It is our purpose for the following minutes to explore some

interesting aspects of Greek free time. Thus, we will deal in chronological

order since their date of creation with athletics, symposium, and theatre.
To begin with, for athletics was integral to the life of the Greeks
especially and most obviously (but not exclusively) for Greek men. The
exploration will, of necessity, go into the details of competitions and may
sometimes remind the reader of the sports section of a modern
newspaper. But once we have examined those details, we can set
athletics in the broader framework of ancient society. It is my hope that
you will come away not only learning something about Greek athletics
and its role in society but also understanding more about our own world.
As much as possible I shall approach this brief overview through
the words and the artefacts that have been preserved from antiquity
please, take a look on your hand-out. No matter how experienced or
knowledgeable a modern scholar may be, the primary sources must
always be the point of departure.
It is really difficult to resume around 2.900 years of long history,
but there is a good attempt by one of funniest classical cartoon, such as
Goofy. Well, Goofy, 1 minute and 16 seconds, you win. However, please,
let us now focus in a diachronically brief overview regarding the history
of Olympics and Greece in itself.
1. Minoan
It was during the second millennium before Christ there flourished
a vibrant civilization that we call the Minoan, centred on Crete but
documented elsewhere (especially the island of Thera), and in regular
contact with Egypt. This culture gave way to one located on the
mainland, particularly in the Peloponnesus. Its centre, Mycenae, gave
this society the name by which we know it today. The myths and legends
of historical Greece were largely rooted in these successive Bronze Age
cultures. Theseus and the Minotaur, Daidalos and Ikaros, Helen,
Agammemnon, Odysseus, Achilles, and Hektor, are only a few of the
figures we can understand as representations of some historical truth
perceived now dimly through the discoveries of archaeologists,
discoveries that record, as the myths suggested, the disastrous end that
befell a brilliant civilization on the brink of developing a written culture.
As far as sports is concerned, due the fact that we have not
interesting textual witnesses on this issue, archaeology has produce no
depictions of footraces, diskos or javelin throwing, jumping, or wrestling.
Possible evidence seems to exist for boxing, and there is no doubt
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regarding the practice of bull-fighting (also called bull-leaping). In any

case, there must be highlighted that there is not a clear correspondence
between the sports attested by archaeology, and those by first texts of
Greek literature, to wit, Homers Iliad and Odyssey, as we will see.
2. Dark Ages
Moving forward, the causes of the collapse of Minoan and
Mycenaean cultures are debated, and were probably diverse, but the
ensuing depopulation and cultural depression are visible in the
archaeological record and justify the name long given to this era The
Dark Ages. This period (1100-800) was associated in myth with and
substantiated in history by the Return of the Sons of Herakles the
Dorian invasion. By the end of the Dark Ages, the dominance of the
Dorians in the Peloponnesus and the Ionians in Attica and the Aegean
was established, and it is on this cultural map that the next centuries of
Greek development can be plotted.
3. Homer
Greece begins to awaken from Dark Ages in the eighth century,
when Homer reputedly hymned the Trojan War and when in 776- the
Olympic games were traditionally founded. The archaeological record,
which details an increasing number of burials, testifying to a population
explosion, also shows an increase in the quality of the artefacts
discovered in the graves sites (including a clear interest in portraying
the human figure), and the beginnings of a substantial architecture. In
this period, too, begins the push of colonization as the expanding
population sought space in ever larger parts of the Mediterranean: Sicily
and Magna Graecia, the coasts of the eastern Adriatic and North Africa,
producing over the next two centuries Greek settlements ultimately
stretching from the southern coast of France and the eastern coast of
Spain to the Black Sea.
This expansion brought the Greeks into contact with older, wellestablished cultures, especially in Egypt (again), Anatolia and Phoenicia.
From them the Greeks took artistic and architectural forms, as well as an
alphabet, but they retooled their borrowings during the "Orientalizing
period" of the seventh century and brought them forth in new forms
clearly stamped "Hellenic."
From a close reading of the contemporary texts, those of Homer,
we must conclude that the picture of athletes in the Iliad and Odyssey
reflects the age of Homer himself, not the period of the Trojan War. To be
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sure, Homers athletes do not compete in the nude, and they awarded
prizes for second and even last place, so the picture does not describe
the Classical period. Nonetheless, we can safely see in Homer a
depiction of athletics of the eighth and seventh centuries, a period of
transition form the depopulated Dark Ages to the creative and
productive sixth and fifth centuries.
4. Archaic period
By about 600 we see the first of many forms: large-scale stone
temples, lyric poetry, and human figures portrayed in stone at life size
(and larger). It is at this time, too, that the Olympic games were joined
by the three other games of the Panhellenic cycle: the Pythian (initiated
586 B.C.), the Isthmian (580 B.C.), and the Nemean (573 B.C.). Also in
these years, the Athenian lawgiver Solon both wrote his own poetry and
set limits on the prizes given to athletes by the state. The games ran
hand-in-hand with Greek cultural development.
In those four places, Olympia for the Olympic games, Delphi for
the Pythian, Corinth for the Isthmian, and, finally, Nemea for the
Nemean games, we are able to sketch the most important competitions,
that we are going to deal with.
Firstly, we would have the gymnikos Agon, namely the nude
competitions that include different kinds of footraces depending on its
length, at whose beginning, we could hear the ancient equivalent of our
modern on your mark in on your mark get set- go!, as it was poda
para poda (foot by foot) apite (Go).
The first event that was not a footrace to be added to the Olympic
program was wrestling in 708 B.C., whose basic feature was beginning
from a standing position, the object was to throw ones opponent to the
ground. The notion of pinning an opponent did not exist, and the
modern practice of what purports to be ancient ground wrestling
stems from a confusion of wrestling with the pankration, as we shall see.
Thirdly, the pyx or boxing was introduced to the Olympic games in
688. In Roman times, Philostratos maintained that the Spartans had
invented boxing because they had no helmets. They felt that a shield,
properly used, could serve in the place of a helmet. Therefore they
practiced boxing in order to know how to ward off blows to the face, and
they hardened their faces in order to be able to endure the blows that
landed (Philostratos, On Gymnastics 9-10; A 37).
However, the most violent of ancient athletic competitions was the
pankration, which combined the pale and the pyx into the all-powerful
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event described by the word. The pankration entered the Olympic

