary, archaeological, and philological investigations of the ancient sources in these chapters confirm much we already knew (e.g., money and honor were important in Greek athletics), and offer both new insights and  promising avenues for additional research. As Caldelli notes in the last sentences of the book’s final chapter: conclusions are not always possible; rather it is progress we seek.

 

Authors and Titles

Christian Mann, “Einführung: Geld, Ehre und Sport in der antiken Gesellschaft”

Thomas Heine Nielsen, “On the Pursuit of Athletic Glory by the poleis of Late-Archaic and Classical Greece”

Georgios Mouratidis, ‘Money, Honour, and Athletics in the Hellenistic polis”

Christoph Begass, “’Großzügig’, ‘gerecht’ und ‘vielfach geehrt’? Zur Selbstdarstellung der Agonotheten in Hellenismus und Kaiserzeit

Zinon Papakonstantinou, “Sport Prizes in Archaic and Classical Greece: Funeral Games and the Great Panathenaia”

Alexis Dhenain, “L’argent dans la motivation des athletes gymniques à l’époque hellénistique”

Marco Tentori Montalto, “Geld und Ehre in der Motivation und in der Selbstdarstellung der Athleten in der Kaiserzeit”

Arlette Neumann-Hartmann, “Ehre und Siegespreise in der Agonistik des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.—Die Perspektive der Epinikien”

Maria Letizia Caldelli, “Denaro e simboli della vittoria nell’agonistica di epoca romana: Dialogo tra immagini e fonti scritte. Un caso studio: Il mosaico degli aurighi di Ostia”