CHAPTER 4 Commemorating the Athlete

       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