Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World

Contests of Virtue

Heather Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317984955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

This book examines the relationship between athletics and philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome focused on the connection between athleticism and virtue. It begins by observing that the link between athleticism and virtue is older than sport, reaching back to the athletic feats of kings and pharaohs in early Egypt and Mesopotamia. It then traces the role of athletics and the Olympic Games in transforming the idea of aristocracy as something acquired by birth to something that can be trained. This idea of training virtue through the techniques and practice of athletics is examined in relation to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Then Roman spectacles such as chariot racing and gladiator games are studied in light of the philosophy of Lucretius, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. The concluding chapter connects the book's ancient observations with contemporary issues such as the use of athletes as role models, the relationship between money and corruption, the relative worth of participation and spectatorship, and the role of females in sport.

The author argues that there is a strong link between sport and philosophy in the ancient world, calling them offspring of common parents: concern about virtue and the spirit of free enquiry.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the Ethics and Sport.

Part 1: Athleticism and Aretē: From Aristocracy to Democracy

1. Athletic Heroes

Creatures of a day!

What is man? What is he not?

He is the dream of a shadow

(Pindar, Pythian 8)

Introduction

In 1993, basketball hero Charles Barkley set off a storm of controversy when he declared: ‘I am not a role model.’ Barkley’s point was that parents should strive to be role-models themselves instead of letting their children look up to athletes whose abilities seem useless in the real world. ‘A million guys can dunk a basketball in jail,’ said Barkley, ‘should they be role models?’ (Platt 2000). Barkley’s comment raises an important question for modern sport: should athletes be admired as heroes? And that raises a question for the history of sport: how did athletics ever get to be associated with virtue and heroism in the first place? In modern parlance, a hero is a person of exceptional courage, nobility, and strength – usually one who performs a great service to the community. To the ancient mind, heroes occupied a special sphere of existence somewhere between humanity and divinity; in fact heroes were often thought to be the offspring of a mortal and a god. The mythological hero Heracles (Latin: Hercules) is a familiar example, born of a mortal woman and but fathered by the god Zeus. And indeed it is in this remote netherworld of the earliest Western civilisations, somewhere between mythology and history, somewhere between Europe, Africa and Asia, that athleticism, virtue, and heroism first meet.

In fact, it can be said that athletic heroes are older even than sport itself.¹ Millennia before the first foot race was run at Olympia, activities that would become the ancestors of Greek and Roman athletics took root among ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Minoans, Hittites and Mycenaeans.² By the time Homer’s epics provide our earliest literary account of Olympic-style athletic contests, around the ninth century BCE, athleticism’s heroic association with divinity, nobility, virtue and leadership seems already to have been established. As a matter of fact, athletic feats were taken in these early cultures as proof –or at least evidence – of divine favour, personal excellence and worthiness to lead. The more astounding or even incredible the feat, the more convincing it must have been to people that their king was indeed divine or at least loved by the gods, and therefore deserving of his office. After all, the belief in a leader’s power and divinity (or divine favour) is comforting and reassuring, especially in an uncomfortable and unpredictable world. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that scepticism about the truth of early athletic legends is accordingly scarce. Perhaps like modern sports fans who seem blind to their athletic heroes’ faults, the ancients could not bear to contemplate the shortcomings of their kings.

The earliest stories and rituals recalling great athletic feats seem to hold an epistemological status similar to myth; that is, they express collective beliefs and explain the status quo without questioning or challenging it. Genuine philosophy, by contrast, is characterised by curiosity, love of learning and critical questioning (Evangeliou 2006, 15). The Egyptian and Mesopotamian ancestors of Greek and Roman sport run counter to these characteristics; they, in contrast, tend to sustain existing beliefs and to discourage lingering doubt. Furthermore, these early athletic activities run counter to some of our most cherished characteristics of sport; features such as open competition and the performance-based selection of single winners. Nevertheless, the heroic feats of strength and athleticism among Sumerian kings and Egyptian pharaohs establish a connection between athleticism, virtue and leadership that survives even today. By the time of Homer, not only do the games better resemble modern sport; they begin to take on philosophical characteristics. Pre-Olympic sport, then, seems also to be a kind of pre-philosophical sport because it affirms rather than challenges authoritarian hierarchies, and it generally preordains answers before questions are ever asked. In any case, as Aristotle said, philosophy begins in wonder,³ and wonder there must be at the feats of the earliest athletic heroes.

