Christesen Paul - Arete: Greek sports from ancient sources

The book that you hold in your hands has as its title a single Ancient Greek word, arete, but thesauros, another word from the same language, might better describe its contents. A thesauros is a treasure, or the container for a treasure, and Stephen Miller's Arete contains a particular kind of treasure, in the form of a carefully selected collection of primary source evidence for the history of sports in ancient Greece. The wide range of material found in Arete, taken from literary works, papyri, and inscriptions, reflects Professor Miller's unmatched scholarly expertise and decades of experience in teaching courses on Greek sports at the University of California, Berkeley. As will become apparent, all this source material is nicely organized, carefully explained, and translated into highly readable English. For anyone new to the subject, especially those who cannot easily make their way through the relevant texts in the original languages, Arete represents an invaluable resource that admirably serves its intended purpose of facilitating the study of Greek sports.

The publication of the first edition of Arete in 1979 reflected and was part of a major shift in the study of sports history, and the republication of the third edition is a fitting occasion to take stock of the enduring significance of Arete, and, more generally, of Professor Miller's work on the history of Greek sports.

The present volume appears at a time when new books and articles on Greek sports are produced regularly and in considerable quantity. It may, therefore, come as something of a surprise that until very recently there was little scholarly interest in the history of sports, either ancient or modern.

Scholarly disinterest in sports is in and of itself a remarkable phenomenon. Sports were a fundamentally important element of life in ancient Greece. To give but one example, the various communities on the Greek mainland had a difficult time assembling an army to oppose a massive Persian invasion force in the late summer of 480 B.C., in part because so many men wished to attend the Olympic Games. (The interested reader can find the story in Herodotus' History, 7.206.) The ubiquity and importance of sports in the modern day is apparent from the fact that the 2010 FIFA World Cup was broadcast in every country and every region of the planet, including Antarctica, and reached an audience of over three billion people.

Yet until the 1960s scholars managed to ignore sports almost entirely. There was, of course, always a trickle of scholarship on sports. The cultural critic Joseph Strutt published the first edition of The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England in 1801. The creation of the modern Olympics in 1896 almost inevitably stirred a continuing interest in their ancient counterpart. In the early twentieth century E. Norman Gardiner produced three separate books on Greek sports, including Athletics of the Ancient World, which remained influential and in print for decades thereafter. Frederic Paxson's 1917 article The Rise of Sport, which traced the growing importance of sports in the America of Paxson's own time to the closing of the frontier and concomitant need for a social safety valve, is typically seen as the first serious scholarship on American sports. Gardiner and Paxson had their successors, but scholarly books and articles on sports were few and far between.

The willingness of scholars to turn a blind eye to a social phenomenon of such importance was in large measure the product of a long-standing tendency on the part of academics to privilege the intellectual to the virtual exclusion of the physical. As Harry Edwards has observed: The slow emergence of the study of sport as a subdiscipline in the social sciences is attributable to the Western educational tradition of emphasizing intellectual development as opposed to physical expression. Such a tradition demands the avoidance of any academic association with sport which, despite its complexities and significance, nonetheless maintains physical expression as its most dominant and obvious characteristic.

All of this changed rather suddenly in the 1960s and the early 1970s, when sociologists and historians began to evince a sustained interest in sports as played in a range of different times and places. Heightened interest in sports history was the product of a number of factors, including a shift in focus toward social (as opposed to military or political) history. Changing academic attitudes toward the study of sports were reflected in the foundation of the North American Society for Sport History in 1972, and of the Journal of Sport History in 1974. The journal Stadion, established in 1975, published a considerable number of articles on ancient Greek sports. The existence of professional organizations and journals dedicated to sports history signaled its recognition as a valid subdiscipline.

Scholarship on sports thus became significantly more common than it had been before, but, as might be expected of an emergent field, much of the resulting work was initially, in terms of the analyses undertaken and the methodologies used, not terribly sophisticated. Many publications offered relatively straightforward descriptive narratives, which can in retrospect seem almost simplistic, but which represented important and necessary first steps toward dealing with a large and largely unexplored body of evidence. Scholars writing about ancient Greece, like Gardiner before them, showed a particular interest in the basic mechanics of Greek sports and focused on questions such as how Greeks threw the discus and whether the jumping contest that formed part of the Greek pentathlon was a long jump or triple jump. The evidence on which they drew to answer such questions consisted largely of passages from ancient Greek authors, supplemented by relevant vase paintings. Good examples of such work can be found in H. A. Harris's