CHAPTER 4
Nigel Nicholson
In Pindar’s odes athletic victory is represented as one of the greatest human achievements. “For the remainder of his life, whoever wins a victory voyages in honey-sweet calm, at least as far as contests can confer it,” Pindar declares in Olympian 1.97– 99.1 Of an aging Olympic victor whose son has won a youth contest at Delphi, he goes even further: “Blessed and hymned by the wise is that man who conquering through his hands or the excellence of his feet, takes the greatest of prizes by daring and strength, and while still living sees his young son in turn meet Pythian crowns. He can never scale brazen heaven, but of all the glories that we mortal race touch, he voyages to the furthest limit” (Pyth. 10.22–29). Some men are in awe of the victor (Ol. 9.96, Pyth. 10.58, Nem. 11.12), others are envious (Ol. 6.74–76, Nem. 4.39–41), while women desire him, or wish he was their son (Pyth. 9.97–103). Athletic victory may not cure all ills, but in a confusing world of countless independent city states with a wide variety of constitutions and ideologies, it seems to provide an anchor, a universal value that bound the Greeks together and expressed some deeper commonality beneath all the differences.
This universality is a mirage. Some were much less impressed by athletic victory, and questioned whose interests it served. Xenophanes, one of the late archaic period’s great intellectual iconoclasts, complained that even those who won the most prestigious events at the most prestigious games did not make a city “better governed” or “fatten the city’s storehouses” (fr. 2.19–22 W). Xenophanes spent much of his life in two cities—Colophon and Elea—that made no significant mark in competitive athletics, but an earlier critic from Sparta, an athletic powerhouse, also found athletic achievement wanting—because it did not imply excellence in battle: “I would not make mention of nor rate a man whose excellence lay in his feet or his wrestling… For a man is not good in war unless war unless he can endure the sight of bloody slaughter and, standing close by, reach out against the enemy” (fr. 12.1–13). Tyrtaeus does not say that athletes bring no benefit to the community, but his declaration that the staunch hoplite is “a common good shared by the city and the whole people” (fr. 12.15) suggests that he considered the returns that athletes conferred on the larger community to be limited. Skepticism of the worth of athletics can also be traced in this larger community. One of the potsherds that remain from Athens’ practice of ostracism calls not only for Megacles, the politician whose chariot victory was celebrated by Pindar’s Pythian 7, to be ostracized, but “also his horses.”2 The writer clearly knew of Megacles’ success in the games, but saw in this no reason to keep him around.
If, then, athletic victory seems like a cultural anchor in Pindar’s odes, that is the odes’ achievement, rather than describing universal values, the odes promoted the values of their patrons by making them seem universal. The value of athletic victory was contested, and each ode had two jobs: to praise the specific victory and to establish the value of the whole institution of athletics.3
Victory Memorials
Pindar’s odes belonged to a group of lyric productions now known as epinician or victory odes. The basic ideological maneuver of these poems is to liken the achievement of the victor to the achievements of past heroes by linking a mythical narrative to the present context through proverbs, or gnomes, and verbal and thematic echoes. The poems were typically commissioned by the victor or a family member for performance by a chorus on his return from the games. This combination of choral performance and praise of the individual represented a radical hybridization of earlier practice, relocating the praise of the individual from the private symposium into a communal space, and applying the “choral form to the praise of a single mortal individual.”4 The precise venues for performance depended on the norms of the local community, as well as the patron’s influence, but existing local cults were likely often appropriated as venues for performance, by aristocrats as well as tyrants.5 Such takeovers of existing civic institutions would have embedded the praise of the victor and his family more directly in the fabric of the local community.