Gilgamesh and Shulgi

By most accounts Gilgamesh was a historical person, king of the Mesopotamian city called Uruk during the third millennium BCE. But the story of his life, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is a fantastic tale better classified as mythology than history. We learn from the Epic that Gilgamesh was endowed by the gods with a perfect body, prodigious beauty and stout courage. ‘Two thirds they made him god and one third man,’ the Epic says, ‘terrifying like a great wild bull’ (Epic of Gilgamesh, 61). Despite his partial divinity, however, Gilgamesh’s extraordinary merits seem to have been accompanied by extraordinary bodily appetites that prevented him from being a good ruler. Indeed he was on his way to forcefully deflower some betrothed virgins when, in a matter of speaking, ‘sport’ made him a better man. More specifically, he was challenged to a wrestling match by Enkidu, a rival that the gods had created in response to the desperate prayers of Gilgamesh’s battered subjects. As the Epic recounts:

Mighty Gilgamesh came on and Enkidu met him at the gate. He put out his foot and prevented Gilgamesh from entering the house, so they grappled, holding each other like bulls. They broke the doorposts and the walls shook, they snorted like bulls locked together. They shattered the doorposts and the walls shook. Gilgamesh bent his knee with his foot planted on the ground and with a turn Enkidu was thrown. Then immediately his fury died. When Enkidu was thrown he said to Gilgamesh, ‘There is not another like you in the world. Ninsun (goddess and mother of Gilgamesh), who is as strong as a wild ox in the byre, she was the mother who bore you, and now you are raised above all men, and Enlil has given you the kingship, for your strength surpasses the strength of men. (ibid., 69)

As so often happens in sport, these bitter athletic rivals eventually become the best of friends. Perhaps foreshadowing the enduring belief that sports helps aggressive young men channel their energies towards the good, the two set off on heroic adventures (including Heracles-style destruction of threatening ogres) which benefit the community instead of terrorising it. Concludes Michael Poliakoff: ‘[Gilgamesh] emerges from the contest a more serious and determined leader’ (Poliakoff 1978, 136).

According to historians H. and H.A. Frankfort, ancient Mesopotamians did not think of cosmic order as something simply given by the gods; rather it had to be achieved through the struggles of human beings (Frankfort and Frankfort 1946, 127). Unlike in Egypt, where the Pharaoh guaranteed stability to society, the divine favour granted to mortal Mesopotamian rulers could be withdrawn at any time (ibid., 366). Gilgamesh’s heroic striving to become like a god may end up validating his position of leadership, but it fails to earn him the immortality he seeks. He transcends the limitations of the common man, yet he is not and cannot become a god. Not unlike modern sports heroes, however, his exploits become a cause for celebration and inspiration.

Gilgamesh certainly had his ancient fans; the greatest, in fact, may have been another athletic sovereign who ruled some 700 years later named Shulgi. Hymns proclaiming the Sumerian King Shulgi’s sporting heroism were composed and sung during his lifetime. In one, he claims to have run from Nippur to Ur, a distance of nearly 100 miles, in one day:

I, the runner, rose in my strength, all set for the course,

From Nippur to Ur,

I resolved to traverse as if it were (but a distance) of one ‘double-hour’.

Like a lion that wearies not of its virility I arose,

Put a girdle (?) about my loins,

Swung my arms like a dove feverishly fleeing a snake,

Spread wide the knees like an Anzu bird with eyes lifted toward the mountain.

(The inhabitants) of the cities that I had founded in the land swarmed all about me,

My black headed people, as numerous as ewes, marvelled at me.

The hymn goes on to compare Shulgi to a variety of strong and agile animals, including a mountain goat, a lion, an owl, a falcon and a donkey. It also describes in detail impressive religious acts including animal sacrifice, the playing of music, the offering of bread and ritual ablutions. Also emphasised are the king’s services to his people – he (somehow) multiplies sheep, creates abundance, and inspires fear (presumably in his enemies). Finally, on his return, he endures the wrath of nature itself:

On that day, the storm howled, the tempest swirled,

The North Wind and the South Wind roared violently,

Lightning devoured in heaven alongside the seven winds,

The deafening storm made the earth tremble,

Ishkur thundered throughout the heavenly expanse

The rains above embraced the waters below

Its (the storm’s) little stones, its big stones,

Lashed at my back.

(Shulgi’s exemplary defiance of the weather is celebrated in the final stanza. He describes himself as light of heart and of feet, as he basks in the admiration of his subjects:

(But) I, the king, was unafraid, uncowed,

Like a young lion I was set for the spring,

Like a donkey of the steppe I rushed forward,

My heart full of happiness I sped along the course,

Racing like a donkey journeying all alone,

(Like) Utu facing homeward,

I traversed the journey of fifteen ‘double hours,’

My acolytes gazed at me (in wonder),

As in one day I celebrated the esbesh feast (both) in Ur and Nippur.

