Sexual abstinence in ancient athletic training

Sex and the modern Olympics

There was a stream of news stories last summer about sex and the Olympics, as the newspapers got overexcited about the idea of lots of athletes living in close quarters with each other in the Olympic village. A quick web search turns up dozens of these. Some examples:

Good news for Olympians! Sex before sport WON’T ruin your medal chances (Daily Mail)

The myths of sex before sport (BBC)

‘Sex before competing: does it boost athletes’ performance?’ (CNN)

Sex before competition won’t exhaust our Olympians: Study (ninemsn)

–and many more of the same (as well as lots of almost identical stories from previous Olympics/World Cups/Commonwealth Games etc.).

Most of these stories follow more or less the same pattern: examples of famous modern sporting abstainers–Muhammad Ali, Glen Hoddle’s England squad for the 1998 football World Cup, Sylvester Stallone in Rocky etc. etc.–sometimes combined with passing references to similar beliefs in ancient Greek athletics; then quotation of recent studies showing that there is no evidence at all for physiological side effects. Here’s one: ‘Effect of sexual activity on cycle ergometer stress test parameters, on plasmatic testosterone levels and on concentration capacity: a study in high-level male athletes performed in the laboratory’, Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness 40.3 (2000): 233-9.

Sex and abstinence in ancient sport

It is absolutely right that there are ancient precedents for the idea that abstaining from sex could help athletic performance.

Aelian, Varia Historia 3.30, tells us that the athlete Cleitomachus was so abstinent that he never slept with his wife, and that he would turn away if he saw dogs mating in the street. That anecdote picks up on the standard idea of athletes as models of virtue and self-control.

In other sources, the physiological basis of the link between athletic training and sexual abstinence is made clearer. At least in some ancient medical texts loss of semen is associated with loss of strength and masculine vitality. One often quoted example is from the discussion of gonorrhea in Aretaeus, On the Causes and Symptoms of Chronic Disease 2.5, CMG 2.71, quoted in this good piece by Peter Jones in the Spectator–also from last August.

Some authors also suggest that semen production is lowered because the material the body would normally use for it is diverted to muscle-building. Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 8.4, 724e includes the following observation (in the course of a discussion of why palm fronds are awarded to victorious athletes, here suggesting that it is because they share the quality of sterility): ‘as for an athlete, its shapeliness uses up all its nourishment for building up the body, so that what is left for the production of seed is very little, and of poor quality’.

Of course that’s not the only side of the story: there are some cases where athletes were renowned precisely for their lack of sexual self-control. The emperor Elagabalus, in the early third century AD, famously took as his lover the athlete Aurelius Zoticus (see here for a translation of the whole lurid story from Cassius Dio 79.16, unless you’re feeling easily shocked).

How to spot a sexually active athlete

As so often, Philostratus’ Gymnasticus is one of the best places to look for the question of how these views impacted on day-to-day training:

Those who come to the gymnasium straight after sex are exposed by a greater number of indicators when they train, for their strength is diminished and they are short of breath and lack daring in their attacks, and they fade in colour in response to exertion, and they can be detected by signs of that sort; and when they strip, their hollow collar-bones give them away, their poorly structured hips, the conspicuous outline of their ribs, and the coldness of their blood. These athletes, even if we dedicated ourselves to them, would have no chance of being crowned [i.e. winning victory] in any contest. The part beneath the eyes is weak, the beating of their hearts is weak, their perspiration is weak, their sleep, which controls digestion, is weak, and their eyes glance around in a wandering fashion and indicate an appearance of lustfulness…. If an athlete has just had sex, it is better for him not to exercise. In what sense are they men, those who exchange crowns and victory announcements for disgraceful pleasures? But if they must undergo training, let them be trained, but with the caveat that their strength and their breathing must be closely observed; for these are the things which are damaged most by the pleasures of sex. (Gymnasticus 48 and 52)

Whether Philostratus’ instructions for spotting one of these people could ever be effectively applied is far from clear!–presumably this is based more on a set of assumptions about what sex is likely to do to an athlete than on experimental research.

But it does show very vividly just how much weight abstinence seems to have been given within ancient sport. It also shows just how vulnerable and precarious the athletic body was thought to be.

