Early Greece

by Oswyn Murray

  Six main categories of sport were recognized. Running events took place over three distances as well as in armour; the stadion or 200 yards sprint was the most prestigious, and the winner’s name was used to identify each Olympiad. The pentathlon was a contest in which the victor was the first to win three out of five events comprising long jump, discus, javelin, running and wrestling. Boxing was without gloves but with leather thongs to protect the hands, and was correspondingly dangerous: Kleomedes of Astypalaea in the 490s killed his opponent by a foul, was disqualified, lost his sanity and pulled in the roof of a school in his home town, killing sixty children: the tragedy is one of the two earliest pieces of evidence for regular schooling (Pausanias 6.9.6, p. 98). Wrestling was less dangerous, and a favourite aristocratic sport: the chief social centre for young aristocrats from the sixth century onwards was their local palaistra or wrestling ground. The pankration was a form of all-in wrestling in which few moves were barred apart from biting and gouging: dislocation of the limbs was not uncommon, and one sixth century victor actually killed himself in his last winning hold. The final sport, four-horse chariot racing, differed from the others in that it did not normally require the participation of the ‘victor’. It was very much a rich man’s sport, involving the breeding and training of horses on some scale, and the actual charioteers were professionals. Again its dangers were considerable, for it consisted of twelve laps with 180° turns: in the Pythian games of 482 the race was won by Arkesilas tyrant of Cyrene whose chariot was the only one to finish out of a field of 41; his charioteer Karrhotos was a personal friend of Pindar, who commemorated his victory in the fifth Pythian Ode.

  The prizes offered at the main games were symbolic crowns of olive (Olympia), laurel (Delphi), pine (Isthmia) and wild celery (Nemea); elsewhere they were more varied, tripods, cauldrons, shields, cups, and at the Panathenaia oil in elaborately decorated vases, many of which curiously survive from Etruscan tombs (plate 2b). But the victor’s chief reward was in his home city: most cities granted such honours as triumphal entries, statues, money prizes and free entertainment for life at public banquets. The political prestige of victory was great: Kylon the unsuccessful Athenian tyrant was an Olympic runner, as was the general Orsippos of Megara, who allegedly lost his shorts in the race of 720 and started the tradition of competing naked (p. 147); Milon of Croton, general in the war with Sybaris about 510, had been the leading wrestler in Greece for twenty-four years (540–516): he won all four great festivals in five successive Olympiads, and collected a total of thirty major crowns. The chariot race in particular was an advertisement of wealth and power: when Kimon of Athens, exiled by the tyrant Peisistratos, won the chariot race at Olympia successively in 536 and 532, he wisely had the second victory proclaimed in Peisistratos’ name and was recalled to Athens; but when he won again with the same horses in 528 after Peisistratos’ death, his prominence was too great, and the tyrant’s sons had him murdered (Herodotus 6.103).

  It is ironical that among the poets who made a living by composing victory songs for these athletes was the greatest of the lyric poets, Pindar; he himself shared the life style of the international aristocracy who were his patrons and often his friends, and was a potent force in articulating their celebration of the agon as the highest achievement open to man:

  As a man takes in his hand a bowl

  bubbling inside with the wine’s dew

  and shall give it

  to his daughter’s young bridegroom to pledge him

  from one home to another,

  – all of gold, crown of possessions,

  joy of the revel – and honours his bridal,

  and makes him to be envied before his dear ones

  for his wedding in which hearts are one,

  So I too pass flowing nectar,

  the Muses’ gift, sweet fruit of the heart,

  to men who win prizes,

  and make them glad,

  to winners at Olympia and Pytho.

  (Pindar Olympian 7.1–11, trans. C. M. Bowra)

  This is the beginning of the ode for Diagoras of Rhodes, winner of the boxing in 464; Burckhardt once wrote: ‘from time to time I catch sight of a lot of festive philistines, and Pindar with all his great pathos in pursuit’.

