Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals

by E. Norman Gardiner

These, however, are but isolated examples; the art which above all other was influenced by athletics was that of the vase painter. Athletic scenes are among the earliest on the vases. This may be partly due to the connexion of games with funeral rites, for which many of the painted vases were made. But there is another and more general reason for the vase painter’s preference. Athletic scenes were especially adapted for the spaces which he wished to fill, whether it were a long band running round the whole vase, or an oblong panel. In the former case, the foot-race or the horse-race, or a series of athletes engaged in various sports, offered an effective variation of the procession of men or animals so common on early vases, while nothing could be better adapted for a panel than a boxing or a wrestling match with umpires or friends looking on. So effective was the latter scheme found that it was applied to mythological subjects. The contests of Heracles with giants or with monsters become a wrestling match or pankration in which gods and goddesses take the place of umpires. So in the fifth century, on the red-figured cups the exploits of Theseus in ridding the world of monsters and bullies are depicted as events in the palaestra. To Theseus was ascribed the invention of scientific wrestling: he appears on the vases as a graceful youth triumphing by trained skill over the brute force of his opponents.

The story of athletic types follows the same course on the vases as in sculpture, though, as the development of the simpler art was more rapid, the changes took place earlier. The bearded athletes of the black-figure vases disappear at the beginning of the fifth century, and on the red-figure vases, from the time of the Persian wars, the ephebos is ubiquitous. Moreover, it is not so much the actual competitions that we see as the daily life and training of the palaestra. Strigils, oil-flasks, and jumping-weights hang upon the walls; picks and javelins are planted in the ground. Trainers in their long mantles and naked assistants stand about and watch the practice of the youths. Sometimes with outstretched hands they instruct them; sometimes they correct them with their long forked rods. The youths themselves run, leap, wrestle, throw the diskos or the javelin; some look on and chat, others prepare for exercise, anointing their bodies with oil, binding on the boxing thongs, or fitting the cord to the javelin; others having finished their work scrape themselves with strigils, or standing round a basin empty vessels of water over each other. All the varied life of the palaestra is before us.

The vases on which these scenes abound belong chiefly to the middle of the century, the period of the “fine style,” as it is called. But, as I have noted before, the actual athletic types have already become somewhat conventional, and we feel that the artist’s interest in them has become secondary. It is rather the variety of the life, with its possibilities of grouping and composition, that appeals to him. At Athens, at least, a change is beginning in the attitude of the people towards athletics. The fine period of vase painting ends about the year 440 B.C., and in the vases of the decline this change is more marked. We still see the palaestra; but it is indicated sketchily by an occasional pair of halteres on the wall; and the youths stand about idly gossiping and arguing, but take no part in manly exercise. This disappearance of athletics from the vases is significant: the sculptor could still work out his own ideals, but the vase painter was dependent for his trade on the popular taste, and the vases are therefore a true index of the feeling of the time. If we compare one of these later vases with such a vase as the Panaetius kylix in Munich (Fig. [17]), we cannot help being reminded of the contrast drawn by Aristophanes in the Clouds between the old education of the men who fought at Marathon and the education of his day. The vases enable us to date the change about the year 440, and we shall find other indications that confirm this date.

Fig. 17. R.-f. kylix. Munich, 795.

There is, however, in this athletic art something more than mere beauty or mere strength. The outward harmony is but the expression of that harmonious development of mind and body which it was the aim of Greek education to produce by means of music and gymnastic. For the interpretation of this spirit we can turn to the living word—a surer guide than merely subjective impressions. Athletic poetry arose like athletic sculpture in the sixth century, but while the athletic ideal continued to influence Greek art during the whole of its history, the hymn of victory, like the athletic painting on the vase, disappears abruptly before the Peloponnesian wars. The earliest writer of the epinikion, Simonides of Ceos, was born in the year 556 B.C.; his nephew Bacchylides, born at Iulis in the same island, lived till the year 428 B.C.[^[113]] His great Theban rival, Pindar, born a few years earlier, had died in 443 B.C. With Pindar and Bacchylides the epinikion almost ceased to exist. We have indeed a fragment of a hymn written some years later by Euripides to celebrate the triumphs of Alcibiades in the chariot-race at Olympia. But this is a mere accident, and it is, we may mark, in honour not of an athletic event but of a chariot-race. Euripides, we shall see, was little inclined to hymn the athletes of his day. The last of Pindar’s Odes, the 8th Pythian, was written in honour of a victory in wrestling won by Aristomenes of Aegina in 446 B.C., and the latest odes of Bacchylides which we can date are six years earlier. The agreement of these dates with the evidence of the vase paintings can hardly be an accidental coincidence.

