Golfer Tiger Woods, to start at the top, is thought to have set a new standard for modern superathletes, earning, as he did, U.S. $112 million in 2007.32 One of the ways he was able to do this was through his U.S. $2.5 million appearance fees. This is certainly steep, but it might surprise the struggling tour promoters who had to fork it over to know that they actually got off lightly. In ancient Greek games (of which there were many besides the Olympics, since every important Greek city staged its own), appearance fees were sometimes double that (in relative terms). One inscription, for instance, records that a top athlete at one city’s games received 30,000 drachma just for turning up—the equivalent of a soldier’s wage for 100 years. Given that the average modern American soldier’s annual wage is approximately U.S. $45,000, this makes for a relative value of U.S. $4.5 million. Then there were the prizes, which could be substantial indeed (giving the lie, incidentally, to the modern Olympics’ hypocritical pretensions of amateurism). At the Panathenaic games, for example, even winners of the lowest events received 100 amphorae “nine-gallon clay jars” of olive oil, the combined value of which was equivalent to the wage of a skilled worker for 3 years—roughly U.S. $225,000 in modern money. Winners also received free food for life at their home city’s expense, probably worth about U.S. $245,000 today.33 It was through rewards like these that Greek and Roman athletes were able to become some of the wealthiest men in the ancient world. The star second-century charioteer Diocles, for example, competed for purses worth up to an astronomical 60,000 sesterces at a time—equivalent to 60 times a soldier’s annual pay, or U.S. $2.7 million today. Given that he raced 4,257 times—and won on 1,462 of those occasions—it is no surprise Diocles accumulated a fortune of 35,823,120 sesterces, or U.S. $1.62 billion over his 20-year career. Admittedly, Tiger Woods might go on to equal this feat, yet we have to remember that Diocles was not even the Roman world’s most successful charioteer; he’s just the only one for whom we have figures. One dreads to think what the winnings of Porphyrius—who raced twice as long, much more frequently, and invariably won—would have been.
Another frequent boast of modern superathletes (the more ungentlemanly ones, at any rate) is the number of women they’ve slept with. Wilt Chamberlain, NBA basketball center for the Lakers and Harlem Globetrotters, to quote the most outrageous, famously claimed twenty thousand conquests. Though Chamberlain probably was exaggerating, it’s undeniably true that male athletic success is seriously sexy for women. One anthropologist who lived with the Mehinaku Indians of Brazil, whose men hold frequent public wrestling competitions, in the 1960s and 1970s wrote that village women coyly “made themselves available” for champions who triumphed in the wrestling square.34 Yet have modern superathletes really reached a high-water mark in sexual conquests? It’s difficult to make exact comparisons, but we do have some evidence that ancient athletes were no slouches in the romance department. Gladiators, for example, seem to have carried enormous sex appeal for Roman maids and matrons, if the following graffito descriptions from walls at Pompeii are anything to go by:
Crescens, the net fighter, is master of the girls [and] lord of the maidens, giving them their nightly medicine.
Celadus, the Thracian, is the girls’ hero who makes them all sigh.35
Even the poet Martial wrote of a phenomenally successful gladiator called Hermes, who was “the care and suffering of women.”36 Nor were the conquests of these ring heroes invariably lower-class groupies. Literary and archaeological evidence shows that gladiators often commanded the affections of very high-class Roman women. The satirist Juvenal wrote pointedly of a senator’s wife, Hippia, who forsook her family and social position to shack up with a gladiator, Sergius, whose “face was really disfigured:…[with] an enormous lump right on his nose, and the nasty condition of a constantly [dribbling] eye.”37 It was the steel, Juvenal complained, that they were in love with. Rumors abounded that powerful Roman men—even the Emperor Commodus—were actually the illegitimate sons of gladiators. An archaeological find from Pompeii, what’s more, may confirm that this wasn’t just talk—the skeleton of a very high-class woman ( judging from her gold and emerald jewelry) was found entwined in a gladiator’s arms in the barracks there. Dallying with senators’ wives and emperors’ mothers would, to put it in perspective, be like first ladies Michelle Obama and Laura Bush shacking up with two tag-team wrestlers from the WWF. So while we can’t say for certain just how many women ancient athletes had assignations with, they clearly sometimes went right to the top when they did.