  Pindar himself felt no such tension. As a Theban aristocrat he belonged to the class whose prowess he celebrated: it is probably one of his ancestors who won the chariot race at Olympia in 680. His younger contemporary and rival, Bacchylides, was similarly the grandson of a famous athlete, and was also nephew and pupil of the poet Simonides. It was Simonides, born in 556, who was apparently the first, both to write victory odes (epinikia) for the games and to establish the profession of choral poet working for hire (p. 272); it is this professional relationship between poet and patron which gives the epinikion its peculiar characteristics. Like the contests they celebrate, Pindar’s odes are standardized, not written for particular gods or particular festivals: the gods exist as a counterpoint to man, to show how nearly equal the athlete is to the divine in his hour of glory. Even the various cities involved are described in conventional terms. For Pindar it is the individual as aristocratic victor who counts, and the relationship between himself as poet and his patron. His ethic is essentially an ethic of aristocratic success: his last surviving ode, written in his seventies for the winner of the boys’ wrestling at the Pythia of 446, expresses this with painful intensity:

  And now four times you came down with bodies beneath you,

  (you meant them harm),

  to whom the Pythian feast has given

  no glad home-coming like yours.

  They, when they meet their mothers,

  have no sweet laughter around them moving delight.

  In back streets out of their enemies’ way,

  they cower; disaster has bitten them.

  But who, in his tenderest years,

  finds some lovely new thing,

  his hope is high, and he flies

  on the wings of his manhood:

  better than riches are his thoughts.

  – But man’s pleasure is a short time growing

  and it falls to the ground

  as quickly, when an unlucky twist of thought

  loosens its roots.

  Man’s life is a day. What is he?

  What is he not? A shadow in a dream

  is man: but when God sheds a brightness,

  shining life is on earth

  and life is sweet as honey.

  (Pythian 8.81–97 trans. Bowra)

  Some ten years later Pindar died in his eighties, in the gymnasion at Argos watching the young athlete he loved.

  Not everyone shared this enthusiasm for success in sport: Xenophanes, always a critic of conventional values, attacked the connection between sport and politics:

  For even if a strong boxer arose among the people, or one great in the pentathlon, or in wrestling or even in fleetness of foot, such as is honoured among all tests of strength of men in the Games, the city would not for that reason possess more eunomia. Small is the joy the city derives from one who happens to come first in the Games by the banks of Pisa: this does not enrich the storehouse of the city.

  (Fragment 2.15–22)

  The gymnasion, the palaistra and the international games provided meeting places and centres of display for the archaic aristocracy; but they were recent phenomena, not found before the sixth century. A far older and more important form of social organization was that referred to often before, the aristocratic symposion. Its origins have been traced to the institution of the feast of merit practised by the Homeric warrior elite; and I have shown how this widespread Greek phenomenon underwent a series of transformations. In general the influence of eastern habits of luxury profoundly altered much of its organization and ethos, towards the elaboration of furnishings and equipment, the provision of sophisticated entertainments, and even the practice of reclining rather than sitting at the feast. But in many areas the social and political impo
rtance of the symposion remained: at Sparta the military system and social coding rested ultimately on the andreia (men’s feasts) and phiditia, in which old customs were transformed to meet the needs of the hoplite state (p. 177); the poetry of Alkaios and Sappho shows that at Mytilene the aristocratic life style and its attendant political activities were still based on the feasting in the Great Hall (p. 155), and this male organization was in turn reflected in the women’s thiasoi for ritual purposes. Likewise in Athens the phratria remained the focus of social loyalties at least until the reforms of Kleisthenes (pp. 53, 276); and even at the end of the fifth century, the aristocratic hetaireiai or drinking clubs were still politically active.