The form flourished in the hands of three great practitioners, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Simonides, but they were not the only producers; papyrus finds have revealed at least epinician-like lyric poems from before Simonides,6 while an ode by an unknown poet from the mid-fifth century is preserved in the manuscript tradition as Pindar’s Olympian 5.7
The rough date of the odes as a whole is secure, but precision for individual odes can be elusive. Precise dates for the odes rely for the most part on precise dates for the victories, and these dates rely in turn on victor lists, whether these lists themselves survive (as, for example, the Oxyrhynchus victor list, whose fragments cover two sequences of victors from the time of epinician) or are reflected in the information provided by the scholia to Pindar odes. These victor lists have limitations, however: they do not cover all events; they cover only Olympic and Pythian victories; and they contain errors and contradictory information.8 Moreover, some odes were commissioned well after the victory given the primary billing, so that the victory date represents only a terminus post quem for the ode itself. Some celebrated a career that was coming to a close,9 while others celebrated a later installation into a civic office. These odes demonstrate epinician’s flexibility. They are certainly epinicians—athletic victories are praised—but the athletic achievements are themselves deployed in support of new civic achievements.10
There were options other than epinician for commemorating an athletic victory. Statues and other kinds of dedication, set up at the sanctuary where the victory was won, or in a sanctuary or public place in or near the victor’s hometown, could serve the same purpose. A cheaper alternative was provided by specially commissioned vases; one vase records the victory of a Dysniketos in a horse race.11 Tyrants had the option of commemorating victories on their coins: Anaxilas, tyrant of Messene and Rhegium, minted a distinctive and voluminous series of coins featuring a mule cart that commemorated a victory in that event.12 Finally, a particularly impressive victor in a gymnastic (that is, non-equestrian) athletic event could try to pursue a place in an orally transmitted legend that cast him as a hero, whether by imitating the actions of Heracles in deeds of war, feats of strength or even death, or by inserting himself into a pre-existing cult and displacing the cult’s previous occupant. This latter was done by Euthymus of Epizephyrian Locri, three-time winner of the Olympic boxing, in 484, 480, and 472. He was said to have driven away a vampiric spirit from Temesa, in the hinterlands of Locri.13
The development of epinician in the latter half of the sixth century, and the elaboration or invention of these other vehicles for commemorating athletics—including the use of (increasingly lifelike) statues that purported to represent the athletes as dedications14—should be understood as part of a concerted effort on the part of the elites, both the traditional elites and those more newly risen to prominence, to establish the value of athletic competition. Epinician became a significant kind of lyric production precisely because the value of athletics was disputed, and should be understood as a response both to the specific criticisms that were or could be voiced about athletics and to challenges to aristocratic power more generally.
Athletic Festivals and Events
Athletics was itself a complex network of institutions and practices, whose relative importance was itself contested. Just as forms for commemorating victories had multiplied by the end of the sixth century, so too had the venues for winning those victories. The two penteteric festivals, the Olympic and the Pythian games, held pride of place because of their greater antiquity, lesser frequency, and the fact that they (unlike, say, the Panathenaea in Athens, which promoted Athenian interests in various ways) were as close as one could get to neutral spaces, free from the control of the main powerbrokers. The Olympics were regarded as preeminent in athletics, although the Pythia was the most prestigious venue for musical competitions, which were not held at Olympia.15 The greatest Olympic victors had the potential to be heroized, even within their lifetimes, an option not typically open to those who had only won at other festivals.16
Two further festivals, founded in the sixth century and held every two years, the Isthmia and the Nemea, made up a group of the four panhellenic contests, with the Isthmia enjoying priority over the Nemea. These four games were called the “sacred contests” and only awarded crowns to their victors, olive at Olympia, laurel at the Pythia, celery at the Nemea and (in this period) the Isthmia. Some athletic memorials clearly prioritize these four games; for example, the Olympic dedication of the great runner Ergoteles recorded his eight panhellenic wins, two at each festival, but no others.17 Other memorials draw the boundary elsewhere. The Olympic dedication of the boxer Diagoras of Rhodes, who had victories at all four festivals, recorded only his Olympic win,18 while the wealthiest equestrian competitors seem to have privileged the Olympics and the Pythia, and left the lesser panhellenic games to others.19
Beyond these four panhellenic contests, there was a wide variety of festivals, some well-known and supported by major cities, such as the Ioleia at Thebes, the Argive Heraea near Argos, or the Panathenaea at Athens, and others obscure. Pindar’s catalogs of his patrons’ wins give some sense of the more prestigious choices. Diagoras, we are told, won at Athens, Argos, Arcadia, Thebes, elsewhere in Boeotia, Pellene, Aegina, and Megara; Epharmostus of Opuntian Locri at Argos, Athens, Marathon, the Lycaea (i.e., Arcadia), Pellene, the tomb of Iolaus (i.e., Thebes), and Eleusis.20 These better-known venues only scratch the surface, however. A stele dedicated on the Spartan acropolis around the time of the Peloponnesian war records the victories of one Damonon at seven obscure festivals in the southern Peloponnese.21