An ancient climbing contest

Wrestling and climbing in the modern Olympics

The IOC has recently announced that both forms of Olympic wrestling (‘Greco-Roman’ and ‘freestyle’) are going to be dropped from the 2020 Olympics to make way for a new sport.

(This is the 2012 London Olympics 74kg Greco-Roman wrestling final between Roman Vlasov and Arsen Julfalakyan).

Or to be more precise wrestling will join a shortlist with seven other sports competing for a single space: baseball/softball, karate, roller sports, sport climbing, squash, wakeboarding and kung fu.

Personally my vote would go for the climbing. Here’s a video of climbing sensation Adam Ondra, who should be one of big medal contenders even in 8 years time (he’s only 20 now). And here he is at the junior world championships at Valence in 2009:

An ancient climbing contest

I’ve written before about the arbitrariness of the choice of sports in the modern Olympic programme. Dropping wrestling would have seemed particularly odd to an ancient sports fan: it was one of the most prestigious of all ancient events (e.g. Philostratus, Gymnasticus 11). And the idea of including climbing as part of the Olympic programme would have seemed utterly bizarre.

Having said that, it’s clear that the Greeks were willing to make a competition of just about anything–just not within the context of one of their oldest festivals. This was a society where competition and competitiveness were deeply rooted (although there is a tendency in a lot of modern scholarship to oversimplify that stereotype–lots of ancient writers worry about the effects of competitiveness too).

There is in fact one text which gives a nice parallel for competitive climbing in the ancient world–from Arrian’s account of Alexander the Great’s capture of the Sogdian rock and its seemingly impregnable fortress, in what is now Uzbekistan. Here it is:

Then Alexander announced that twelve talents would be the prize for the first man to climb to the top, eleven talents for the second, and so on for the third, with 300 gold darics as the final prize for the last. This announcement spurred on the Macedonians, who were already keen, all the more. Three hundred men assembled who had experience of rock-climbing (petrobatein) from previous sieges. They prepared small iron pegs, used for securing tents, for driving into the snow where it seemed firm, or into patches of ground not covered by snow, and securing these with strong ropes made of flax, they set off, when night fell, to the steepest and therefore least guarded section of the rock. And driving in these pegs either into the earth, where it showed through, or into the patches of snow which were least likely to give way, they hauled themselves up by a variety of routes up the rock. Thirty of them died during the climb: their bodies fell in various places in the snow, and were not recovered for burial. But the rest of them, reaching the top of the rock around dawn, waved linen flags in the direction of the Macedonian camp, as Alexander had ordered them to do. (Arrian, Anabasis 4.18-19)

And here’s a video reconstruction.

Maybe the idea of a climbing as a competitive sport would not have seemed so odd to an ancient Greek after all, even if it could never have made it into a traditional festival programme.

Postscript: mountains in the ancient and modern world

Lying behind all of that is a series of wider questions about mountains in ancient and modern imagination. I do think there is a tendency to oversimplify ancient attitudes to mountains and to overestimate the degree to which they were different from our own. That’s not to say that mountain climbing of the kind Arrian describes here was widespread in the ancient world: clearly mountaineering as a widely practised leisure activity is a very distinctively modern phenomenon. But it’s not as hard as one might think to find examples in ancient texts of people climbing mountains (Waldo Sweet’s sourcebook Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece, published in 1987, includes this Arrian passage as one of fourteen examples). And even if we accept that ancient Greeks and Romans used high places for very different reasons from our own, I still think that the ancient world is treated in much too cursory fashion in recent scholarship on the cultural history of mountains. But that’s for another time…

Ball sports in the Roman empire

Ball games in Roman culture

Ball games tend to get a relatively low profile in our accounts of ancient sport. The reasons for that are pretty clear: they were not part of the standard athletic festival programmes, at Olympia or anywhere else.

And yet Roman society was a society obsessed with ball play.

Ball games were standardly played in bath-houses and in gymnasia, for entertainment and for health. The rules are very hard to reconstruct from our sources. Most of the websites which turn up on search engines really underestimate that difficulty, and also the variety of ancient ball games (more on that below). Many of them also overemphasize the links with modern sports–especially football. But if you want a basic survey the Wikipedia pages on (for example) harpastum or episkyros at least give some of the key sources in translation.

I’ve just been reading the Latin satirist Martial, and the letters of Pliny the Younger, along with some other authors who were more or less contemporary with them (late first/early second century AD), and it’s striking how often they mention people playing with balls. It turns up over and over again, as if it’s a standard part of day-to-day elite life.

