Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Pleasure and Leisure 265
the entrance to the site, eager to catch a glimpse of their favorites.
Pindar writes of one such favorite as follows:
On the many occasions that you won in the Panathenaia, Telesikrates,
unmarried girls saw you and under their breath prayed that you might
be their beloved husband or son, and they did the same at Olympia and
Delphi, and at all the local festivals. (Pythian 9.97–103)
Although only a minute proportion of the Greek population actually
participated in the games, young men were inspired to train
in the palaistra in the hope that they might one day have the distinction
of representing their city. The games thus functioned as a
general incentive to physical excellence. Not everyone, however,
approved of the adulation that victorious athletes received. A character
in a lost play by Euripides inquires:
Who has ever assisted his city by winning a prize for wrestling or running
fast or throwing the discus or striking someone full on the chin? Will they
fight the enemy with a discus or kick them out of the country as if they
were footballs? (Autolykos fr. 282)
The Bare Facts
The Greeks were not, of course, unique in their prejudice, as we
might label it, for those who were physically perfect. The same prejudice
was central to the Renaissance, as the numerous images of
perfectly formed saints—the embodiments of physical and moral
energy—by artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael demonstrate.
So far as the common man figured at all in Renaissance art, he did
so primarily as an adjunct to the central biblical and mythological
scenes that were enacted by the Renaissance equivalents of the
Holly wood idols of today. This remained the case until the seventeenth
century, when commoners finally became objects of artistic
interest in their own right.
In crafting an image of themselves that was at such variance with
physiological reality, the Greeks were not wholly different from us,
although they have bequeathed to us almost exclusively this image
of themselves. If, by some quirk of history, all that survived of
contemporary Western “art” were copies of GQ, Vogue, or Woman,
posterity might be equally intrigued by the disjunction between
representational image and physiological fact. It is a disjunction that