When Callimachus arranged Pindar’s odes into books, he separated them by festival, privileging the panhellenic contests, and ordering the books according to the traditional hierarchy: the Olympics first, the Pythian games second, the Isthmian third, and the Nemean fourth. (At some point in transmission the order of the Isthmian and Nemean books was reversed.) The few odes that celebrated victories won elsewhere were tacked on to the end of Isthmian and Nemean books.22 Epinician itself was, however, much less interested in privileging particular victories, whether Olympic, panhellenic, or combinations of many such wins. Epinician odes do not differ in form or quality depending on the place of victory. They certainly recognize the traditional hierarchy among the venues—Olympian 1.7 declares no contest better than the Olympics; Pythian 7.14, in an ode praising a Pythian chariot win describes the family victory at Olympia as the “outstanding” family victory; Pythian 5 ends with a wish for an Olympic victory; and Nemean 2.1–11 speaks of a first Nemean win as a strong platform from which to win victories at other sacred games—but an Olympian ode is no longer, and no grander in its language or design than a Pythian or Nemean one. There was, moreover, no firm demarcation dividing panhellenic from non-panhellenic wins in the odes: local victories were celebrated in catalogs of the victor’s achievements; Isthmian and (especially) Nemean wins can be treated more like the well-recognized local festivals, grouped with them and not precisely tallied;23 and some odes celebrated as their primary victory a victory won at a non-panhellenic festival.24 The boundary that mattered to epinician was winning a contest, not winning the most prestigious contests; epinician celebrated athletic victory as a whole.25 This inclusiveness perhaps explains why so few of the truly great athletes in the age of epinician seem to have commissioned epinicians: these athletes had the very real possibility of being heroized, if local norms and institutions permitted it, and to commission an epinician meant embracing a vision of the victor that aligned the truly great athlete with many lesser competitors—victors with no Olympic wins, few or even no panhellenic victories, or victories only in the youth categories.26
The different events also formed complex networks. Events were divided between gymnastic (that is, what we call athletic) and equestrian, and, while there was a core of events that featured at most festivals, there were significant differences in programs.
Equestrian events, especially the chariot race, typically enjoyed greater prestige than gymnastic ones,27 a prestige reflected in Callimachus’ choice to place the equestrian events before the gymnastic in his edition of Pindar’s odes. At Olympia, the east pediment of the temple constructed around 460 represented the chariot race of Pelops and Oenomaus as the founding moment of the games, while the Panathenaea, one of the most prestigious games outside of the four panhellenic contests, offered considerably larger prizes for the main equestrian events.28 The great powerbrokers gravitated toward the main equestrian events at the most important festivals. This was at least partly because these events required (and thus demonstrated) significant resources, but also because the meeting of kings, tyrants, and other great aristocrats leant these events distinction. The list of Olympic chariot victors constitutes a roll-call of the great, if not the good: Damaratus, king of Sparta; Gelon, tyrant of Gela (at the time); Theron, tyrant of Acragas; Anaxilas, tyrant of Messene and Rhegium; Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse; Arcesilas IV, king of Cyrene; Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens (on whom, see below); Alcibiades; and others. These wealthy men supported the special distinction of the chariot race and other main equestrian events by conducting themselves as if they were in a different class. At the site of the victory they dedicated statues of their chariots that dwarfed the regular victor statues, set up expensive pavilions during the festival, and played host to the whole assembled gathering. Empedocles, the grandfather of the philosopher, when he won the horserace at Olympia, is said to fed the crowd with some sort of vegetarian ox-substitute made of myrrh, frankincense, and spices.29 Anecdotes report significant tensions between these great men at the games: Plutarch records that at the Olympic games of 476 Themistocles, the great victor of Salamis, wanted Hieron’s tent destroyed and his horses prevented from competing. Hieron had not joined the fight against the Persians, but the Deinomenids had defeated the Carthaginians at around the same time. Plutarch reports that the spectators neglected the victors to applaud Themistocles, but if he really did attend, he left without a crown, while Hieron won the horserace.30
The primacy of equestrian competition did not go uncontested. When Pindar described the first Olympics, he described a festival with six events: the sprint (or stadion), the wrestling, the boxing, the four-horse chariot, the javelin, and the discus.31 A different version gained traction in the fifth century that made gymnastic events the original events of the festival, and the stadion the very first, and this was the version that the sophist Hippias—an Elean (and thus a local to the Olympics)—canonized in his Olympic chronology at the end of the fifth century.32 The stadion was much more central to the ritual of the festival, taking place close to the heart of the sanctuary; an account written during the Roman empire claims that in the early days of the Olympic festival, the stadion winner lit the fire that would consume the sacrifice for Zeus.33 Moreover, in the wake of the Persian wars, the very luxury and kingliness that marked out equestrian competition could also constitute a liability. The often rich clothing that distinguished equestrian competitors from gymnastic ones also linked them to the Persian kings, while the nudity of the gymnastic competitor marked him out as Greek, and perhaps in some cities became identified with a broader (even if still exclusionary) citizenry.34
Within the categories of gymnastic and equestrian athletics, there was a wide variety of events. Equestrian events included four-horse and two-horse chariot races and races for single racehorses. These basic events could be quickly multiplied by having separate races for colts, mares, and warhorses. Mule-cart races were also offered, and the Panathenaea held a race with some third kind of two-horse chariot called a zeugos. Some more complicated events graced the program, events such as the kalpe¯ at Olympia, which called upon the rider to run as well as ride. The second-century program for the Panathenaea included as many as 28 equestrian events for individual competitors, some open, others restricted to various citizen groups. There were eight fewer gymnastic events.35
The relative importance of the main equestrian events was clear: chariots won more prestige than racehorses, four-horse chariots more than two-horse, full-grown horses more than colts, horses more than mules. Questions were surely raised between the categories—was an open racehorse win better than a colt chariot win?—but Olympia avoided such questions by having a spare equestrian program, especially so in the period of epinician’s production. Before 408, Olympia offered only four equestrian contests: the four-horse chariot, the racehorse, a mule-cart race, and the kalpe¯, and the last two were added only around 500 and discontinued only about 50 years later.