For example, Seneca complains in one of his Letters (56) about the noise from the bathhouse under his lodgings: the grunting of people lifting lead weights, the sound of massages, the sound of pickpockets being arrested. He also complains about the noise made by pilicrepi shouting out the score: the last straw, Seneca suggests. That word pilicrepus doesn’t turn up often in surviving Latin, and we’re not quite sure what it means, but this is presumably either a ball-player or a scorer. Either way, Seneca’s referring to him as if he’s a common sight (or sound) (too common for his liking) in the baths of Rome.

Medical writers talk a lot about ball play too, most importantly the great second-century AD medical writer Galen in his work On Exercise with the Small Ball. Galen hated athletes and athletics and especially athletic trainers for the damage they did to the human body and for the way they encroached on his medical expertise. But he also gave detailed instructions for alternative, more moderate types of exercise which were beneficial to the body: and the small ball is one of those.

Gaius Laberius

There’s a lot of ball play also in Roman art.

This image is from the small town of Sinj in Croatia, from a tombstone for a boy called Gaius Laberius, who has died aged 7 according to the inscription (although oddly the individual depicted seems to be much older than that). It dates as far as I can tell from the second century AD. He’s depicted here holding a ball made of hexagons, much like a modern football–presumably an attempt by grieving parents to commemorate one of the things he loved.

It’s clearly a local landmark, and a source of local pride, and taken as evidence for the origins of football not just in the Roman empire, but actually in the pre-Roman local population: for example here. There are photos here of one attempt at a recreation match, inspired by the tombstone. And the monument also apparently featured on the front page of the FIFA newsletter in 1969.

I haven’t; been able to work out exactly what those arguments are based on. On the face of it it’s hard to see what is special about this ball image compared with lots of others which survive similarly in Roman imperial art, but maybe I’m missing something… (more details gratefully received, if anyone knows).

Antyllus on the small ball

Many of the key passages on ancient ball games are listed in the standard introductory books on ancient athletics, so I won’t plough through any more of them here.

But here’s one which isn;t easily available in translation. It’s by the medical writer Antyllus, writing in the second century AD.

It’s in the context of a wider discussion of other exercises too: running, horse-riding, hoop-rolling, swimming, wrestling and shadow-boxing.

Ball exercise makes people more agile and strengthens their vital energies. There are different types of exercise according to the different types of ball. The types are the small ball, the large ball, the medium ball, the good-sized ball, and the hollow ball. There are three types of small ball, each with a separate type of exercise. The first is very small…The exercise from this is very good for the legs…Then there is another ball, a little bigger than this one…And this is the best of the ball exercises, for it makes the body healthy and nimble, and it sharpens the sight without causing congestion in the head. And then there is a third ball bigger than these two which they play standing apart at a distance. There is a stationary version and a running version. In the first they stand and throw the ball repeatedly and forcefully. This exercises the arms and the eyes. The running version exercises the arms and the eyes in the same way as the previous one, but it also benefits the legs through running, and the backbone through the twists and turns which place during running. (CMG 6.1.1, 185-6)

And much more of the same…

It’s a fairly austere account. It doesn’t help us to reconstruct the rules. But what is amazing, I think, is all the complex subdivisions here. Clearly ball play in the ancient world came in a vast variety of different forms. It had something for everyone (or something for every part of the body, if you’re a medical writer like Antyllus).

We can at least see that ball play had its own very rich and complex culture in the ancient world, even if the nuances and the details are lost to us…

Podcast: Olympics in the Roman Empire

Podcast here, discussing the ancient Olympics in the wider context of the Greek athletics of the Roman Empire (part of a wider series of Classics podcasts here).

 

Sweat collectors in the gymnasium

We’re quite used to the idea of people making money from sport. But one ancient commercial activity which is very hard to parallel is the selling of sweat from the gymnasium.

Gloios

It was standard practice to cover yourself in olive oil before exercising in the gymnasium. It was seen as beneficial for health. After exercising you would then scrape off the oil and sweat on your body with a metal scraper called a ‘strigil’.

The resulting mixture of sweat and dust and used oil was known as gloios.

