Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World

Donald G. Kyle

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118613801
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

The second edition of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World updates Donald G. Kyle's award-winning introduction to this topic, covering the Ancient Near East up to the late Roman Empire.

• Challenges traditional scholarship on sport and spectacle in the Ancient World and debunks claims that there were no sports before the ancient Greeks

• Explores the cultural exchange of Greek sport and Roman spectacle and how each culture responded to the other's entertainment

• Features a new chapter on sport and spectacle during the Late Roman Empire, including Christian opposition to pagan games and the Roman response

• Covers topics including violence, professionalism in sport, class, gender and eroticism, and the relationship of spectacle to political structures

1
Origins and Essences: Early Sport and Spectacle

Sports are a human universal, appearing in every culture, past and present. But every culture has its own definitions of sport.

A. Guttmann, Sports: The First Five Millennia, 1

Speculations abound but the origins and prehistory of sport remain obscure because the phenomenon long predates clear and substantial evidence for itself. Anthropology shows an inclination to sport (i.e., play, competitiveness) to be aboriginal and universal in humans,¹ but sport historians disagree about whether sport grew out of or into ritual, and whether sport in essence is practical, autotelic (an end in itself), ludic (playful), or symbolic. Debate about the essence of sport continues because debate about the essence of human nature continues. The emergence of civilizations, however, brings more explicit physical evidence and written sources for institutionalized sport (Olivová 1984, 10–19; Ulf 1988, 14–73).

J. Huizinga’s classic Homo Ludens suggests that play preceded human culture and was essential to the socialization of humans, and that games were reconciliatory surrogates for war, death, and the challenges of life (Huizinga 1950, 9–10, 89–104; cf. Guttmann 1978, 1–14). Human competitiveness does seem to be an instinctual matter of survival and propagation. Paleolithic humans probably used physical performances and contests to prepare themselves for hunting, to defend themselves or their territory, for leadership selection and the establishment of social hierarchy, as boundary display, and in mating rituals and contests (see Miller 2001, 253–6, 335–7).

Studies of early Greek sport, noting connections between contests and religion or funerals, extrapolate general origins for all sport. Perhaps human games entertained anthropomorphic gods, or funeral games expiated bloodguilt. Anthropological theories are more inclined to relate games to fertility or vegetation cults, or to rites of passage (e.g., initiations and funerals).² Somehow instinctual acts became ritualized social institutions that provided social interaction and catharsis. In societies, sport was a form of performance, a social mechanism that assisted both social order and social change. In time, early cities and soon territorial empires used physical performances for military ends (for the training, review, and testing of soldiers)³ as political displays of power, and as communications and reinforcements of royal and imperial control.

Hunting rituals and sport

Paleolithic cave paintings suggest that man’s fascination with animals is aboriginal, and apparently our long existence as hunters and carnivores imprinted impulses on our psychology.⁴ Confrontations with beasts were essential to survival, and protecting others by fighting beasts and procuring food by hunting were associated with commensality (group eating) and mating hierarchies. Hunting has remained a heavily ritualized form of masculine display even in the modern world.⁵

D. Sansone (1988) argues that all sport, ancient and modern, has a single essence or fundamental nature as the “ritual sacrifice of physical energy.” Applying ethology (the study of instinctive impulses in human nature) and studies of ritual and sacrifice, he traces the origins of Greek and all sport back to ritualized patterns of behavior derived ultimately from Paleolithic hunters. He suggests that when man sacrificed domesticated animals in the Neolithic Era, the earlier ritual element of expended energy, which went into the Paleolithic hunt but was no longer necessary, was still sacrificed—in the form of sport—as an enduring ritual and an offering to the gods. By a process of ritualization, the once-productive hunting actions continued, became stylized, and took on new communicative functions as sport. The hunter/athlete who best expended or sacrificed energy won the greatest honor. Sansone feels that hunting rituals explain features of Greek sport, such as sacred wreaths (as vestigial survivals from the camouflaging headdresses and screens worn by early hunters) and nudity (as an intensification of the limited clothing the primitive hunter wore to reduce his scent), and also features of modern sport, such as animal names for teams.

Our modern enthusiasm for sport may recall that of the ancient Greeks, but in antiquity the Greeks were seen as unusual in their sporting passions and practices. If sport had (and has) a single universal nature, Greek features such as nudity and crowns should have been universal and not particular to Greek culture. And so the debate continues, because theories cannot resolve the complexities of human nature or the limitations of prehistoric evidence, because modern sport may be fundamentally different, and because sport is now so culturally diverse that agreement on a single essence or function seems unlikely.

Agonism: the unique Greek?

Claims that the Greeks had a unique competitive or “agonistic” spirit, and that only they could have raised sport to the level of athletic festivals, went unchallenged for many decades. E.N. Gardiner opened his Athletics of the Ancient World (1930, 1) by declaring that, “The story of ancient athletics is the story of Greek athletics. The Greeks, as far as we know, were the only truly athletic nation of antiquity.” Indeed, competitiveness was fundamental to the heroic or aristocratic code of early Greece. In Homer (Il. 6.208, 11.784, see Chapter 3), their fathers told Glaukos and Achilles to “always be the best” and to “excel above others.” Greeks remained intensely competitive in virtually every aspect of their public life, from war to sport and politics.

Although still dear to some Hellenists, the ethnically exclusivist idea of the unique Greek has been undermined by comparative anthropological studies. European ancient sport historians took the lead in challenging the idea that the ancient Greeks invented sport. Weiler’s analysis (1974) of the motif of contest or competition (agon) in Greek myth and legend notes earlier versions of such myths. Weiler and Ulf’ comparative approach shows that competitiveness was a typical aspect of early societies in general (Weiler and Ulf 1988; also see Scanlon 1983). Scholars now agree that there were sporting precursors in earlier societies, and recent works try to identify pre-Greek athletic contests (e.g., Decker 2004).

C. Ulf (2011) argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars of Greek sport (e.g., E. Curtius and J. Burckhardt) projected modern ideological notions of competition (taken from economic theory in the context of industrialization) onto the Greeks, fashioning them as uniquely competitive creators of a distinctively “agonistic” culture. Certainly the Greeks were competitive, but competition could possibly be a “general human drive” (102).⁶

Though no longer magically unique, the Greeks remain distinctive for the degree to which they institutionalized athletics with regular festivals, prizes, and facilities (Poliakoff 1987, 18–19, 107–12). The Greeks also developed a genre of athletic victory poems and idealized the nude athlete in their art.

Mesopotamian Combat Sports and Running

From the early third millennium BCE on, at roughly the same time as Egypt, Mesopotamian civilization had public physical performances that are recognizable as sports.⁷ Evidentiary difficulties obscure exact details about some performers, contexts, and intentions, but reliefs, seals, and artwork show that Mesopotamians were familiar with wrestling, boxing (see Figure 1.1), and a form of belt wrestling. They also had sporting or athletic activities related to festivals and kingship, and their kings understood the value of spectacular performances and flattering depictions of th...