By the end of the sixth century, the Olympics offered many more gymnastic events: four in running (the stadion; the diaulos or double sprint; the dolichos, a long race; and the race-in-armor), three in combat sports (boxing, wrestling, and pancration, a kind of kick-boxing), and the pentathlon (combining the wrestling, the sprint, the long jump, the discus, and the javelin). Three youth events were offered, in the sprint, the boxing, and the wrestling. Less prestigious venues offered more events, and multiplied the options for youths, both by opening more events to youths and by having more youth categories. Isthmia and Nemea offered two youth categories: their “beardless” category (perhaps, roughly 17–20 years old) may have constituted an intermediate category (and a more realistic opportunity for a victory) between the youth and adult categories at Olympia and Delphi.36 They also offered some different events, including the horse-course race, a longer running race than the Olympic dolichos, perhaps 800 m.37 As with equestrian events, there was likely a wide array of possibilities at the smaller games, including separate competitions in the long jump, discus, and javelin.38
Youth events ranked below open events. Among the open events, we have seen that Hippias’ chronology privileged the stadion, and, to judge by the Panathenaea in the fourth century, the stadion commanded the biggest prizes for a gymnastic event at regional contests,39 but the combat events enjoyed priority in other ways. The athletes from the late archaic and early classical period that occupied the most space in the oral tradition tended to be combat athletes: the boxer Euthymus of Western Locri with his victory over the vampiric monster of Temesa; the boxer-cum-pancratiast Theagenes of Thasos, whose statue was said to have fallen upon an enemy who was whipping it; the boxer Diagoras of Rhodes, whose children shared his success at Olympia; and, perhaps greatest of all, the wrestler Milo of Croton, who was said to have led a much smaller Crotoniate force to victory over the Sybarites dressed as Heracles and wearing his Olympic crowns. The great sprinters—Astylus of Croton, Crison of Himera—were comparatively anonymous. Most, though by no means all, of the athletes who became the objects of cult or were framed as heroes by the oral tradition were combat athletes.40
Various hierarchies, therefore, structured the complex field of athletics, some of them in competition with each other. But just as epinician downplayed differences between venues, so too it downplayed differences between events. It celebrated open and youth contests, and equestrian and gymnastic contests with similar grandeur. Despite the fact that equestrian victors were typically older41 and rarely participated in the physical work of victory, differences between equestrian and gymnastic contests seem to be actively erased. Gymnastic paradigms sometimes illustrate equestrian victories, and the victories are offered as evidence of the same virtues: hard work, generosity, wisdom and wise expenditure, divine favor, and excellence in general.42
Pindar’s two odes for Melissus of Thebes, Isthmian 3–4, illustrate this lack of distinction. Isthmian 4 celebrates an Isthmian pancration victory, and includes in its catalog the family’s prior equestrian victories, suggesting that the two athletic activities are part of the same story. This sense was then strikingly underlined when Melissus won a chariot race at Nemea. He commissioned a second ode—the ode we call Isthmian 3—but, uniquely among Pindar’s odes, the two odes share the same meter. The second ode does not seem to have been intended simply to extend the first ode (although the repeated metrical scheme would have made it much easier for both to be performed as part of a single celebration),43 but their extraordinary similarity does mark the two victories as part of a unitary athletic activity. The language used to describe the victory also promotes this idea: like the earlier win, the chariot win demonstrates strength and hard work—albeit the “strength of wealth” (Isth. 3.1–2) and the “toils of four-horse chariots” (Isth. 3.17)—as well as the same, vague “excellence” (Isth. 3.4, 3.13) lauded by the earlier ode (Isth. 4.13, 4.38).44
Epinician does not avoid descriptions of the events, but rarely spends much time on them.45 A particularly prized victory in the combat events and the pentathlon was called a “dustless” victory, a victory seemingly won without having to compete in the final bout. Bacchylides describes how, at the Olympics of 476, Hieron’s racehorse, Pherenicus, won without being soiled by “dust” (5.44) kicked up by any horses in front of him. Pherenicus is claimed to be literally clean here, but epinician’s victory descriptions also metaphorically raise the victors out of the dirt, transforming the sweat, dust and struggle, the blood and violence—the basic physicality of athletic competition—into a beautiful, bodiless radiance. At one point Bacchylides describes a wrestling bout as “the sparkling of the wrestling” (9.36).46