Gymnasium employees had the task of collecting it so that it could be sold for medical purposes. It’s mentioned in quite a few medical texts. It had a range of uses, but it seems to have been used in particular to reduce inflammations. It was spread on to the affected area rather than ingested. Sometimes it was used in combination with the dirt scraped off the walls or statues of the gymnasium.

Gloios mattered for ancient gymnasia because it provided a significant revenue stream. One famous inscription, the gymnasium law from Beroia, gives us a glimpse of that process in a passing reference to the sale of the rights to the revenue from the gymnasium’s gloios–which suggests that this was happening on a fairly large scale

(There’s a really good piece on all of this, and on other aspects of olive oil use, by Nigel Kennell in M. Joyal ( ed.) (2001) In Altum: Seventy-Five Years of Classical Studies in Newfoundland, but it’s relatively hard to get hold of, and certainly not available online as far as I know…)

Sweat collectors

I think the most fascinating aspect all in all of that is the role of the gloios-collectors.

These people are barely mentioned in surviving ancient texts. But they must have been a common sight in gymnasia and bath-houses across the Mediterranean world. Presumably we have to imagine them as a constant background presence, going around collecting the scrapings and scratching at the walls while the exercisers went on with their training, or perhaps at the end of the day (although it’s hard to believe that could ever have been a full-time job–it must have been combined with many other duties in the gymnasium too).

The main reason for their invisibility in the sources is surely their low status, by contrast with the members of the elite who were the primary clientele of the gymnasium buildings they worked in. This can’t have been a prestigious profession, despite the value of the product they collected (there’s an obvious parallel in the role of fishermen in ancient culture–the fish they caught were highly valued, but they themselves had very low status and low incomes). Presumably many of the gloios collectors were slaves.

Valerius Maximus

Here’s one rare ancient witness: Valerius Maximus, in his work Memorable Deeds and Sayings, a huge collection of anecdotes and exemplary stories, written in Latin in the first half of the first century AD. The extracts here are from 9.14, a collection of stories ‘On physical likeness’:

The father of Pompey [first-century BC Roman general, rival of Julius Caesar] appeared to resemble his cook, Menogenes, to such an extent that he was powerless, despite his military pre-eminence and his warlike spirit, to dislodge that man’s name from himself…

A young man of outstanding nobility, Cornelius Scipio, despite his plentiful supply of distinguished family names, was associated against his will with the slave-like name Serapio by popular gossip. This is because he was exceptionally similar in appearance to a sacrificial assistant of that name. Neither the respectability of Scipio’s behaviour nor respect for the many death masks of his ancestors, brought him any relief from being stained by this insult…

Hybreas of Mylasa was a prolific and energetic orator. But the whole of Asia Minor more or less assumed that he was brother to a slave of the city of Kyme who collected the scrapings from the gymnasium, so similar were they in the outlines of their faces and in all their limbs.

Status is the thing Valerius is fascinated by here above all, both in the Hybreas story and in the others in the chapter. The idea of high- and low-status individuals with identical appearance threatens the common ancient idea that elite identity was automatically linked with bodily beauty and dignity. Hybreas was an orator from the city of Mylasa in Caria (now south-west Turkey) from the first century BC. He was renowned for his enormous wealth and his political control over the city. But presumably this connection with the unnamed gloios-collector (from Kyme–another nearby city in Asia Minor) is a detail that could have been exploited by his political enemies, all the more so given that Hybreas seems to have risen from humble origins himself (Strabo 14.2.24).

It is not a flattering association. For Valerius Maximus collecting other people’s sweat is very far removed from the cultured behaviour appropriate to the political elite.

Cheating in ancient sport

Lance Armstrong

When future sports historians look back at the months following the 2012 Olympics, what they’re most likely to remember is surely the stripping of Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de France victories, prompted by the release of USADA’s reasoned decision on 10 October.

Most cycling fans had begun to realise what was going on, but it’s still hard not be shocked (also if you read Tyler Hamilton’s book, The Secret Race) by the scale of the cheating, and by the assumption of invincibility among those who were doing it; also by the brutal control tactics Armstrong especially seems to have adopted; and by the uselessness of all the drug testing which clearly failed to detect all but occasional cases.

The whole affair is a pretty sobering counterweight to the more idealising vision of sport which was on show in the Olympics earlier in the summer.

