Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art

by Walter Woodburn Hyde

NUDITY OF VICTOR STATUES.

Most of the victor statues at Olympia were nude.[442] In the early period all athletes wore the loin-cloth. Cretan frescoes show it was the custom in the early Mediterranean world. The athletes of Homer girded themselves on entering the games of Patroklos,[443] and the girdle appears in the earliest athletic scenes on vases.[444] Throughout the historic period, however, the Greeks entered their contests in complete nudity, and this nudity naturally was carried over into athletic sculpture. Pliny’s[445] statement, Graeca res nihil velare, is, therefore, correct, despite another of Philostratos to the effect that at Delphi, at the Isthmus, and everywhere except at Olympia, the athlete wore the coarse mantle.[446] The beginning of the change from wearing the loin-cloth to complete nudity was ascribed to an accident. The Megarian runner Orsippos in the 15th Ol. ( = 720 B. C.) dropped his loin-cloth while running, either accidentally or because it impeded him.[447] The story was commemorated by an epigram, perhaps by Simonides, which was inscribed on his tomb at Megara.[448] A copy of this epigram in the Megarian dialect, executed in late Roman or Byzantine times, when the original had become illegible, was discovered at Megara in 1769 and shows that its original was the source of Pausanias’ remarks.[449] Philostratos says that athletes contended nude at Olympia, either because of the summer heat or a mishap which befell the woman Pherenike of Rhodes. She accompanied her son, the boy boxer Peisirhodos, to Olympia disguised as a trainer, and in her joy at his victory she leaped over the barrier and disclosed her sex.[450] The practice does not appear to have become universal with all athletes in all the competitions at Olympia until some time after Orsippos’ day, since Thukydides says the abandonment of the girdle took place shortly before his time and that in his day it was still retained by certain foreigners, notably Asiatics, in boxing and wrestling matches.[451] The change is not illustrated in sculpture. The earliest victor statues, i. e., those of the “Apollo” type, are all nude. The nudity of this type shows an essential difference between Greek and foreigner and also between the later Greek and his rude ancestor. Plato gives the use of the loin-cloth as an example of convention, by which what seems peculiar to one generation becomes usual to another.[452] We see the change, however, in vase-paintings. The loin-cloth is common on seventh-century vases, but is gradually left off in later ones.

There were exceptions to the rule of nudity. Statues of charioteers were usually partly or wholly dressed in the long chiton, a custom explained in various ways.[453] The Delphi bronze Charioteer (Fig. [66]) is a good example of a draped one. Another auriga almost nude is shown on a decadrachm of Akragas in the British Museum, dating from the end of the fifth century B. C.[454] There are also several examples of nude charioteers.[455] The Olympic runners and athletes generally were also bareheaded and barefoot. The only exceptions were the hoplite-runners, who wore helmets, and possibly charioteers, who wore sandals.[456] Statues of women victors also were draped. Though Ionian women could witness games,[457] and Spartan girls took part in athletic contests with boys,[458] women were rigorously excluded from crossing the Alpheios during the festival at Olympia.[459] They were allowed, however, to enter horses for the chariot-race and, if victorious, to set up monuments.[460] Only one woman was allowed to witness the games, the priestess of the old earth cult of Demeter Chamyne, who could sit at the altar in the stadion during the contests.[461] Pausanias notes but one exception of a woman infringing the rule of admission, Pherenike, the mother of the Rhodian victor Peisirhodos already mentioned. She was pardoned because her father, brothers, and son were victors, but the umpires passed a law that thereafter even trainers should be nude.[462] While excluded from the games proper, women had their own festival at Olympia in honor of Hera, which was known as the Heraia. These games occurred every four years[463] and included a foot-race between virgins, in which the course was one-sixth less than the stadion. The victress received an olive crown and also a share of the cow sacrificed to Hera, and was allowed to set up a painted picture of herself in the Heraion.[464] It has been generally assumed that the statue of a girl runner in the Galleria dei Candelabri of the Vatican represents one of these victresses (Plate 2),[465] since Pausanias says they ran with their hair down and wore a tunic which reached to just above the knees, leaving the right shoulder bare to the breast. That the statue represents a girl runner seems certain,[466] but that it can be referred to one of the Olympic girl victresses is doubtful. The description of Pausanias fits it in many respects, except that the chiton of the statue is too short, and he does not mention the girdle just below the bosom. Furthermore, he does not mention statues of girl victresses, but only pictures. Nothing can be argued from the palm-branch on the tree-stump, except that the Roman copyist thought it the statue of a victress. It does not necessarily refer to a victress at Olympia, for Pausanias elsewhere says that the palm-branch was given at many contests.[467] The statue represents a young girl leaning forward awaiting the signal to start,[468] but it is impossible to say to what games we should refer it. There were girls’ contests in and out of Greece—such as at the Dionysia in Sparta[469] and in her colony Kyrene.[470] Such games were also held in the stadion of Domitian at Rome.[471] In fact the Palatine estate of the Barberini, from whom the Vatican acquired the statue, embraced the area of the old stadion of Domitian on the Palatine. It is probably of Doric workmanship, as it certainly represents a Dorian victress, though not necessarily by a Peloponnesian sculptor.[472]

THE ATHLETIC HAIR-FASHION.

