MOUSEION - Memorial University of Newfoundland

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS
often brutally competitive spirit endemic in ancient society to an extent
we moderns can only imagine.
One cannot do justice to all the essays in a brief review. but a few
struck me as particularly useful from the perspective of someone
whose main responsibility is teaching ancient Greek culture to undergraduates
in general education courses. Stephen G. Miller's "The Organization
and Functioning of the Olympic Games." another version of
which appears in his book Ancient Greek Athletics (Yale University
Press. 2004). is an excellent overview of the everyday details and management
of the ancient athletic festivals and events. with a splendid recreation
of a typical festival. Miller is particularly good at highlighting
those practices and quotidian realities that we moderns would find jarring
or perhaps not even think about. The mastigophoroi. for example.
were officials who flogged athletes when they fouled or failed to pay a
fine. The sudden influx of visitors to a site like Olympia. with no hotels
or inns. meant that a small city sprang up overnight. so sanitation must
have been a problem. And given the incessant sacrificing going on by
priests and hopeful athletes. the flies. smoke. and stench of slaughtered
animal flesh no doubt were a plague. Throw in the prostitutes. peddlers.
wrangling poets and sophists. declaiming historians. jugglers.
magicians. and fortune-tellers. and the ancient games resemble more
our commercialized modern ones than they do the marmoreal. decorous
Victorian ideal that in part spurred the creation of the modern
Olympics.
Equally misleading is the idealized amateurism that some moderns
project back onto the Greeks. As most of the essays in this collection
make clear. competition permeated Greek culture. extending into activities
that we wouldn't think are occasions for the spectacle of rivalry.
Harold Tarant's "Athletics. Competition. and the Intellectual" discusses
how "Competitiveness was central to philosophy at an early stage," a
phenomenon Aristophanes mined for jokes in the Clouds. The rise of
the Sophists intensified this "transfer of the competitive ideal into the
intellectual arena." Language from athletic competition was pressed
into service when describing philosophical disputes. and a virtue such
as arete was redefined "to reveal itself intellectually rather than physically.
and to equip one for leadership challenges of the classical rather
than the heroic age." Those who purchased the services of Protagoras.
for example, "would themselves be aiming at a competitive advantage
[sic] in the city." And since public speaking was the most important
means of political participation, there was a shift of "the pre-existing
competitive ethic away from physical towards verbal competition."
This emphasis on what one could call "binary rivalry" explains the Dissoi
Logoi. the training in arguing both sides of an issue. better than the