Luckily for the much reported Olympics feel-good factor, none of the UK’s new cycling stars is closely involved: there’s general agreement that things have got better in the last few years.

Nevertheless there are many many people still involved in cycling as riders or managers who lived through the bad times. Many of these will be getting worried: clearly there are more relevations to come. Even Team Sky and their manager Dave Brailsford (who is also performance director of British Cycling) have had some uncomfortable questions to answer: see here or here. And the UCI, the sports governing body, is increasingly facing accusations of incompetence and even collusion.

Cheating in ancient sport

Cheating in the ancient Olympics has been one of the most frequently treated ancient-sport topics in the popular media over the last few decades. There are countless discussions on ancient Olympics web-sites too.

Most of these accounts cover very similar ground, relying on the same few familiar sources, none of which really takes us very close to ancient athletic experience.

That usually involves a fairly uncritical repetition of various anecdotes from Pausanias, usually with passing mention of famous heroic cheats like Pelops (who is said to have cheated in his chariot race against King Oinomaos: victory in the race gave him the hand of Oinomaos’ daughter, Hippodamia, in marriage).

The problem is that it is very hard to find alternatives to those often quoted sources.

Just to take one example, it’s hardly surprising that the evidence of the inscriptions (which provide some of our best evidence for ancient sport) are silent about cheating, given that their main aim is nearly always honorific: to honour prominent athletes and benefactors.

Philostratus on selling victories

Even so, I think there is more to say about the way in which ancient writers thought about cheating and talked about it, even if we can’t find any new evidence for what corrupt ancient sportsmen actually did.

The text quoted here (Philostratus, Gymnasticus 45; see Miller, Arete, 2004, no. 214 for alternative translation) suggests some striking similarities and differences between ancient and modern treatments.

This kind of luxury…started the habit of rule-breaking among athletes for the sake of money and the buying and selling of victories…A boy won the Isthmian wrestling after agreeing with one of his opponents a price of three thousand drachmas for victory. When they came the next day to the gymnasium, the defeated contestant demanded his money, but the other said that he did not owe it, since he had won the victory over an opponent who had been unwilling to lose. And since their argument remained unresolved they entrusted the matter to an oath and came to the temple of the Isthmian god [i.e. Poseidon], and the one who had sold the victory swore an oath in public that he had sold the contest of the god and that three thousand drachmas had been promised to him. And he admitted to these things in a clear voice, speaking without any hesitation…And I do not absolve the trainers themselves from responsibility for this corruption. For they turn up at training sessions with money, and they make loans to the athletes at levels of interest higher than those which are normal among sea-going merchants, and they pay no attention to the reputation of the athletes but instead act as their advisers in buying and selling, out of a concern for their own profit, which they secure either by giving loans to those who want to purchase victories,or by taking repayments from those who have made sales.

There are some vague overlaps with the stories which have been emerging from the cycling world over the last few weeks and years.

Most obvious is the blatant, unashamed quality of the way in which the two boys talk about their deal, as if it’s an absolutely commonplace happening (again, Hamilton’s book is a good place to look for parallels: there are lots of stories there of professional cyclists referring to their doping in very casual, matter-of-fact fashion among themselves, even if they didn’t do so in public like Philostratus’ two boy athletes here).

Philostratus’ worries about trainers corrupting young athletes also look familiar: there are more and more stories coming out of young cyclists being pressured into doping by their teams.

Idealising the past

The obvious difference is in Philostratus’ treatment of the past.

For Philostratus, this corruption is a sign of the influx of money into the sport. He contrasts it with a glowing portrait of the old-fashioned virtues of the heroic athletes of many centuries before, who lived simple lives and ate simple diets. (I think the importance of Philostratus’ text in reinforcing the amateurist ideology of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries hasn’t always been recognised).

By contrast there’s not much sign of this kind of idealisation of the past in relation to the Armstrong scandal.

That must be partly because of the disillusionment which is prominent these days in the professional cycling media. It’s becoming increasingly clear that these problems date a very long way back–into the 1960s at least–even if they were at their worst from the early 90s onwards.

But I think it’s part of a trend which is common in other sports too–a wider lack of interest in idealising visions of a past sporting golden age. It’s increasingly rare these days to find the language of moral virtue attached to the sports stars of the earlier ages. Maybe our increasing cynicism about some aspects of present-day sport makes us less inclined to look for perfection in the great figures of the past too…

Index of previous posts

Now that the Olympics season is nearly over, with the Paralympics finishing next Sunday (9 September), I’m going to be posting here less often: probably monthly from October onwards rather than weekly.