The adulation of millions of fans is also considered a mark of the modern superathlete. Yet some ancient athletes were actually worshipped, not just hero-worshipped. Theogenes, to give one example, had a statue erected for him and became a god in his native city of Thasos. Citizens prayed to him to preserve crops, prevent disease, and rid the city of plague. A later inscription on a shrine shows his cult was still going strong five hundred years later and had spread far beyond his home city.38 Porphyrius the charioteer would probably have been made a god, too, if the empire had not become Christian by his time. As it was he received every honor short of it, having no fewer than seven statues of gold, silver, and bronze erected to glorify him, the first two before he had even grown a beard. This was unheard of, since such statues had to be approved by the emperor and weren’t normally authorized until the charioteer had retired. Michael Jordan, by comparison, had to wait until 2009—six years after his retirement—for induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
These two ancient athletes also show that another supposed mark of modern superathletes—bad behavior—has all been done before. Dennis Rodman may have ignited the airwaves in the early twenty-first century with cross-dressing, suicide attempts, and domestic violence incidents, but Theogenes and Porphyrius were serious bad boys. The Greek historian Plutarch, for instance, states that Theogenes was prone to challenging every guest at his banquets to fistfights. He was also once fined two talents (U.S. $250,000) for abruptly withdrawing from an event at the Olympics—a serious offense. This massive fine, and the fact that Theogenes was able to pay it, again emphasizes how wealthy Greek athletes were. Even Theogenes’ behavior, though, paled beside Porphyrius’s outrages. The famous charioteer once led a rioting mob on a burning and murdering rampage through the Jewish quarter of the city of Antioch, resulting in a mini massacre, and later, in 532 CE, played a part in the infamous Nika “victory” riots in Constantinople in which thirty thousand people died (see below). Next to that, even the 2007 dog-fighting conviction of NFL football player Michael Vick seems mild. In just about every respect, then, our athletic performance would probably relegate us modern males to the prehistoric benches. But isn’t it nonetheless true that we are, at least, the best sports in history? Haven’t modern athletes set new highs in terms of fair play and sportsmanship—defined by one sports ethicist as the ability to “take loss or defeat without complaint or victory without gloating and…[treat]…opponents with fairness, generosity and courtesy”? 39 Has any modern sporting team captain, though, ever seen one of his players killed but then still agreed that the murderer was, indeed, the game’s MVP? Yet that’s exactly what a troop of Scottish knights at a jousting tournament in 1341 ce did. Given the honor of naming the tournament prize winner, they chose the knight who had killed their countryman, William Ramsey, with a lance through the head.40 One could argue, of course, that European knights are a poor comparison, since their code of chivalry partly gave rise to the modern ethos of fair play. Yet other, non-Western, athletes historically showed sportsmanship that frequently amazed colonial-era Europeans. Swiss anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú was astonished to witness the aftermath of a 1940s Timbira Indian “log-race,” a grueling relay event in which teams of men struggled to run a ten-mile course carrying a two-hundred-pound wooden log, describing it thus:
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Fans
The new millennium has often been described as an era of unprecedented spectator violence, particularly soccer hooli
ganism. As of 2008, for example, 185 Argentinean soccer fans have died from violence and hooliganism in soccer stadiums, with even more killed in related off-field attacks. Though tragic, this carnage is still just a shadow of ancient spectator violence. Roman sports crowds were not only so brutal they would have scared even English soccer hooligans, they also showed greater fanaticism than the most diehard of modern fans. This was partly because ancient crowds at some events were, incredibly, even larger than modern mobs. The hippodrome at Constantinople, for instance, seated 250,000 spectators for the chariot races. The biggest sporting event in the twentieth century, by comparison, the 1950 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, saw just 199,500 fans squeeze into the Estadio do Maracana to see Uruguay defeat Brazil.