As Bacchylides’ inclusion of Hieron’s racehorse suggests, epinician did speak of what might be called the additional personnel involved in athletics. For equestrian events, several different bodies were involved: the horses (or mules), the drivers or jockeys, as well as grooms, breeders, trainers, and managers. In some events at regional or local festivals, the competitors were required to drive or ride, but in the main events it was optional and, while it may have been common for owners to drive at small festivals, at large venues the option was rarely exercised. Pindar records one adventurous victor, Herodotus of Thebes, who drove a team to victory at the Isthmian games, but the example of Melissus of Thebes was typical, and telling. Although himself a prize-winning athlete, he left his chariot to be driven by someone else.47 For gymnastic events, athletes typically required trainers when young, for the running events as much for the combat events, and many adults will have continued to practice with a trainer.48 Framing the participation of these different agents required care, as their relationship with the victor or the role they played in the victory might undermine its value.
Athletic trainers were largely omitted from victory memorials; their absence at Olympia in this period is confirmed by Pausanias’ surmise that the inclusion of a statue of a trainer in a third-century memorial required special dispensation from the Elean officials.49 Epinician follows this strategy for adult victors and youth victors in the running events, but odes for youth victors in the combat events mostly name the victors’ trainers. We thus learn of several trainers from this period: Ilas, Orseas, Melesias, and Menander.50 Menander seems to have been particularly successful as a trainer, and such success, while providing an excellent reason to secure his services for a youth, might also suggest that the real agency in a victory belonged to the trainer, and that victory itself was a commodity that could be passed around between strangers. A striking passage in the Hippocratic corpus compares a trainer training an athlete to a smith producing an iron tool.51 Such a vision of training must have provided strong motivation to pass over the trainer in silence, but epinician mostly confronted the trainer’s involvement directly, at least in the odes for youths in the combat events. It framed the trainer as developing qualities already present in the athlete, rather than producing him, and represented him as a close family friend.52 The image of the trainer as the athlete’s whetstone, used twice by Pindar, responds directly to the vision of the athlete as a tool seen in the Hippocratic corpus: both trainer and athlete are things in this image, and the trainer sharpens but does not make the athlete.53
Epinician maintains a studied vagueness about the trainers’ responsibilities. These included technique, character development, and physical development, including diet, exercise routines, and recovery from any injuries. Athletes certainly sustained injuries—Hippocratic texts speak of dislocations needing to be reset in wrestling schools—and trainers need to be understood as healthcare workers, in competition in some areas with the physicians represented by the Hippocratic texts from the late fifth century.54 There is, however, no mention of injury in epinician. Obviously a victor is unlikely to have been injured in that particular competition, but one might expect recognition of past injuries, perhaps as an obstacle that the victor has overcome or as a reason for retirement. Injury is not evoked, however; rather, the epinician body proves itself immune to injury and a reliable platform for athletic performance, and 30-year-old epinician bodies are not distinguished from 20-year-old ones.55
Statue dedications, vases, and coins often depict the horses, mules, drivers, and jockeys involved in equestrian competition. The absences are more notable. Some fifth-century Olympic chariot victors dedicated single statues of themselves rather than large sculptures of a team,56 while at the end of the sixth century the Corinthian Pheidolas seems to have dedicated a statue of a racehorse that lacked a jockey. The story told to Pausanias at Olympia as he visited the sanctuary was that the horse had bucked its rider and won anyway.57 There is, in fact, a general tendency to privilege the horse over the jockey or driver: significantly more horses are named by memorials, and the horse is often given the credit. Bacchylides describes Pherenicus “taking care of his helmsman” (5.47), and Pindar claims the same horse won “ungoaded” (Ol. 1.21). The victory vase of Dysniketos says that his horse (as opposed to the victor) won, as does Bacchylides of Pherenicus (5.40, 183).
