Introduction. Athletics and play
p. 117-124
Texte intégral
1Towards the end of the 6th century, the physical training of elite young men became a favourite subject for red-figure vase-painters. From 520-510, the representation of athletic activities multiplied, expressing a new interest in the anatomy and aesthetics of athletes’ naked bodies. The painters among the so-called generation of ‘Pioneers’ took advantage of the opportunities offered by the new red-figure technique to render more realistically the various positions of bodies in movement and detail their taut muscles.1 The depicted athletes were young men, still beardless, with maturing bodies, old enough to complete the ephebia, the military training of the citizen soldier, hoplites or cavalrymen, between the ages of 18 and 20.2 This education aimed to mould them into physically handsome (kalos), morally good (agathos), courageous, and enduring individuals.3
2Gymnasium scenes show how different types of training were combined to achieve this aim. There are two broad categories. The first corresponds to our notion of sport, as it included activities that were the subject of trials (athloi) in public competitions crowned with prizes (athla). Most of the athletic themes depict gymnasts preparing for the pentathlon, which consisted of the long jump with weights, running, discus throwing, javelin throwing and wrestling. These highly regulated exercises trained the athlete’s skills, strength, and resistance. They were performed under the watchful eye of a trainer, the pedotribe, dressed in a himation who held a long, forked stick to referee the competition.4 The second category included activities that the texts refer to as games, paidiai, which also took place at the palaestra. We will examine four of them: ball games, ephedrismos, spinning top and hoop games.
3Several characteristics differentiate athletic activities (athloi) from playful activities (paidiai).5 The athloi gave rise to public competitions in which only the very best took part, by age category, distinguishing between boys, paides, young men who were still beardless, ageneioi, and adult men, andres.6 The competitions were organised by individual magistrates, according to a set timetable, at specific locations, during festivals attended by the entire population of a particular city or, in the great pan-Hellenic competitions, by representatives of all the Greek city-states. In Athens, the Great Panathenaia, the ‘festival of all Athenians’, instituted around 566-565,7 took place every four years at the end of Hekatombaion (July) for four days in honour of the city’s goddess, Athena Polias. These events led to a score and a ranking. The prizes awarded by the city increased the winners’ social status; they were symbolic and prestigious, like the olive wreath and Panathenaic amphorae filled with oil from Athena’s sacred olive trees.8
4In contrast, paidiai, recreational games have no time or space constraints. They are agonistic in nature, but spontaneous and relatively free in the choice of partners, potentially of different ages, gender, and sometimes even social status. There are no official competitions. Rewards, if any, and penalties for failure, had in principle no impact on real life outside the confines of the game. The balance between the partners could quickly be restored by playing a new game.
5Every classification has its share of flexibility.9 These two different sorts of activities are also closely related, as they are combined in the education of the elite, which aimed to internalise collective norms and values through physical exercise. They were also close because the games, paidiai, could also be agonistic, like athloi, i.e., performances watched by spectators. In the space of the palaestra, as in ‘official’ competitions, athloi and paidiai demonstrated the cohesion of a civic identity in which young people and adults interacted at different levels.10 The strength, skill, and vigour of young men alluded to the robustness of the civic body itself. Inscriptions on vases intensified the eroticism of the spectacle of naked male bodies by praising the name of a boy designated by the adjective kalos, ‘beautiful’.11 In both cases, the body care kit used in the gymnasium, which consisted of an aryballos, i.e., a small vessel with scented oil, a strigil, and a sponge, was never far away. But athloi were associated with the notion of effort and strain, while paidiai, despite also requiring training, were fun and relaxing. As discussed in the previous part, the Greek and Roman accounts of the invention of games emphasised their beneficial effects; games relieved the sufferings of an entire society, whether they were due to political tension and turmoil of warfare, famine or epidemics that affected the civilian population at large.12
A playful elite
6The reliefs decorating the marble bases of three Attic funerary monuments from the Archaic period bear witness to the porosity between athletic and recreational competitions. They were unearthed in 1922 in the southwestern part of the Dipylon cemetery, as re-used material in the wall built by Themistocles after the Second Persian War (figs. 2.1-2.3; 500-490).13 On each base, originally a stepped pedestal, was a statue of a standing, naked young man, conventionally called a kouros, destroyed by the Persians when they devastated Athens in 480. All that remains is the mortise on the upper face of the block where the statue’s pedestal once rested. Like other kouroi, the statues most likely celebrated the athletic body of a young man who had died prematurely in battle. The generic beauty of the deceased must have represented a physical and moral ideal that brought honour to his family clan.
Fig. 2.1a, b, c. Marble, funerary kouros base (32 x 81 x 81cm), 500-490. Athens, National Museum 3476.

Fig. 2.2a, b, c. Pentelic marble, funerary kouros base (27,5 x 82 x 59), 500-490. Athens, National Museum 3477.