In the mean time, here’s an index of previous posts. Thanks for reading…

1. Citizenship and athletic victory

2. The torch relay and ancient festival envoys

3. Why did ancient athletes cover themselves in oil?

4. A travelling athlete

5. A visitor to the Olympics

6. Olympic preparations

7. A death in the gymnasium

8. Funding Olympic athletes

9. The Olympic dominance of the city of Kroton

10. The deaths of Markos Alfidios and Wouter Weylandt

11. Criticising the Olympics

12. Ancient athletic festivals and private enterprise

13. The International Olympic Committee website and the Olympic truce

14. Spectators as spectacle

15. The cultural Olympiad and the musical contests of the ancient world

16. Judging form and placing bets

17. New sports in the Olympic programme

18. CVs on stone

19. Children’s books on the ancient Olympics

20. The opening ceremony at the ancient Olympics

21. Whipping spectators at the ancient Olympics?

22. Imagining victory

23. Going home after the Olympics

24. Disabled athletes in the ancient world?

Disabled athletes in the ancient world?

The Paralympics are about to begin.

What would an ancient spectator have made of them?

Dwarf boxers

Ancient Greek and Roman culture aren’t renowned for their sensitive treatment of the disabled.

Most of the examples we have of ‘sporting’ appearances by athletes who didn’t conform to ancient notions about ideal body shape involve mockery.

The emperor Domitian is said to have exhibited dwarf gladiators in the arena:

Next come the bold ranks of dwarfs. Their brief growth, abruptly ended, has tied their bodies once for all into knotted lumps. They join in combat, they inflict wounds, they threaten death with their tiny hands. Father Mars [i.e. the god of war]…marvels at these fierce boxers. (Statius, Silvae 1.6.57-64)

We have lots of surviving statuettes of dwarf boxers too–for example here or here.

Injured heroes

It’s very difficult to find more positive examples.

There are a few injured war heroes from Greek mythology who might conceivably be appropriated as icons of physical achievement in the face of disability.

The obvious example is Philoketes, who is said to have been abandoned on an island by the Greeks on their way to Troy with a terrible wound in his foot from a snake bite. Fortunately for him they left him with his bow, the famous bow of Herakles, which he used to catch food. Finally the Greeks went to collect him and brought him back to be healed, in response to a prophecy that Troy could not be captured without his bow.

Guillaume Guillon-Lethiere: Philoctète dans l’île déserte de Lemnos gravissant les rochers pour avoir un oiseau qu’il a tué, 1798 (Paris, Musée du Louvre).

The Egyptian wrestler Mys

But that’s a fairly tenuous connection with modern Paralympic ideals.

A better bet are the various stories about ancient athletes who emerged stronger after a period of illness (like Lance Armstrong perhaps), or even turned their illnesses to advantage.

Here’s one:

The Egyptian, Mys, so I have heard from some older informants, was a little chap of no great size, but he wrestled beyond the normal limits of the art. At one point after he had been ill his left side grew bigger; he had already decided to give up competing when a dream appeared to him telling him to have no fear of the illness, for he would be stronger in the damaged parts of his body than in those which were healthy and unharmed. And the dream was right; for he used to use the damaged parts of his body to make wrestling holds which were very hard to defend against, and that made him very difficult for his opponents to deal with, and he benefited from his disease through being strengthened in the afflicted parts of the body. This is an amazing thing, and let us take it as a one-off incident, rather than as something which happens regularly, and let it be viewed more as the work of a god revealing a great sign to humans. (Philostratus, Gymnasticus 41)

Conclusion

The vast majority of ancient texts do take a pretty negative view of physical disability, even if they don’t always go quite so far as the emperor Domitian and the spectators who flocked to his shows.

But this text does suggest that there is another side to the story. Admittedly the final sentence on divine intervention jars a bit with the modern idea that the Paralympic athlete takes control over her or his own destiny by hard work and determination and self-belief. In making that claim Philostratus echoes the ancient tendency to described odd body shapes and disabilities as marvels and oddities–albeit without the unflattering, dehumanising connotations that language usually has. It’s also striking that this boxer isn’t attested in any other source, and there’s really no way of saying how reliable Philostratus’ account is, or how widely known this story was.