Agency is, therefore, not an issue for these events, but, as with trainers, the nature of the relationship with the victor. The horses slip easily into the role of close family friend; in this period, they were bred and raised in-house, as we can deduce from the fact that it was only in the second half of the fifth century that raising your own horses became something to boast of.58 Jockeys, too, were likely drawn from a wealthy entrant’s estates, although they may have been drawn from the surrounding community too, or even purchased as slaves, and seem to have been a locus of concern. Most concern was focused on the charioteers, however, as their achievements seem to have been genuinely admired and they may have served many victors. Epinician and other memorials largely ignored them, or at least kept them largely hidden behind the horses (literally, in the case of the Delphic charioteer),59 but two odes where the charioteer receives considerable attention should be noted. First, Pindar’s Pythian 5 generously praises the driver, Carrhotus, but he was genuinely a close family friend, being the victor’s brother-in-law. Second, Pindar’s Isthmian 2, for Xenocrates of Acragas, reveals the role of a Nicomachus in victories won both by Xenocrates and by his brother, Theron, tyrant of that city. It is surely no coincidence that this extended praise of a charioteer dominates the central section of an ode that opens with the image of the Muse as a prostitute selling herself for profit and addresses head-on the anxiety that epinician itself was a commodity. The charioteer passes without mention in the two odes that Pindar composed to celebrate Theron’s victory when it actually occurred.60
Competitors and Politics
Success in athletics required considerable investment, of resources and of time. For equestrian competitors, it was usually other people’s time, but serious gymnastic competitors dedicated their youth to training, as well as to regular travel for competition. Athletics was certainly a lifestyle, but it was not a diversion; it was a central route to prestige and political power. Kings, tyrants, and aristocrats used athletic victories to justify their positions of power. This meant not only investing in their own competition in equestrian contests, but also making a home for successful émigrés. Astylus of Croton joined Gelon’s expansion of Syracuse in 485/4 after his first two Olympic crowns, but before his next five, while Ergoteles settled in Theron’s Himera after being exiled from Cnossus, but before all of his eight panhellenic wins.61 Athletics could also be used to articulate relations among the elites, as less famous festivals or less prestigious events provided venues for lieutenants or lesser leaders to compete. Thus, while Hieron of Syracuse competed in the chariot and horseraces at Olympia and Delphi, his lieutenants competed in the chariot races at Sicyon and Nemea, or the mule-cart race at Olympia.62
Victories also enhanced the standing of those who sought power, as Athens’ history demonstrates: Cylon used an Olympic victory to foment an unsuccessful coup in the seventh century; the elder Cimon transferred his second Olympic chariot win to the tyrant Pisistratus in return for being recalled from exile, but when he won a third victory, after Pisistratus’ death, Pisistratus’s sons killed him; and Alcibiades used his Olympic victory in 416 (celebrated in an epinician ode commissioned from Euripides) to push for an invasion of Sicily, with himself in pole position to claim the expected gratitude.63 Relative status was worked out in many communities often in particular athletic events, without coups, invasions, or murders: Aeginetans jostled for position through combat events in the fifth century, and Spartans through chariot racing—a reminder that athletic cultures varied across the Greek world.64
Epinician certainly mentions special distinctions, such as Pherenicus’ pseudo-dustless victory for Hieron, or the 25 panhellenic victories accrued by one Aeginetan family (Pindar, Nem. 6.58–61), and sometimes odes include more powerful figures from outside the victor’s family within the ode (Pindar, Ol. 6.93, Pyth. 10.5, 64), but the overwhelming impression given is of unity, within cities and across cities, rather than competition, hierarchy, and a struggle for position. The different Aeginetan clans appear in their odes as part of unified elite, bound by shared values, shared history, and shared interests, and, while Hieron is evoked as the ruler of Syracuse in a victory ode for one of his commanders, he is pictured more as his friend than his king, hosting his victory celebration when it reaches Sicily (Pindar, Ol. 6.92–100). In epinician, all victors belong to the same elite panhellenic club.