program in 648. As in boxing, the victor was determined by the inability
or unwillingness of one of the competitors to continue. The point is
demonstrated graphically by one of the most famous athletic stories
from ancient Greece, a version of which appears in Philostratos Pictures
in a Gallery (2,6; A 45). In the final bout, Arrhaions opponent, having
already a grip around his waist, thought to kill him and put an arm
around his neck to choke off his breath. At the same time he slipped his
legs through Arrhachions groin and wound his feet inside Arrhachions
knees, pulling back until the sleep of death began to creep over
Arrhachions senses. But Arrhachion was not done yet, for as his
opponent began to relax the pressure of his legs, Arrhachion kicked
away his own right foot and fell heavily to the left, holding his opponent
at the groin with his left knee still holding his opponents foot firmly. So
violent was the fall that the opponents left ankle was wrenched from his
socket. The man strangling Arrhachion signalled with his hand that he
gave up. Thus Arrhachaion became a three-time Olympic victor at the
moment of his death. His corpse, like that of the boxer Kreugas, received
the victory crown.
As a matter of fact, the name of the next event, the pentathlon,
suggests that there were five prizes, but as in todays pentathlon a
single winner collected one prize for the five competitions, which joined
the Olympic program in 708 along with pale. Two of the five competitions
were contested both as pentathlon and as independent events: the
stadion race and wrestling. The other three were contested only as a
part of the pentathlon: the diskos throw, the halma (jump), and the akon
(javelin throw). Although we do not know the exact criteria for victory in
the pentathlon, it is clear that as in multi-event competitions today
winners had to be good in more than one sport. The best diskos thrower,
for example, had no chance to become an Olympic victor if he could not
perform at least two other events well. Perhaps because of the
equipment involved, the pentathlon was a favourite of ancient vase
painters, who frequently showed the three specialized competitions
together.
Out of the gymnikos agon, we should say something about the
Hippikos agon or horse races. The horse races were a fundamental
component of the ancient games, especially the four-horse chariot race.
As we have seen, they enjoyed the preeminent position in the funeral
games of Patroklos; and they appear early in artistic portrayals as well.
Yet despite its apparent popularity, the four-horse chariot race, or
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tethrippon, was not added to the Olympic program until 680, after most
of the events of the gymnikos agon had been established. Our evidence
for details of the equestrian events is not very good. Ancient authors
were interested in the excitement of the race as a spectacle, but not in
the nuts and bolts of running it. Modern scholars generally agree that
the tethrippon consisted of twelve laps around the hippodrome (horse
track), but the length of the hippodrome is not known. The evidence is
late and fragmentary, and no Greek hippodrome has been completely
excavated. Allegedly, twelve laps would be a distance of about 14
kilometers.