But even so, this passage does show that a more positive account of disability, and specifically sporting disability, was at least conceivable to some ancient authors.

Going home after the Olympics

Going home

The London Olympics are over. Most of the athletes will be home by now. Some will have been greeted by cheering crowds and parades.

This usually seems to involve open-top buses. Here’s the French team back in Paris this week

And Kelly Holmes in 2004:

The high-profile winners can expect national honours and increased funding for themselves and their sports in the future.

Triumphal entry

What was it like to go home as an Olympic victor in the ancient world?

In some cases it would have taken a long time–not just because of slow transport, but also because of the packed festival calendar: many athletes would simply sail on to the next festival. But when a victorious athlete finally did get home, he would get a welcome just as spectacular as anything we would expect today.

If his victory was in one of the top-rank games with the title eiselastikos he would have the privilege of driving in to the city (eiselaunein) in a chariot. Diodorus Siculus (admittedly as part of an account of the luxury of the city of Akragas, which suggests that this may not have been entirely typical) has the following account:

In the ninety-second Olympiad, when Exainetos of Akragas was the victor [i.e. in the “stadion” race--approx. 200 metres] they led him into the city in a chariot, and included in the procession there were, in addition to other things, three hundred chariots with white horses, all of them belonging to citizens of Akragas. (Diodorus Siculus 13.82)

In some cases we hear of a breach being made in the city’s wall. The emperor Nero insisted on that privilege for himself in returning home after his (stage-managed) musical and chariot-racing victories in Greece:

Returning from Greece to Naples…he entered the city with white horses, part of the city wall having been torn down, as is the custom for victors at the sacred festival; in a similar fashion he entered Antium, then Albanum, then Rome…in purple clothing and a cloak decorated with gold stars. (Suetonius, Nero 25)

The ancient equivalent of the gold medal was the crown of victory (in the case of the Olympics that was a crown of olive leaves). It was particularly important in these ceremonies–in fact the whole process was sometimes referred to in a kind of shorthand form as ‘bringing in the crown’ (eisagein to stephanon). It would be carried in procession and then be dedicated within the city.

One Hellenistic inscription from Teos gives very precise instructions, as part of a much wider list of honours for the Seleukid king Antiochos III (see Ma, Antiochos III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor, Epigraphical Dossier no. 18, lines 46-9):

Those who make a solemn entrance into the city, having won a victory in the sacred contests, must go first to the Council chamber, as soon as they come through the city gate, to crown the statue of the king, and to offer sacrifice.

The victor’s pension

There were longer-term privileges too. Most importantly, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, victors would be given pensions and in some cases also exemption from taxation. In the Roman period, victory at a ‘sacred festival’ (i.e. one of the top ranked contests) seems to have given you an automatic right to a pension from your home city. Here’s a text from the city of Hermopolis in Egypt, from the mid third century AD, surviving on a papyrus manuscript. (Also available in the Loeb Classical Library series, Select Papyri vol. 2, no. 306).

To the most excellent Senate of the great, ancient, most revered, and most illustrious city of Hermopolis, from Aurelius Leucadius, citizen of Hermopolis, sacred victor and pankratiast …I request that an order be given to pay me from the city’s accounts, as my pension for the victory for which I was crowned at the sacred eiselastic games, the total of 1 talent 2610 drachmas, for 48 months…at the rate of 180 drachmas per month; also, as my pension for the first victory for which I was crowned at the sacred eiselastic universal Olympian [i.e. following the same rules as the Olympics as Pisa] boys’ contest in the colony of Sidon, the total of 1 talent 450 drachmas for 35 months 25 days…at the rate of 180 drachmas per month, making a total claim of 2 talents 3090 drachmas of silver…

180 drachmas per month was a lot of money: well above the average monthly wage for a skilled labourer. Note the way this request is phrased almost as the assertion of a right. It seems that you could claim a separate pension for each separate victory. Having lots of these to pay would have been a significant drain on the city’s budget.

Conclusion

That kind of evidence makes the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century idea that amateurism was important to ancient athletics seem all the more bizarre. Admittedly Olympic victors received only symbolic rewards at the games themselves, rather than money prizes–the same is true today. But victory was lucrative in other ways, and many ancient athletes must have been driven largely by financial motivations.

