Victory and Celebration: An Introduction to Greek Athletics

Victory and Celebration traces how athletic success was transformed into broader social and political capital in ancient Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE--how being a good boxer or wrestler, or having a fast son or superior horses was made into something of significance beyond the stadium or hippodrome. Athletic success did not speak for itself. Its meanings had to be produced and defended, and this was the work of the victory memorials--the poems, statues, and other dedications produced to commemorate the athletic victories.

Through readings of these victory memorials, Victory and Celebration explores, first, how Greek athletics was intertwined with general ideas of excellence, beauty, and a closeness to gods and heroes, and second, how the memorials communicated more directly political visions of leadership, inherited ability, and the victor’s place in their city and the wider world. Finally, the book examines how specific events, such as boxing, contests for youths, and chariot and horse races were shaped and made valuable, or kept valuable, by the memorials. The significance of athletic victory was not a given; by addressing what meanings were attributed to athletic success, and the often-innovative ways in which these meanings were made to seem true, Victory and Celebration emphasizes how much work had to be done to make that success count.

Nigel Nicholson is Walter Mintz Professor of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Humanities at Reed College, where he has also served as the Dean of the Faculty. He is the author of Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece, The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West, and, with Nathan Selden, The Rhetoric of Medicine: Lessons on Professionalism from Ancient Greece. A dedicated teacher, he was named Oregon’s Professor of the Year for 2004.