Particularly noticeable are the number and importance of those odes which belong to the years immediately following the Persian wars. The writer of epinikia, like the sculptor of athletic statues, was by the very nature of his art Panhellenic. His muse, as Pindar tells us, was a hireling. He wrote for those who could pay him best, for the wealthy nobles of Thessaly or Aegina, or the princes of Sicily. Neither in Ceos nor in Thebes could a poet find sufficient scope for his genius. The little island of Ceos, famed for its athletes and its music, lay somewhat outside the main currents of Greek life. Thebes had fallen from her legendary greatness, and played but an inglorious part in the Persian wars. Hence, though the poets turned with special tenderness and pride to sing of the victors of their native cities, they spent much of their lives at the courts of powerful patrons, and found their highest inspiration in that burst of Panhellenic feeling that the Persian wars produced, and which for the moment united in the service of Hellas tyrant and oligarch and people. If Theban Pindar could not, like Simonides, sing of those who fell at Thermopylae or Salamis, his patriotism found vent in no less than six odes in honour of the victors in the great national celebration at Olympia in 476 B.C.

The defeat of Persia not only gave a fresh impulse to the Panhellenic festivals: it raised athletic training into a national duty. The consciousness of a great danger safely past arouses a nation to a sense of its military and physical needs. We can remember only a few years ago the growth of rifle clubs, the cry for military and physical training that followed the Boer war. The danger, it is felt at such times, may occur again, and it behoves every citizen to be ready to play his part. Among the Greeks this feeling gathered force not from any consciousness of their own shortcomings, but from a consciousness of their superiority. At Marathon the Greeks of the mainland had for the first time found themselves face to face with the Orientals, and for the first time realized the gulf that separated them from themselves. Their triumph was the triumph of freedom and law over slavery and despotism. A handful of free citizens had defeated a horde of slaves, and this result was due in no small degree to their athletic training. Witness the famous charge of Marathon. Critics may throw doubt on its truth: it is sufficient that Herodotus supposed it possible. An army charging a distance of eight furlongs over ground that would try any cross-country runner! No wonder the Persians regarded the Greeks as madmen. The mere existence of such a story is proof enough of the athletic training of the nation. Moreover, the sight of the long-haired, effeminate Persians, whose bodies were not hardened by exercise and tanned by exposure to the air, seems to have impressed itself indelibly on the national imagination. Hence the extraordinary popularity during the years that followed of all those military and athletic exercises which we see so constantly depicted on the red-figured vases. We must remember that at Athens this training was for the most part voluntary. It was only during the two years’ training of the epheboi that the state undertook the education of its members. Yet from this time the palaestra and gymnasium became the resort of all classes and all ages. And what was true of Athens, was true, we may feel sure, of the rest of Greece. For a time Athenian influence prevailed everywhere. The old Spartan pre-eminence had passed away, and even in athletics Athens had become the school of Greece. If Athens produced few victors in the games, she at least set an example in physical training. “Meet is it that from Athens a fashioner of athletes come,” says Pindar of the Athenian Menander who trained Pytheas of Aegina for a Nemean victory, won probably in 481 or 479 B.C.[^[114]] The effect of this national athletic movement is seen in the great games. The lists of the victors at Olympia, or the lists of those for whom Bacchylides and Pindar sang, are representative of the length and breadth of Greece from Rhodes to Agrigentum, from Cyrene to Thasos.[^[115]] Finally, the national rejoicing over the victory of Plataea could find no fitter expression than the founding, at that city, of a new athletic festival, the Eleutheria.

Before we consider the individual writers of epinikia two points may be noticed which are common to all poems of this class. In the first place, the epinikion was essentially Panhellenic in its theme and also in its structure. The hymn itself consisted of three parts—an allusion to the victory, a legend suggested by the victor’s home or lineage, or by the locality of the festival, and some moral reflections or advice. The heroes and gods of the legends had for the most part lost their local character and become the common property of the race, and the poet, by coupling the present with the past, thereby proclaimed the continuity and unity of Hellas. Secondly, the epinikion was aristocratic. The victors whom the poet praised were princes and nobles, who competed for pure love of sport, and for whom athletics were in no sense a profession, nor even the chief occupation of their lives. Life was not all sport in Greece at this period, and these men did not shirk their duties, but played their part with honour in the more serious contests of war and politics.

Of the epinikia of Simonides only a few fragments survive. To these we may add several epigrams of somewhat doubtful authenticity. Little more was known of Bacchylides till a few years ago the discovery of an Egyptian papyrus by Drs. Grenfell and Hunt restored to us, besides other poems, large portions of thirteen of his epinikia. Bacchylides came from an island of athletes: his own family seems to have been athletic, his grandfather is said to have been distinguished as an athlete, and his uncle was the poet Simonides. He dwells with intense delight on the details of the games, the light foot and strong hands of the victor, the whirlwind rush of the chariots, the cheers of the spectators, the triumphal rejoicings at the victor’s home. But of the deeper meaning, the spirit of the games, we learn little from him.