These Roman fans were so committed that they sometimes followed their sporting idols into death, as in the case of the distraught supporter of the “Reds” chariot team, who suicided by jumping onto the funeral pyre of his favorite driver. Ancient fans could also have shown modern hooligans a thing or two about rioting. European soccer fans might overturn cars and smash windows at every UEFA Cup final, but rampaging fans in Constantinople actually burned the entire hippodrome down on four separate occasions between 491 CE and 532 CE. Nor did Roman fans lack organized hooligan gangs equivalent to the infamous “crews” of English soccer. Supporters of the “Blue” and “Green” factions at Constantinople, for example, wore flamboyant, billowing robes that would have put any English thug’s uniform to shame, and styled their facial hair so bizarrely it would have made modern skinheads look conservative. It was these gangs that almost toppled the Emperor Justinian in the week-long Nika riots of 532 CE—more than thirty thousand people were butchered before the government managed to put the rowdies down.
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And now we come to the feature that remains incomprehensible…The victor and the others who have desperately exerted themselves to the bitter end receive not a word of praise, nor are the losers and outstripped runners subject to the least censure…Not a trace of jealousy or animosity is visible between the teams…Who turns out to be the victor makes as little difference as who has eaten most at a banquet.41
Another European observer of around the same era likewise noted that although young wrestlers and stick fighters of the African Nuba tribe spent months in harsh training, come fight day so little attention was paid to the champions that “there are essentially no victors and defeated.”42 Anthropologist Raymond Firth, similarly, commented on the remarkably sporting behavior of winning teams in the Polynesian Tikopian contest of stick throwing, writing: “It is the custom for the winners to gather a large number of green coconuts which are distributed among the losers. Both sides then sit down together to drink, eat and refresh themselves.”43
It is sometimes said, on the other hand, that what really marks modern competitive sport is its lack of sportsmanship. According to this theory, the commercial pressure to provide a spectacle, combined with our accelerating obsession with winning and records, has led to a retreat from the glorious sportsmanship we inherited from the ancient Greek Olympians. Once again, however, we’re really just the wannabe bad boys of the sports world. The ancient Greeks, to begin with, would have laughed at the notion, first voiced by the National Sportsmanship Brotherhood of America in 1926, that what matters is not “that you won or lost—but how you played the game.”44 Greek Olympians were so hypercompetitive they didn’t even record second or third places—all that mattered was who won. The poet Pindar, for instance, scorned second-place getters at the games, writing that theirs would be “a hateful homecoming [in] disgrace and secrecy…they slink along back alleyways, shunning enemy eyes and nursing pain, the bite of defeat.”45 Greek athletes were so preoccupied with winning that they were also quite prepared to die in the pursuit of victory, as evidenced by an inscription found at Olympia honoring a boxer, Agathos Daimon, who “died, boxing in the Stadium, having prayed to Zeus for either the crown or death.”46 Other ancient athletes went to further extremes, killing other people to win, as in the case of the Aztec priest-king Axayacatl, who had his men murder another city’s ruler, Xochimilco, when the latter got the advantage in a one-on-one match of the rubber-ball game that resembles basketball.47 Trobriand Islands men, according to the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, were even less chivalrous (if not quite as deadly)—not only did they force their women to enter a hopelessly uneven tug-of-war contest with them, and then, when the women inevitably lost, rub it in with a sneering and howling display; they also flung themselves upon their defeated womenfolk and had public and repeated sex with them.48
The high (or possibly low) point of bad sportsmanship, though, must be cheating. The succession of Olympic doping scandals in the 1990s and beyond have led some to claim that modern sport has entered an age of cheats. Yet even the most cursory study of ancient sport shows it was ever thus. True, Greek Olympians didn’t have the fantastic medicine chest of drugs we do, but it wasn’t from want of trying. Not only were Greek athletes suckers for any fad diet that might give them an advantage—figs, soft cheese, poppy seeds, mushrooms, pigs fed on berries, and so on—they also happily downed whatever supposed performance enhancers their technology did allow them (one favorite being gloios (“gum”), the mixed sweat, olive oil, and sand scraped off winning athletes’ bodies).49 Other ancient athletes also indulged. Native American lacrosse players, for example, smeared themselves with liquid mixed from wolves’ tracks and crawfish burrows.50 They also tried to secretly douse their opponents’ legs with the juice of a rabbit’s stewed left leg to lame them (the idea coming from the rabbit’s curious habit of leaving just three tracks in the snow).