(‘Hymn of Praise to Shulgi’, in Kramer 1981, 286–7)

Not only does this athletic feat link Shulgi with the gods (after all, he is journeying from one religious festival to the other), it also celebrates him as a leader by marking his territory and recounting the adoration of his subjects. Most important, though, the run is incredible – in the literal sense of being difficult to believe. The only reasonable explanations for such a feat are that the poet exaggerates and lies – or perhaps that the gods somehow lifted King Shulgi above the capacities of a normal man. Ancient Sumerians most likely came to the latter conclusion.

A modern scholar named Dean Lamont sees it differently. Admitting that Sumer’s royal poets were ‘inclined toward exaggeration’ (Lamont 1995, 210 n.20) and ‘often used extravagant imagery in an effort to create, maintain, or bolster the royal image’ (ibid., 209), Lamont tests Shulgi’s feat against modern standards of ultra-marathon running in similar climates and terrain. He concludes that the feat was indeed possible, adding that it might have been attempted ‘to please the deities responsible for the seasonal cycles and thus gain their good will with regard to the maintenance of a regular and thus predictable cycle’ (ibid., 215). Of course, this explanation just as easily applies to the hypothesis that the feat was embellished or even fabricated in order to make people believe the gods were pleased. It all depends on who the real audience was: the king’s gods or his subjects. It also depends on what we expect from athletic heroes: philosophical wonder or extraordinary reassurance.

Feats of the Pharaohs

If we were meant to believe that ancient tales of athletic heroism are true, we would expect that failure was at least possible. To the modern mind, it is not really an athletic event unless the outcome is unpredictable. Scripted contests, such as those promoted by World Wrestling Entertainment are not considered sport. In fact, modern sport philosophers often count the ‘sweet uncertainty’ of contests among their most valued components. Not so in ancient Egypt. There, as we noted earlier, the pharaoh him- or herself guaranteed social stability. Considered the child and image of the Creator, the pharaoh ensured harmonious integration between nature and society at all times (Frankfort and Frankfort 1946, 366). In accordance with the beliefs of the age, it was unthinkable that he or she should fail athletically. Or, perhaps it was thought that the gods intervened to prevent such failures. Either way, the pharaoh’s athletic supremacy appears never to have been subject to doubt.

In at least one case, the public image of royal success was assured by the relative ease of the ‘feat’. At the Festival of Sed or Festival of Renewal, pharaohs made a circuit on foot around posts spaced about 55 metres apart in the pyramid complex of Djoser (c.2600 BCE). There were no competing runners and apparently little exertion. Even the female pharaoh Hatsheptsut executed it (who knows, she may have been a better runner than some of her colleagues). The run was performed 30 years into the ruler’s reign, perhaps to demonstrate that his or her divine powers were still intact (Kyle 2007, 29). Pharaohs also displayed their skills in other ‘sports’, including chariot driving, horsemanship and archery. But the need for secure outcomes meant rivals were scarce. Royal hunts were staged to show the king’s mastery of nature and wild animals, so the pharaoh hunted alone, though with the help of many assistants. It was like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel. As Donald Kyle explains, ‘A failed royal hunt… would suggest personal weakness or an inability to control nature, so states arranged precautions and procedures to make hunting success convenient and secure’ (ibid., 35). Presumably subjects were appropriately satisfied by these performances, but one has to wonder why. Was the truth of the pharaohs’ divinity so far beyond question that athletic ‘proof’ of it – the kind that comes from defeating rivals or publicly performing great feats – simply wasn’t required?

There is some evidence of head-to head athletic competition in ancient Egypt, but it does not involve the pharaoh and there is no indication of a single winner. Tomb excavations near Beni Hasan and elsewhere have revealed scenes of wrestling and stick fighting, but these most likely were simply military training exercises. Carvings from Medinet Habu, meanwhile, suggest that Egyptian wrestlers competed against foreigners – but the Egyptians seem always to have won (ibid., 30). All of this is understandable as propaganda, but implausible as sport because there is no notion of open com...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1: Athleticism and Aretē From Aristocracy to Democracy
• PART 2: Sport as Training for Virtue in Classical Greek Philosophy
• PART 3: Learning from Watching Ancient Roman Spectacles
• reference
• Index