7The sculpted reliefs on the bases of the monuments reflect the merit of these young people. On the two best-preserved bases, the three sides show a combination of athletic, military, and recreational performances that forged the social identity of a gilded youth. We will analyse the different activities in more detail further on, but what is particularly interesting here is the way they are combined. On the front panel of the first base (fig. 2.1a),14 the sculptor has skilfully rendered the stances of four young men practising disciplines of the pentathlon. At the centre, two wrestlers have clasped hands and face each other, head-to-head, to topple their opponent. They are surrounded on the left by a young man in the racer’s starting position,15 and on the right by another preparing to throw the javelin. On the right (fig. 2.1b), two teams of three players are playing a ball game with a remarkable variety of poses. On the third base, which is very fragmentary, only the end of the right-hand part of the ball game remains, with two players in the same pose as on the better-preserved base (fig. 2.3).16
8Education and civic identity are also shaped by moments of relaxation and shared pleasure that are featured on the left-hand side of the base, perhaps in an area of the palaestra (fig. 2.1c). Two young men draped in their himation, sitting on stools, lean forward each holding an animal on a leash, a greyhound-type dog and a cat or cheetah.17 The agonistic dimension of the athletic scene on the main panel is repeated here, but shifted to the two animals facing each other threateningly. The distinction of the greyhound, associated with aristocratic hunting, and the rarity of the cat or cheetah also connote the high social status of their owners.
9Depictions of animal fights usually involve roosters and their masters (figs. 1.23). This type of entertainment, which lent itself to gambling, was very popular in Greece from the late Archaic period onwards.18 On the Athens base, there is no indication of gambling or that these precious animals are going to fight and injure each other. We only observe their intimidation techniques. Both animals are in an offensive posture, the dog with its raised hindquarters, the feline with its arched back and its head stretched forward. Standing behind the cat’s owner, a young man in a himation puts his hand on the shoulder of the boy with the muscular torso, who is almost viewed frontally. The physical contact between the two boys underlines the complicity that unites the male group at the palaestra. They are all holding a long stick that identifies them as citizens, reinforcing the image of social cohesion.
Fig. 2.3a, b, c. Pentelic marble, funerary kouros base (29,3 x 79,2cm), 500-490. Athens, Kerameikos Museum 1002.

10On the second base (fig. 2.2a),19 the main panel shows six naked youths about to start a game with a small ball and sticks with curved ends. On each side is a scene alluding to the military dimension of physical training (fig. 2.2b-c).20 It seems to show the integration of the deceased into the body of citizen-soldiers which was composed of men of different ages: a bearded, helmeted, armoured hoplite, holding a spear and shield, rides in a chariot driven by a charioteer, followed by two companions on foot, one bearded, the other beardless. The interpretation of these reliefs is still open to debate. The movement of the hoplite as he climbs onto the vehicle could evoke the start of an armed chariot race of apobates, reserved for Athenian citizens, and part of the equestrian events of the Great Panathenaia from 520-510. During this event, the apobates would jump off a speeding chariot, race after it, catch up and climb back on.21 The solemnity of the procession seems to indicate that it was more akin to a troop parade, perhaps to mark the entry of ephebes into the hoplitic corps.22
11Together, these three funerary monuments, visible in the necropolis, displayed the norms and values of the city as enacted by young citizens who formed a structured and lively community.23 This group of monuments also testifies to the cultural importance of paidiai and collective games, even if they were not the subject of competitions or prizes.
Notes de bas de page
1Kurtz 1983; Villard 1990 and 1992.
2Vidal-Naquet 1981.
3On this ideal of the warrior, see also Part 1. Heroic games.
4On the transformations of these scenes between the Archaic and Classical periods, Osborne 2018.
5On the relationship between play and sport, see Golden 2021. See also Bouvier, Kidd in press.
6Golden 1998: 104-116.
7On the founding date of the festival and the Pisistratus’ debated involvement, Shear 2021: 5-6.
8On the representations of competitions on Panathenaic amphorae, see e.g., Neils 1992; Bentz 1998.
9On the distinction between game (competitive) and play (non-agonistic), see also the observations by Hamayon 2021: 43-55.
10On the increasing eroticism of the place, Osborne 2018: 53-86. See Hamayon 2021: 115, about Buryat games: “The involvement of the body in the internalisation of ideals: As these Games are a duty for everyone as a whole and for everyone in particular, participation in the games demonstrates the way in which each young member of the community has integrated the norms and values, and the way in which each older member ensures their control”.
11On kalos inscriptions, Lissarrague 1999b and 2013.
12See Part 1. Heroic games. On the proliferation of images of play during the Peloponnesian War (431-404) and during the Athenian ‘plague’, see Part 4. Childhood at play.
13On this wall, Thuc. 1.93. On its discovery, Philadelpheus 1922.
14Marble base, Athens, National Museum, 3476; Kosmopoulou 2002: 48-50, no. 10, figs. 19-21.
15It probably was not the long jump because of the absence of weights and the position of his feet. I would like to thank Serge Vaucelle for this observation.
16Marble base, Athens, Kerameikos Museum 1002; Kosmopoulou 2002: 171-173, no. 11, figs. 22-24.
17Calder 2011: 85, no. 226 with cat parallels. About cheetahs, Calder 2011: 87-88; Lewis, Llewellyn-Jones 2018: 457-458. How to identify a cheetah, Kosmopoulou 2002: 49; D’Onofrio 1986: 184-185.
18On cock fights, Bruneau 1965; Hoffmann 1974; Braun 2004; Matuszewski 2013; Vespa 2019.
19Marble base, Athens, National Museum, 3477; Durand 1991: 94, fig. 80; Kosmopoulou 2002: 46-49, no. 9, figs. 16-18.
20On the shared culture of sport and war, Pritchard 2013, esp. 164-191.
21On the origin and types of the apobatai competition, Shear 2021: 50-66.
22D’Onofrio 2020: 176-178, esp. 177, suggests a procession leading from the sanctuary of Artemis Amarynthia to Athens as part of the Artemisia festival.
23On citizenship as performance, Duplouy 2018.
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