5. Classical period
By 500, a Hellenic cultural identity had come into full existence, an
identity that demanded its own political structure. In Asia Minor, where
the Persian Empire dominated the Greek cities, the Ionian Greeks
launched a revolt in 499-495. It failed, bringing Persian wrath not only on
the Ionians but on the Athenians, who had supported them, and in 490 a
punitive expeditionary force landed northeast of Athens at Marathon.
The unexpected Athenian victory there was justly celebrated, but it led,
ten years later, to the assault of a huge Persian force bent on vengeance
against them and any other Greeks who got in the way.
Three hundred Spartans were the first to get in the way at
Thermopylai at the beginning of August, and their famously futile
heroism should be put into the context of another Greek event: the
Olympic Games of 480 were in the final stages of preparation even as
Leonidas and his Spartan warriors were sacrificing themselves. A few
days later, while the Persians were torching Athens, the games took
place at Olympia. The athletes, like the crowd as a whole, came from all
over Greece: Thebes, Argos, Syracuse, and Rhegion in Magna Graecia;
Heraia, Stymphalia, and Mantineia in Arkadia; the islands of Chios and
Thasos. That these games went on as Athens was burning tells us much
about the position of athletics in Greek society, although no Athenians or
Spartans are known to have competed while their fellow citizens were
dying at Persian hands, and Phallos of Kroton, a famous pentathlete,
gave up his chance at Olympic victory to man his own ship at the Battle
of Salamis, contributing to the Greek victory there. After the games were
over, the rest of the Greeks presented a more nearly unified front in the
defeat of the Persians at Plateia in 479.
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This victory, so unexpected in the face of overwhelming odds,

unleashed a newfound Panhellenic pride. In one tangible expression of
the new spirit, booty from the defeated Persians was dedicated at
Olympia, Delphi, and Isthmia but not Nemea, which was controlled by
Argos. Argos had not fought against the Persians, so its games site was
not allowed to benefit from the Greek victory. But Pindar and Bacchylides
led the poetic celebration of athletic victories at all four sites, while
Myron commemorated them sculpturally. Many of the best-known
athletes and examples of athletic art date from the period just after the
Persian Wars, and for the next generation sources record more
competitions between athletes than between city-states.
6. Peloponnesian wars
The political situation had shifted by the middle of the fifth century
as the Greek world became increasingly polarized between Athens and
Sparta. To be sure, this was also the time when an unprecedented (and
still unequalled) eruption of creative energy was occurring at Athens:
Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were setting the
Athenian stage, Pheidias was building the Parthenon, and Thucydides
was recording the disastrous conflict that eventually consumed the city.
But the Athenian brilliance of 440 under the leadership of Perikles had
dimmed by 399, when the state condemned Sokrates to death. It is not
surprising that athletic performance during this period was
overshadowed by political intrigue or that we know more about Sokrates'
visits to the gymnasion than about Athenian victories at Olympia.
7. Fourth century
Politically, the fourth century was a struggle for dominance:
Thebes entered the picture, but none of the cities held sway for long.
Culturally, the fourth century offered refinement rather than innovation.
It is telling that the leading men of letters were lawyers and
philosophers. Plato gave up an athletic career to pursue the quest for
the perfect state, and Aristotle included a revision of the list of Olympic
victors among his works and conducted the research that established
the list of Pythian victors. But we find no records of famous fourthcentury athletes such as existed a century earlier, and no art is tied to
these individuals.
8. Alexandrian period