  From such evidence it is clear that the aristocratic symposion was not merely an occasion for drinking, but the centre of social and cultural life, whose practices were regulated by ritual and tradition. The president of the occasion has the old title of basileus; he determined the order of the proceedings, and in particular the appropriate mixture of water with wine in the great kratēr or mixing-bowl from which the participants were served: unmixed wine was thought dangerous to the health (King Kleomenes of Sparta learned the habit of drinking neat from Scythian ambassadors, and went mad: Herodotus 6.84), and one part of wine to three of water was the standard mix; the result was a liquid roughly equal in alcoholic strength to modern beer, and drunk in similar quantities, by the litre. The guests reclined in couches around the walls of the andron (men’s room), which was later often specially designed, with stone benches and a door offset to the right, allowing space on the left for the last couch and the foot of the preceding one. The fact that the participants reclined, rather than sitting, created a specific space limited in size by the need for all to communicate, and therefore in numbers, since people reclining take up more space than people sitting. The typical andron or ‘men’s room’ held between seven and fifteen couches, with two men to a couch. This ‘sympotic space’ created an exclusive, internalized world, centred on the loyalty of members of the group to each other, and encouraging a sense of separateness from the external world of family and polis. The main items of furniture were couches, cushions and tables for food, a mixing-bowl, ladles, jugs and flat two-handled cups for drinking. The proceedings began with cleansing rituals, the distribution of garlands, and a libation to the gods poured on the floor. There were various games, the favourite of which was kottabos, or flicking wine from the cup at a target; entertainment could be provided by professionals such as dancing-girls, but often took the form of competitive singing by the participants, to the accompaniment of a slave flute-girl. In literature the earliest reference to the arrangements of the symposion is by the Spartan poet Alkman:

  seven couches and as many tables crowned with poppy cakes and linseed and sesame and among the flagons [?] honey cakes.

  (Fragment 19)

  In art, one of the first and finest portrayals of the symposion is the Corinthian vase depicting Herakles and Iphitos being served by Iole in the house of Eurytos (plate 4b); typical of the aristocratic style of life are the elegant couches, tables and cups, the hunting dogs tied to the couch legs, and the cavalcade of horsemen in the lower register.

  Much of the evidence for the symposion comes from funerary contexts; for most complete vases have been found in tombs. The great collection of King Ludwig of Bavaria (now in the Munich Antikensammlungen) comes from the tombs of Sicilian Akragas (Agrigento); and the museum at Ferrara houses the thousands of vases from the cemeteries of the trading post at Spina. Most of the other great vase collections, in the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Villa Giulia and Vatican Museums in Rome, come from Etruscan tombs. There is indeed no doubt that Etruscan culture borrowed Greek drinking customs, and used them to create an elaborate funerary art, in which the dead lie in andron-rooma of Greek style and seem to continue to participate in the pleasures of the symposion. Similarly the best surviving example of late archaic Greek painting is the early fifth century Tomb of the Diver discovered in 1968 at Paestum in south Italy: it provides the dead man with a lively portrayal of a symposion on the four inner sides of his coffin.

  But Etruscan views of death were different from those of the Greeks: to the Greeks there was a basic antithesis between the pleasures of life, which are the pleasures of the symposion and their absence in death:

  Then he will lie in the deep-rooted earth

  and share no more in the symposion, the lyre

  or the sweet cry of flutes.

  (Anon. Fragment 1009 Page)

  So sings one anonymous poet in a funeral lament. Only those who had undergone purification through initiation in a Mystery cult could hope to enjoy sympotic pleasures after death.

  Much of the art of archaic Greece is concerned with the activities of the symposion; indeed pottery, the leading art form of the period, would scarcely have existed without it. The majority of archaic pottery shapes are functionally related to the practices of the symposion, and can be classified according to their use for storing, mixing, pouring and drinking wine; book II of Athenaeus’ Professors at Dinner consists largely of a learned alphabetical catalogue of different names for drinking cups, about a hundred pages long. In other words, archaic painted pottery consists primarily of luxury ware produced for the symposion. It is instructive to compare the similar functional emphasis in the pottery of early China, and the striking difference from our own culture, whose main pottery shapes reflect the rituals of the dinner party and the drinking of tea or coffee.