PLATE 2

Marble Statue of a Girl Runner. Vatican Museum, Rome.

The assumption long held that short hair was always characteristic of the athlete is incorrect.[473] It is controverted equally by literary evidence and by the monuments. The Homeric Greek took pride in his long hair,[474] and doubtless the contestants at the games of Patroklos in the Iliad had long hair. Long hair was worn by some Athenians throughout Athenian history. From the end of the fifth century B. C., long hair was regarded as a mark of effeminacy[475] and was regularly worn only by the knights.[476] Short hair was worn as a sign of mourning in Athens from early days down.[477] Only the slaves regularly wore very short hair in the fifth century B. C.[478] The change to short hair in Athens was certainly due to the influence of the palæstra and to athletics in general.[479] We see just the opposite custom in vogue in Sparta. There, according to the code of Lykourgos,[480] men were compelled to wear long hair and children short hair. Thus the heroes of Leonidas entered the battle of Thermopylæ after combing their long locks.[481] After the Persian wars only children and men with laconizing or aristocratic sympathies[482] wore their hair long at Athens. When boys arrived at the age of ἔφηβοι, they had their hair cut at the feast of the οἰνιστήρια[483] and dedicated it to a god.[484] Soon after the Persian war period, athletes wore their hair short. Before that time, the wearing of long hair had already been discarded for obvious reasons in wrestling.[485] Similarly, in boxing and the pankration long hair was in the way, and was therefore early braided into two long plaits which were wound around the head in a peculiar way and tied into a knot at the top, the so-called Attic κρωβύλος, the oftenest mentioned manner of dressing the hair in Greek literature.[486] The oldest notice of this style of wearing the hair is found in a fragment of Asios.[487] Herakleides Ponticus[488] says it was used up to the time of the Persian wars. The locus classicus is in Thukydides, who says it was worn in his day by old people only.[489] Earlier young men wore it,[490] but it went out of fashion between 470 and 460 B. C. In this connection we should mention that the professional athlete under the Roman Empire wore his hair uncut and tied up in an unsightly topknot known as the cirrus.[491]

The monumental evidence bears out the literary. Thus, on old Corinthian clay tablets freemen are represented with long hair, while slaves have short hair.[492] Hydrias from Caere (Cerveteri) and paintings from Klazomenai show that the Ionians wore their hair short for the first time in the sixth century B. C., the custom not becoming general until the fifth. Older Spartan monuments represent the hair long.[493] Attic vases show long hair on men until the second half of the sixth century B. C., when the black-figured vase masters began to represent them with short hair, a custom becoming general in the first half of the fifth. In statuary the Diskobolos of Myron (Pls. 21, 26, and Figs. 34, 35) has short hair, and most statues of athletes before it have long hair, while most after it have short. Before the time of the Diskobolos, b.-f. and early r.-f. vase-painters often represented athletes with braided hair in the fashion of the warriors on the Aegina pediments. When short hair began to be used on athlete statues, these older braids were often replaced by victor bands.[494] We may roughly summarize by saying that statues before the date of the Diskobolos which do not have long hair are probably those of athletes and not of gods, and, in any case, if they have braids bound up in the fashion of the κρωβύλος, they are almost always statues of athletes.[495] As for short hair on representations of gods, Furtwaengler has shown that it appears only after the middle of the fifth century B. C.[496] Prior to that date the hair of divinities fell over the neck and shoulders in curls, as in the statue of the Olympian Zeus by Pheidias. By the time of Perikles, however, short curly hair reached only to the nape of the neck on statues of Zeus, and this style frequently appears on figures of the god on Attic vases of that period. Dionysos has short hair for the first time on the Parthenon frieze.[497] Furtwaengler has shown that Pheidias did not invent the short bound-up hair for goddess types, as we see it in the Lemnian Athena, but that he borrowed it from works already in existence.[498] Though the style was unknown in the archaic period, it appears on helmeted heads of Athena of the early fifth century B. C. showing Peloponnesian style—on coins, statuettes, reliefs, etc. It appears in Attic art exclusively on bareheaded types of Athena of the period just prior to that of the Lemnia.