The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (31 page)

For the ancient Greeks athletics had another meaning. Their word for athlete came from a root meaning a “contest.” The adjective from it meant “struggling” and later came to mean “miserable” or “wretched.” An athlete, Pindar said, was one “who delights in the toil and the cost.” “Deeds of no risk are honorless whether done among men or among hollow ships.” Beginning as each city’s “national” festival, then as a ritual of peaceful competition among cities, athletic contests flourished with the city-states. The intensity of athletic competition was a barometer of civic loyalties. The first Olympic festival-contests between the communities were held in 776
B.C.
and then every four years until
A.D
. 393.

The Greeks did not go in for team sports. Only individuals competed and all honor went to the victor, whose reward at the Olympic competition was a crown of wild olive. The special virtue of the athlete, according to Pindar, was
aidos
—respect for the gods and fellowmen. The proper athlete was no bully, but neither was he “a good sport” or “a good loser.” A defeated athlete never congratulated the victor. Since it was a disgrace to be defeated, the Spartans, it was said, forbade their citizens to engage in intercity boxing or the risky pankration, where they were unlikely to win. Losers, Pindar tells us, returned to their mothers in shame, “by back ways they slink away, sore smitten by misfortune.”

Athletic contests arose in ritual. Homer devotes the twenty-third book of the
Iliad
to the funeral games for Patroclus. At such games the deceased was commemorated by mementos given as prizes. The Olympic games, Pindar tells us, began in the ritual celebrating Hercules’ victory over Augeas when he cleansed the stables by deflecting the river Alpheus. At Olympia, a sacred place, the games honored Olympian Zeus. The games began as only a one-day ceremony, then in 472
B.C.
extended to five days, ending with sacrifices and a banquet honoring the victors. The tie to religion helps explain the remarkable continuity of Greek athletics. The later Olympic games follow the rules described by Homer. Finally the Christian emperor Theodosius I abolished them in
A.D
. 393 because they were pagan relics.

Even before there was a Greek nation, the Olympic festival brought Greeks together in a Panhellenic celebration. Only freeborn Greeks could compete. Numerous other festivals grew up—at Delphi, Delos, Corinth, and Nemea—modeled on the Olympic, but with local embellishments. At Nemea the wild-olive-wreath prize was displaced by a crown of parsley.

Music and poetry celebrated the gods and the winners. The first national festival at Delphi was a musical contest. Pindar (518–438
B.C.
), one of the
greatest Greek lyric poets, wrote his famous cycles of odes to athletic victors. He praised the winner in 476
B.C.
of the boys’ boxing competition:

Festival games were symbols of peace, but Greece was seldom at peace. War in those days was not weapon against weapon, but man against man, and a citizen had to be prepared to defend his city. “No citizen has any right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training,” urged Socrates, as Xenophon recalled. “It is part of his profession as a citizen to keep himself in good condition, ready to serve his state at a moment’s notice. The instinct of self-preservation demands it likewise: for how helpless is the state of the ill-trained youth in war or in danger! Finally, what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and the strength of which his body is capable!”

Every athlete was in training for defense. Since the ravines that split the Greek countryside demanded long jumps for the chase, the long jump became a regular athletic event. But there was no high jump. The Greek athletic long jumper had to hold weights, from four to eight pounds, testing his ability to carry a weapon. The race in armor was another regular event. It was sometimes called the hoplite race after the class of citizens who could not afford horses but still could equip themselves with full personal armor. After the eighth century
B.C.
the rise of hoplite warfare—the massed phalanx of armed citizens in close formation—made the strength of each citizen crucial to holding the line. At first each contestant wore a helmet and carried a shield, but later had only a shield.

The discus throw may have begun as a test of ability to throw stones in battle. In the
Iliad
, when Ajax and Hector had thrown their spears, they picked up stones and fought on. Some ancient critics objected that, instead of the discus throw, it would be better to train men to throw “stones that fill the hand.” In the javelin throw, as on the battlefield, to add distance and accuracy a thong was looped around a finger to give the javelin a spinning motion. The pankration made unarmed combat into a game. Eight of Pindar’s Odes celebrate victors in this most dangerous and most popular of their regular athletic events. It combined wrestling and boxing, allowed kicking and strangling, but biting and gouging were forbidden. One popular opening was to break your opponent’s finger. It was common to twist feet out of sockets and not unknown to kill an opponent by strangling. The
umpires sometimes placed the olive crown on the dead body of a valiant loser.

Cities rewarded their representatives handsomely. Competitors in the great festivals were apt to be men of wealth who could afford the time to train and could pay their own way to the contests. Still, “amateur” citizen-athletes expected to be paid for the glory they brought to their hometown. Solon, the great Athenian legislator (c.590
B.C.
), enacted a limit on victory grants—five hundred drachmas for the Olympics, one hundred drachmas (the year’s earnings of a workingman) for the others. Fringe benefits included free meals, front seats at festivals, and exemption from taxes. The winner was honored by a hymn of victory and celebrated in odes by the great lyric poets.

The custom of erecting statues of the victors would prove fertile for the arts in the West. In the earliest times a city might erect a statue of the victorious athlete both at the scene of his victory and back home. The victor himself might offer a little votive statue in gratitude. By the sixth century it had become a custom to allow the victor to erect a life-size statue of himself. In 408, when Eubatus, a runner from Cyrene, came to compete at the Olympics, an oracle had already promised him success, so he arrived there with his own victory statue. An attractive as well as a self-confident man, he aroused the passions of the famous courtesan Lais, who tried to seduce him. He resisted her advances but brought home her portrait. When his wife saw the portrait of Lais, she was so impressed by his fidelity that she erected another statue of him in Cyrene.

During the Panhellenic athletic festivals, thousands of victory statues were fashioned and erected at festival sites and the hometowns of the athletes. But of the life-size bronze victory figures only a few, like the charioteer from Delphi, remain.

The statues of the great athletes were supposed to cure illness. One of the most popular cults surrounded Theogenes, the famous boxer from Thasos, an island in the north Aegean, whose athletic victories in mid-fifth century
B.C.
numbered more than thirteen hundred. Other athletes were so intimidated by Theogenes’ reputation as a heavyweight winner that sometimes they refused to confront him. And then the umpires conceded to him what the Greeks called a victory “without dust” (
akoniti
). Exploiting his name (Theogenes, “god-born”), he claimed that he was not simply the son of a priest but himself a son of a god, and so a demigod. In a rebellion supported by Theogenes in 465
B.C.
Thasos revolted from the Delian League, and rejoined Athens only after a siege.

But at his death Theogenes left a legacy of hatred. One night when an enemy crept out to flog his statue in the marketplace, the statue fell and
killed him. Under a primitive principle of law (perpetuated in England as the law of deodand) an object that causes death is itself guilty and must be punished. This guilty statue of Theogenes was taken out to sea and dumped overboard. The next season the Thasos crops failed, bringing an unprecedented famine. When the city fathers consulted the oracle at Delphi, they were advised to recall their political exiles. Still the famine continued. The Delphic oracle next suggested they try reviving the memory of Theogenes. They fished up Theogenes’ statue from the sea bottom, replaced it on its original base and so ended the famine. This time the Thasians bound down the statue with chains. Five centuries after Theogenes’ death the boxer’s statue was still famous for its cures. On his travels Pausanias noted Theogenes cult statues across Greece, and even among the barbarians. The people of Thasos made a good thing of their athletic demigod. If anyone offered less than one obol to Theogenes’ memory, they proclaimed, “it will lie on his conscience” and not accomplish the desired effect.

Concerned citizens, including Euripides, Plato, and Diogenes, warned against idolizing athletes. The sixth-century philosopher Xenophanes (born 576
B.C.
) of Colophon, in Asia Minor, was troubled by the extravagant honors to a winning athlete in his home city. “Yet is he not so worthy as I, and my wisdom is better than the strength of men and horses. Nay this is a foolish custom nor is it right to honour strength more than excellent wisdom.” A century later Euripides was more vivid. “Of all the countless evils throughout Hellas none is worse than the race of athletes.… Slaves of their belly and their jaw they know not how to live well.… In youth they strut about in splendour, the idols of the city, but when bitter old age comes upon them they are cast aside like worn-out cloaks.” He asked, “Who ever helped his fatherland by winning a crown for wrestling, or for speed of foot, or hurling the diskos or striking a good blow on the jaw?” And, in the rising Roman Empire, Galen (
A.D.
c.130–c.200) himself was eloquent in his disgust:

Life in the open air in athletic Greece would change the sculptural image they inherited from claustrophilic Egypt. While the Egyptian figures wore
a brief skirt, now the Greek
kouroi
were nude. Some are slimmer than others, perhaps reflecting the physical types in different parts of Greece. Still, with only minor variations, they all follow the canon of proportions revealed on the grids found on Egyptian figures. Complete or in part, more than two hundred of these authentic
kouros
statues survive.

The
kouroi
were the Greek sculptor’s “laboratory.” And naturalism, like the nude, was to be a contribution of Greek sculpture to Western art. The nude, as Kenneth Clark reminds us, is an art form invented by the Greeks in the fifth century
B.C.
They believed that unashamed nudity and their willingness to appear nude in the Games distinguished them from the barbarians. This had not always been so. In the funeral games for Patroclus, Homer recounts that when Euryalus wrapped his hands in cowhide thongs he put on his boxing trunks. Thucydides (471?–400?
B.C.
), too, observed that the earliest Greeks, like the barbarians of his own time, “even in the Olympic contests … wore belts across their middles; and it is but a few years since that the practice ceased.”

When and why the Greek athletes first took off their shorts was a source of irreverent legend. Perhaps the new fashion was set when Orsippus of Megara, at the Olympics in 720
B.C.
, lost his shorts in the middle of his race. He won anyway, and others followed his example of nudity. Others recalled that, at one of the festival races at Athens, the leading runner’s shorts slipped down and tripped him before he could reach the finish line. To prevent such accidents in the future, an edict required contestants to be naked. King Agesilaus of Sparta (444–360
B.C.
) who organized the defense against the Persians, though notorious for his own poor physique, once exhibited Persian prisoners of war naked to encourage his own men—by contrasting the flabby Persians with the trim and bronzed Spartans.

The first nudes were only male, the
kouroi
. By the fifth century there were a few female nudes, but these did not become common till later centuries, and even then with some inhibition. Male gods were usually portrayed nude, while female goddesses were usually draped, with the conspicuous exception of Aphrodite. From time to time women had their athletic contests. Inscriptions do survive for statues of three women victors at Delphi, but they probably did not compete against men. Among statues of victors at Olympia, Pausanias (second century
A.D
.) did not find even one of a woman. He described the girls’ games at the Temple of Hera, sister and consort of Zeus, queen of heaven and protectress of marriage.