  It is not surprising that a very large number of the subjects painted on archaic pottery relate to the symposion – especially scenes of drinking and revelry, both actual and mythological, and scenes more or less explicit of symposiac sex, either between men who are fellow guests or with the slave-girl attendants. But apart from these explicitly symposiac subjects there is the more general fact that the great majority of representations on Greek painted pottery reflect the tastes and inclinations of the aristocracy for whose banquest they were made and decorated.

  Much the same point can be made in relation to the poetry of the archaic age. Poems descriptive of the symposion reveal that poetry itself was one of the main forms of entertainment there, and provide advice on the sorts of poetry suitable that shows the wider variety actually performed. Other poems have their form derived from symposiac practices – notably the poetic contest, modelled on the skolion, in which successive singers were called on to cap each others’ spontaneous verses in the same metre: it is significant that many of the surviving skolia concern political subjects (pp. 274, 280). But we know also that a far wider range of poetry than appears either from its subject matter or from its form, was in fact composed for and performed primarily at symposia. The poetry could be military like that of Tyrtaios, political and moral like much of the Theognidean collection, or concerned with the more immediate pleasures of drink and sex. The increasing sophistication of aristocratic taste produced a number of professional symposaic poets, whose skills could supply songs of an elegance beyond the scope of spontaneous invention. Like the poets of aristocratic sport, these poets belonged to the same class as the patrons they served, but were professional in the sense of receiving rewards for their services, and in recognizing professional standards of skill. The consequence was a change in poetic tone. Earlier lyric poets, like Archilochos, Alkaios or Sappho, had created a personal poetry out of their own experience; the later professionals composed on similar personal themes, love, desire, the pleasures of drinking, the transience of life; but these themes were the generalized expression of social norms, emotions felt by the group as much as by the individual.

  It is this which accounts for the lack of genuine feeling, the sense of decadence which one finds for instance in the most successful of such poets, Anakreon of Teos in Ionia. Born about 572, he escaped with the rest of the citizens during the Persian siege of the city in 545, to found Abdera in Thrace; later he served a succession of patrons, tyrants and aristocrats. Herodotus shows him reclinin
g with Polykrates tyrant of Samos in the andrōn about 522, when a message from the local Persian governor arrived to lure the tyrant to his death (3.121). He then joined the Peisistratid Hipparchos in Athens, and on the fall of that tyranny, found a patron in the ruler of Pharsalus in Thessaly. Finally he returned to Athens, where his name is linked with Xanthippos father of Perikles and with an ancestor of Plato, to whom he wrote love poetry: he is named as the lyre-player on three early Attic red-figure vases showing symposiac scenes. Anakreon claimed to be the exponent of euphrosynē, the good life connected with the symposion (Frag. 2 West): the word is that used by Solon to describe the pleasures of feasting among the Athenian aristocracy (Frag. 4; p. 188). His poetry reflects this sophisticated world. ‘For my words the boys will all love me: I sing of grace, I know how to talk with grace’ (Frag. 402): the double reference to tone and subject matter is untranslatable, and the playful repetition is typical. ‘Again I am in love and not in love, I am mad and not mad’ (Frag. 428). Love for Anakreon is a way of life: he talks in metaphors of drunken love, love as a ball game, love as the charioteer, the axe of love, dicing and boxing with love, the girl who is a frightened deer, and how he will ride the unbroken filly; he offers a mock prayer to the gods for success in love. The setting is the symposion, with its laden tables, scented garlands and beautiful servants where ‘the lovely gifts of the Muses and Aphrodite are mingled’. ‘Let me go home then, for I am drunk’ (Frag. 412); the tone is that of the Chinese poet Li Po:

  I am drunk, long to sleep;

  Sir, go a little –

  Bring your lute (if you like)

  early tomorrow!

  Like Pindar, Anakreon was given an appropriate death in legend, choking at the age of 85 on a grape pip.

  Xenophanes took the symposion more seriously, so seriously that it has been suggested that he had in mind a religious or philosophical fellowship; but once again he seems rather to be criticizing implicitly contemporary standards, by presenting his own puritanical ideal: