A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity by Paul Christesen and Donald G. Kyle

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 383 A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Edited by Paul Christesen and Donald G. Kyle. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. 2014. Pp. xx, 658. This volume of forty-three essays is a superb introduction to the study of sport and spectacle in Greece and Rome. As mentioned by the editors in the introduction, the book is mostly meant as an overview of the issues of sport and spectacle aimed at scholars in classics who do not work on these areas. Although there is much that is interesting to be found and appreciated by scholars who have been working on sport for some time, the essays are mostly concise surveys of topics central to the study of sport and spectacle. The overarching concern of the handbook is to present sport and spectacle as major social phenomena that need to be embedded within the study of Greek and Roman social history. As P. Christesen mentioned in the recent conference to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal Nikephoros (Graz, June 26–28, 2014), the field has matured to such a degree that we can now ask not only how society shaped sport, but also how sport shaped society. This companion establishes the groundwork for just such a discussion. The book is organized in two main parts, a Greek section comprising a total of twenty-four essays, and a Roman one containing nineteen, each with an up-todate bibliography and a very useful guide for further reading. There is a general index at the end of book, but no common bibliography, which accounts for several repeated titles. Topics discussed in the Greek section range from the ancient Olympics and sport in Homer to issues of Pan-Hellenism, democratization, and social life, as well as an attempt to keep a chronology from the Mycenaean era to later periods. It is divided into four parts. Part I, “Background,” contains essays covering athletic competitions (Donald Kyle), sport in the Mycenaean period (Jeremy Rutter) and the early Iron Age (Timothy P. J. Perry), sport in literature (Nigel Nicholson) and in art (Jennifer Neils), epigraphic evidence for sport (H. W. Pleket), concluding with a chapter that looks to the future of the discipline with a survey of recent scholarly trends (Ingomar Weiler). The second part, “Places,” has five essays organized by geographical criteria: Olympia (Thomas Heine Nielsen), Sparta (Paul Christesen), Athens (Donald Kyle in a second contribution), the northern Peloponnese and central Greece (David Gilman Romano), and the Greek West (Carla Antonaccio). Part III, “People, Settings and Ideas,” is the longest of the Greek section with ten essays. Paul Christesen, in a second essay, covers participation in sport and its democratization; Werner Petermandl summarizes what little we know about the integration of sport into the educational system; Andrew Lear explores the socialization of the youth with a contribution on pederasty and sport. Kyle, in a third essay, gives us a clear overview of myth, rite, and organizational roles of women in sport, even though evidence for female sport is scant. The next few essays deal with sport as part of ancient Greek society. Christian Mann reflects on the class divide of people involved in sport, while Stephen Miller and Michael Scott respectively consider the marginality and indeterminate nature of athletic spaces and their significance in the changing expression of Greek identity. Sarah C. Murray looks at religion and Greek sport, concluding that it is difficult to separate the two in the ancient context, while Zinon Papakonstantinou explores the conflicts between sport and politics in different periods and Winthrop Lindsay Adams discusses the Hellenization of Macedonia through sport. Part IV, “Later Greek Sport and Spectacle,” has only two 384 PHOENIX essays covering Greek sport in Egypt (Sofie Remijsen) and hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor (Pleket’s second essay in the volume). On the Greek side, one of the recurrent topics is the social class of the athletes, a debate that started in the late 70’s in reaction to the image of the Greek athlete as an Oxbridge gentleman. Scholars argued about whether or not members of the lower classes could practice sport on a regular basis. This debate is not...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.