The emergence of Philip II of Macedon and the spread of his power

and influence changed the situation. The Battle of Chaironeia in 338
established Macedonian dominance in Greece, setting the foundation
from which Philip's son Alexander began his own conquests, which are as
remarkable for their speed (336-323) as for their endurance, at least in a
cultural sense. At Alexander's death the Greeks' known world was under
Greek control as far as the Indus. But the Greeks could not hold this
world together, and after Alexander's death it was divided into a number
of kingdoms. These were all, to some degree, Greek; the old Hellenic
world had spread to become a larger, Hellenistic world, where the Greek
language and, at least superficially, Greek customs were current. The
great libraries in Alexandria and Pergamum provided the basis for the
study of early Greece and the fitting of indigenous cultures into a
Hellenic framework.
Alexander had taken athletics along with him, and as his empire
grew, competitions also proliferated. These required an ever-greater
supply of athletes, and athletics became a full-time job. It is not a
coincidence that the first athletic trade unions appeared at this time.
9. Hellenistic times
During the next two centuries Hellenistic successors of Alexander
struggled among themselves while Rome rose in the west. The
inexorable expansion of the Romans brought defeat and destruction to
the Greek world including most notably the utter destruction of Corinth
in 146 and only slightly less destructive sack of Athens in 86. With
Greece depopulated and denuded of its wealth, athletics fell on hard
times in the old Greek world: in 80 only competitions for boys were held
at Olympia. It took an endowment from Herod the Great in 12 B.C. to
start the Olympic Games toward recovery. With Augustus firmly in
control of the Roman Empire (as of 31 B.C.), the Greek world, now part of
that empire, began to recover economically, becoming a school,
museum, and tourist attraction.
10. Roman period
From the time of Augustus to about A.D. 180 the eastern Hellenic
section of the empire enjoyed peace and prosperity. Athletics flourished
along Hellenistic lines, becoming a vast entertainment industry that
finally was established in Rome itself in A.D. 86. As Rome's expansion
slowed and attention turned to the administration of the empire, we hear
more about pensions and parades, of the organization of athletic guilds,
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and about the benefits granted them by various emperors. Athletes were
as cosmopolitan as any members of their society while nonathletes
turned to private exercise and public baths. Specialization was complete.
11. Christianity
The advent of Christianity, which had been growing into a major
force and was officially tolerated by Constantine in 313, foreshadowed
the end of Greek free time. In the case of the athletic competitions, this
was not because of any specifically anti-athletic bias by the Christians
but because athletics had always been tied to religion; every game was
sacred to some god or goddess in the old Greek pantheon. As the
popularity of the gods diminished in the face of the new religious force,
so did that of the games. There is no evidence that the Olympic games
were ever officially ended. But when Emperor Theodosius II formally
forbade the use of the old pagan religious buildings in 435, games that
were tied to buildings like the Temple of Zeus certainly also ended.
Greek religion and Greek athletics, already relics, ceased completely to
play any meaningful role in society.
Therefore, according to the binary thinking of the Church's early
followers, everything that did not belong to God belonged to the Devil;
thus all non-Christian gods and religions were satanic. Efforts were made
in many countries through this period to not only convert Jews, pagans
and Muslims but to destroy pre-Christian institutions and influences.
Works of Greek and Roman literature were burnt, the thousand-year-old
Platonic Academy was closed in 529 A.D., and all theatres were shut
down. The theatre itself was viewed as a diabolical threat to Christianity
because of its continued popularity in Rome even among new converts.
Church fathers such as Tatian, Tertullian and Augustine characterized the
stage as instruments in the devil's fiendish plot to corrupt men's souls,
while acting was considered sinful because of its cruel mockery of God's
creation.
Under these influences, the Church set about trying to suppress
theatrical spectacles by passing laws prohibiting and excluding Roman
actors. They were forbidden to have contact with Christian women, own
slaves, or wear gold. They were officially excommunicated, denied the
sacraments, including marriage and burial, and were defamed and
debased throughout Europe. For many centuries thereafter, clerics were
cautioned to not allow these suddenly homeless, travelling actors to
perform in their jurisdictions.

Thus, from the 5th century, Western Europe was plunged into a
period of general disorder that lasted (with a brief period of stability
under the Carolingian Empire in the 9th century) until the 10th century
A.D. As such, most organized theatrical activities disappeared in Western
Europe. While it seems that small nomadic bands traveled around
Europe throughout the period, performing wherever they could find an
audience, there is no evidence that they produced anything but crude
scenes.
In the case of athletics, we would have to wait until 1894, when
Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee
(IOC) and created the so-called modern Olympic games.