Athletics certainly offered an effective means for those at the margins to claim a place at the center of Greek world. Marginalization came in different forms—ethnic, political, geographical, or social—but the more prestigious athletic festivals provided a venue where one could not only compete against others to stake a claim to priority within the aristocracy, but, more simply, share in the activities of the interstate aristocracy and claim a place within it. Epinician both recorded this participation, and reinforced through its very form the claim to a place in the interstate aristocracy. It was a truly panhellenic form, fitting patrons from all around the Greek Mediterranean into a limited repertoire of shared mythical paradigms and gnomic wisdom, and representing in its melodies an interstate synthesis of local instrumental traditions. The very figure of the epinician poet articulated a panhellenic vision: his authority was rooted not in his voicing of local tradition but in his capacity to move between communities and speak for himself, separate from a chorus.65
There seems to have been a formal process at Olympia through which competitors might be called upon to prove their Greekness,66 but this served more to affirm the fundamental Greekness of those taking part than to exclude entrants. Competitors whose Greekness was in question in some way could thus use athletic competition to burnish their credentials, and among the patrons of epinician Psaumis of Camarina, victor of Pindar’s Olympians 4 and 5, likely belongs in this category. His strange name, garbled by scholiasts and compilers of victor lists, indicates Sicel connections.67 More usually a competitor’s Greekness was threatened by his values or conduct, rather than his ancestry. The victories and odes of both Arcesilas, king of Cyrene, and the great Diagoras served to mitigate their close connections to Persia: Arcesilas’ family owed its position to Persian backing and were effectively client kings of the Persians,68 and Diagoras’ family were surely supported by the Persians and may have ruled as kings until Rhodes was forced into the Delian league.69 In itself, tyranny or kingship could seem un-Greek in the wake of the Persian wars, so epinician was a popular choice with kings, tyrants, and those with monarchy or tyranny. Such odes served not to obscure tyranny or kingship, but to normalize them as regular parts of the Greek institutional landscape. Hieron’s tyranny owed nothing to foreign powers, but he and his circle, and his fellow west Greek tyrants were particularly keen users of epinician.70
A third kind of marginalization that athletics and odes helped to combat was geographical distance. Athletics provided the opportunity to be seen on the mainland and to affirm a place in the interstate aristocracy. Known epinicians largely celebrate victors from the mainland or at least from nearby islands, with the obvious exception of the significant contingent of west Greek odes, but others from the geographical fringes who commissioned odes include Cyreneans (an aristocrat called Telesicrates as well as Arcesilas), the Rhodian Diagoras, and a civic official from Tenedos.71 Different kinds of marginalization overlap, with tyranny and kingship often coinciding with distance from the center and subordination to Persia. It should also be noted that Hieron did not begin the vogue for odes in the west: his commissions were preceded by odes from Pindar for Xenocrates of Acragas, odes from Simonides for Anaxilas of Messene and Rhegium, and Astylus of Croton and Syracuse, and odes from Ibycus for victors from Leontini and perhaps Syracuse.72
Epinician was also a useful means for social climbers to claim a place in the aristocracy. Whether the prizes available in local festivals would have allowed anyone from a household that could not afford to purchase any additional labor to find their way into the elite is highly unlikely, but there were many households in a typical Greek community that lay outside the aristocracy, but had sufficient wherewithal to hire labor or have tenants or slaves. The heads of these households could afford to serve as hoplites, and could, if they chose, dedicate the necessary time and resources to athletic competition.73 Some of these athletes, particularly those generating the most wealth, will have sought entry into the local elites, and commissioning an epinician was one way to claim that place. Such social mobility is difficult to trace for certain, but there are some promising candidates from among epinician’s patrons.
Chromius, the Sicilian patron of Pindar’s Nemeans 1 and 9, can be characterized as a highly competent soldier of fortune who secured great wealth, status, and prominence under Gelon and Hieron, marrying one of their sisters, racing chariots, and becoming the regent of Aetna. Some soldiers of fortune were aristocrats (as Hagesias, the victor of Pindar’s Olympian 6), but Chromius’ odes give no evidence of aristocratic forebears and make no mention of prior family athletic competition.74 Psaumis of Camarina was likely another soldier of fortune from outside the aristocracy. He amassed his wealth under Hieron, and, after the democratic ructions of the 460s, settled in the newly refounded Camarina and used his wealth to mount a major assault on the equestrian competitions at Olympia, entering horse, chariot, and mule-cart races, and winning the last two.75 Finally, the family of Argeios of Ceos, the victor celebrated by Bacchylides 1 and 2, may have sought to use athletics and epinician as a way to join the island’s elite. Much of the long first ode does not survive, but we learn from it that the victor’s father, Pantheides, provided medical care, and there is no indication of earlier athletic activity. The central myth concerned the first king of Ceos, and the ode claims that Argeios is descended from him (Bacch. 1.140–142). If this was widely considered true, the family presumably already belonged to its city’s aristocracy, but the claim of such ancestry itself, a claim impossible to prove or disprove—together with the epinician ode, the Isthmian victory, and the family’s generous hospitality—may represent a concerted effort by a family grown wealthy from providing medical care to claim aristocratic status.76