Some modern gold-medallists–especially from minority sports in less wealthy countries–might even wish they were back in ancient Hermopolis…

Imagining victory

Athletic victory in London 2012

It’s quite striking that media references to Olympic history are actually less frequent now that the games are underway. That’s maybe not a surprise–we have more urgent things to preoccupy us. The reason for watching sport is to see people win. When we watch Usain Bolt, or Jessica Ennis or Mo Farah or countless others in the moment of winning, it’s easy to forget everything else. If we care about who wins, even from the other side of a television screen, sport can pull us in to identify with the athletes we’re watching–it gives us a desire for victory.

We can feel an emotional engagement in watching the losers too: Lu Xian crashing into the first hurdle, or Tyson Gay in tears after his fourth place in the 100m.

Here’s Billy Mills winning a surprise victory in the 10,000 metres in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics–a great picture, I think:

Athletic victory in Pindar

Ancient literature is full of attempts to recreate precisely that kind of exhilaration, and the celebration that follows it.

Most famously it’s everywhere in the work of Pindar–the Greek poet who wrote his victory odes in the 5^th century BC. Here’s his (often quoted) praise of the wrestler Aristomenes of Aegina for victory in the wrestling at the Pythian games of 446 BC (Pythian 8.81-97) (also in alternative translation in Miller, Arete (2004) no. 249).

You fell on the bodies of four opponents from on high and with cruel intent. For them no happy return home was allotted at Delphi, as it was for you, nor did sweet laughter bring pleasure to them when they went home to their mothers. Instead they slink along alleyways, staying aloof from their enemies, bitten by misfortune. But the man who has won some new fine thing is made splendid, and flies beyond hope on the wings of his manly deeds, nursing ambitions greater than wealth. But mortal pleasure flowers quickly, and quickly falls to the ground, shaken by an unpleasant thought. Creatures of a day. What is somebody? What is nobody? A human is just the dream of a shadow. But whenever a ray of sunshine comes as a gift from the gods, then a brilliant light falls upon men, and our life is gentle.

Athletic victory in early Christian writing

Oddly enough some of our other best descriptions of victory come from early Christian texts. A lot of early Christian writing uses athletic imagery to describe spiritual victory. Some examples are well known: for example it’s common in accounts of the deaths of martyrs, who are often compared to athletes or gladiators, and Paul’s letters are famously full of examples–they even get their own Wikipedia page.

But early Christian and late antique literature is still a huge untapped resource for scholarship on ancient athletics: there are hundreds and hundreds of more obscure passages which don’t get so much attention.

There are some good examples in a piece by Michael Poliakoff from IJHS 1984, freely available online here.

Job’s victory over Satan

Here’s one of his passages, from the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia, the Suda. It’s an account of the Old Testament figure of Job, who was often described as a wrestler, wrestling against Satan. That’s paradoxical, given how weak he often is in the traditional imagery. He’s the one on the right here, covered in boils (this image from the sixth- or seventh-century ‘Syriac Bible of Paris’)–he doesn;t look as though he’s in a position to wrestle with anyone:

Here’s the passage (quoted here from Poliakoff’s translation, with a few adjustments):

Job was that truly great and noble competitor for the truth who first opened the athletic stadium shared by the whole world, who threw down his opponent in every wrestling bout, who received blows and bruises to his very bones yet remained undefeated, who was full of worms yet also crowned (i.e. crowned as victor). Death was not able to lay him out or to put dust on his shoulders, but he stood immovable like a statue or an anvil, unstruck, wrestling throughout his whole life and smashing his opponent. He raised a monument of victory over the Evil One, not by contesting at Nemea, Olympia, the Isthmus, and Delphi…The Opponent’s madness and envy were not sated up until the point when he challenged this athlete naked to the dung heap, making him completely spotted with sores and full of worms and until finally the Cursed One brought the defeat upon himself and drew the lot of final shame….Job gained the ultimate and finest prize from his contests, to be raised with Christ…

This Byzantine fascination with athletic imagery is odd in a way, given that the old athletic festivals had died out many centuries before. The Olympic festival was held for the last time roughly in AD 400.

But maybe that just shows all the more clearly how deeply embedded these ideas of victory were in the Greco-Roman traditions which influenced early Christian and Byzantine culture…