If such concoctions failed to help, however, ancient sportsmen were only too ready to cheat outright. One European observer stated dryly that Samoan games of stick throwing were only honest because every single participant cheated, thereby canceling out his neighbor’s underhanded efforts. Greek Olympic athletes proved just as willing, bribery being their favored method. One Athenian pentathlete, Calippus, bribed every one of his competitors in 332 CE, duly winning the five-leg pentathlon. Demonicus of Elis, similarly, bribed the father of another competitor in the boys’ wrestling to let his (Demonicus’s) son win. We know this because both individuals were caught by the hellenodikai (“judges of the Greeks”) who forced them, by way of a fine, to pay for several statues (called zanes) of Zeus bearing the inscription: “An Olympic Victory is to be won not by money but by swiftness of foot or strength of body.” So many athletes were caught bribing that the hellanodikai were able to line the walkway to the Olympic stadium with these zanes in an attempt to shame other would-be cheaters. The evidence, though, shows that not all were so shamed. One lad who agreed to throw his wrestling match at the Isthmian games for 3,000 drachmas, for example, was so incensed that the victor refused to pay that he dragged him before the judges at the local temple and swore an oath on Poseidon that his opponent had bribed him fair and square.51 A little less forward, though far more malevolent, were those athletes who resorted to black magic to win. Around one thousand five hundred tabula defixio (“curse tablets”) have been found in ancient Greek and Roman arenas bearing appeals to devils and demons to intervene in the contest. At the hippodrome in Carthage, for instance, a concealed lead tablet was found carefully smoothed and nailed to the arena floor, inscribed with the words, “I beseech you O! demon and demand of you that you torture and kill the horses of the Greens and the Whites and that you cause the drivers Clarus, Felix, and Primulus to have fatal accidents.”52 True, these sound quaint to our ears, but given that chariot-race deaths were frequent, and that the people invoking the curses believed them utterly, it’s clear that ancient athletes were ready to take cheating to levels at which even Tonya Harding’s husband would have balked.
Why are modern contests so pale an imitation of ancestral sport? Why do we, apparently, run slower, jump lower, and shoot and throw more feebly than our tribal and prehistoric forebears did? Is it because we a
re, in some way, physically lesser than they were? Many sports historians, for example, originally believed that the Rwandan Tutsis were only able to jump so high because of their towering height compared to Europeans. Yet Tutsi men, it turns out, aren’t taller than modern Europeans; generally they’re shorter.53 True, at an average height of 5'7", they did tower over Europeans of the early 1900s, when those sports historians were writing, but Europeans and Americans have since grown to an average 5'8"—and yet our high-jump record still lags behind the Tutsi jumpers’, meaning it can’t be a simple matter of height disadvantage.
Once again, I believe, the explanation is ontogenetic. Tutsi boys practiced gusimbuka-urukiramende all the time, since it was the only way they could pass initiation and enter full manhood. Modern high-jumpers, in contrast, though no doubt highly motivated, don’t face the prospect of not being allowed to drive, vote, or drink if they fail to clear the bar. Tutsi men, just like those ancient Greek rowers, also passed tough childhoods as shepherds, in which they frequently had to run, jump, dodge, and even fight off lions. I’m also willing to stick my neck out and say that ontogeny probably explains the superiority of ancient archers, too. An average Olympic archer today, for example, trains forty hours a week on the range54—though certainly demonstrating commitment, this is nothing compared to Genghis Khan’s Mongols. Not only did Mongol archers probably train eighty hours a week, they also did so from early childhood, as Franciscan friar John Carpini, who visited the Khan’s court in 1247 ce, confirmed:
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