All these potentially marginalized patrons were welcomed into epinician’s club, with the result that epinician should be considered a tool for constituting a more expansive version of the interstate aristocracy, and not just reaffirming or protecting existing networks and connections (see Węcowski (Chapter 5) in this volume). Yet, although it constitutes a more expansive aristocracy, epinician promoted a profoundly aristocratic vision of excellence. Excellence is represented as something that is inborn and inherited, even in odes for those born outside the aristocracy, so that, as Peter Rose observes, “birth is the determining principle of everything worth having”: “One must walk on a straight road and contend through one’s nature. For in action strength counts, while in planning the wisdom of those whom the inborn foresight of the future follows” (Nem. 1.25–28), Pindar declares in an ode for the soldier of fortune Chromius.77 A broad trend can be seen in all athletic memorials to frame victory as a family possession and a family achievement. Victor statues almost always include the name of the victor’s father as well as the victor; many describe earlier family victories or are dedicated alongside statues of other victors from the family.78 The narratives that depict some athletes as heroes sometimes replace their mortal fathers with gods: Euthymus, the son of Astycles, becomes the son of the river Caecinus, Theogenes, son of Timosthenes, becomes the son of Heracles, and Diagoras, the son of Damagetus, becomes the son of Hermes.79 The notion of inherited excellence was articulated particularly insistently by Pindar’s odes, which repeatedly link “the specific achievement of the victor, his immediate origin in his own family, and his more remote origin in the mythically evoked heroes of his homeland, and, finally, the origin of both those heroes and the present victory in divine favor.”80
While the odes articulate an aristocratic ideology, they also address themselves to the criticisms such as those of Xenophanes that reflect a civic point of view. Victory is described as glorifying and benefitting the victor’s city, as well as the victor, his family, and the larger interstate aristocracy that epinician constitutes, almost as a kind of liturgy. The victor and his family are described as men of hard work and moderation (rather than leisure and excess) who identify with their civic community as well as their family and class. Thus Olympian 5, the ode by an unknown poet for Psaumis of Camarina, speaks of the victor as “increasing your city, Camarina” (Ol. 5.4) by his offerings and competition at Olympia, and as “setting up delicate glory for you [Camarina]” by his victory, as he announced both his father Acron and his “newly founded seat” (Ol. 5.7–8). The ode goes on to describe how he has built houses for the newly founded city, “leading out of helplessness into light this people of townsmen” (Ol. 5.14), and how those who succeed through “hard work and expenditure” (Ol. 5.15) in risky enterprises (a designation vague enough to cover both equestrian competition and town-building) are considered wise “by their fellow citizens” (Ol. 5.16). Pindar’s Isthmian 6.63–71 promotes the same vision of shared interests: the family’s victors sustain the clan of the Psalychidae and the house of the immediate victor’s maternal grandfather; yet all are pointedly located in this “god-beloved city,” and the immediate victor’s father is described as “bringing to his own town an ornament for all to share”—presumably the victories of his sons—and “beloved for his beneficence to guests, pursuing moderation in judgment and holding fast to moderation.”81 Wherever epinician looks, it sees harmony; victories may exemplify and prove the truth of aristocratic ideals, but victors serve the interests of the city as a whole.
Conclusion
In many ways the function of epinician was to convert athletic victory into political and social capital by persuading people of its value. Athletics encompassed a complicated web of festivals, disciplines, and personnel, and there were different visions of their meaning. Epinician’s vision downplayed differences between festivals and events, located its different victors in a unified, panhellenic aristocracy, and presented a harmonious vision of relations between the members of that aristocracy and their cities. This represented one particular version of athletic competition, in competition with others, and understanding the particular intervention into the complex field of athletics that epinician represents offers an excellent entrée into the key social and political dynamics of the Greek world of the late archaic and early classical periods.
FURTHER READING
The best starting point for students of the athletic context of epinician is Golden 1998, both for its discussion of the kinds of evidence available and its many insights on the political work done by athletics. Golden makes no claim to comprehensive coverage, but strong surveys of ancient athletics are offered by S. Miller 2006 and Kyle 2015. There is an extensive companion covering Greek athletics, Christesen and Kyle 2014, and Nikephoros, a journal that specializes in ancient sport, provides discussions of many elements of athletics and athletic culture. König 2010 collects some important pieces on the politics of athletics, including Pleket 2010, Kurke 2010, and C. Morgan 2010. Christesen 2007 describes and analyzes the Olympic victor lists, and Christesen 2012 thoroughly dissects the relationship between sport, social status, and democratization. Young 1984 provides a searing critique of earlier scholarship on athletics.
For the politics of epinician specifically, P. Rose 1992 and Kurke 1991 are invaluable for the broader dynamics of the genre. Various studies concentrate on local athletic cultures, including Kowalzig 2007, C. Morgan 2007, Antonaccio 2007, Stamatopoulou 2007, Fearn 2011b, and Nicholson 2016a. For the representation of the specifics of the athletic events in epinician, see Nicholson 2005. For the heroization of athletes, see Currie 2005 and Nicholson 2016a, and for dedications at the Panhellenic sites, Neer 2007.
Notes