The Crown Games of Ancient Greece: Archaeology, Athletes, and Heroes

David Lunt's The Crown Games of Ancient Greece is a strong survey of the four Panhellenic Games, with separate chapters on the Olympics, Pythian Games, Isthmian Games, and Nemean Games, alongside two concluding chapters on athletic heroes and future directions for research. Lunt's aim is not to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Panhellenic Games but rather to introduce them and “suggest that the Panhellenic sites and contests provided a common cultural touchstone for the otherwise disparate and often-truculent Greek city-states” (ix). Each of the four main chapters offers an overview of the respective sites, the foundation myths, and special things of note at each site. The chapters do not follow a specific pattern or format but rather are guided by the evidence. For example, at Nemea, Lunt details each part of the site and spends some time on its rather strange—and short—history of actual athletic use. The last chapter discusses champions in the Panhellenic games. The book is well written and would, with some caveats below, be at home in a course on Greek sport or as an introduction for interested undergraduate students.Much of the content is presented very well and is unassailable as far as scholarship goes, so my comments here focus on three issues that stood out to me as needing more discussion or nuance. This book is narrowly focused on the four Panhellenic Games, yet Lunt narrows it even more by focusing only on the Archaic and Classical periods. While traditional, this focus removes the Hellenistic and especially Roman imperial periods—the culmination of the practice of ancient Greek sport—from the book. At no other time are more Greeks (and Hellenized peoples) practicing sport and traveling to and making famous the Panhellenic circuit. It is during these periods that phenomena like the Olympic and Pythian games take shape and during which athletic associations form—developments that clearly are part of the history of the Panhellenic Games.Another issue relates to two issues in scholarship that have somewhat recently been reevaluated: the end of athletics in late antiquity and the question of Greek exclusivity in the Panhellenic Games. Lunt notes that Greek athletics ended in the fourth century and that the end of athletics was related to conversion to Christianity. This date and this reason have, traditionally, been taken to herald the end of the Panhellenic Games and, especially, the Olympics. However, Sofie Remijsen's The End of Greek Athletics in Late Antiquity makes clear that imperial decrees and religious change did not close pagan sanctuaries and in no way “ended” the Games. Anyone interested in the end of Games must look at least at the conclusions to part II of Remijsen's study, which summarizes a plethora of evidence and convincingly demonstrates that a breakdown of many interconnected systems, not an imperial decree or religious change, was behind the decline and end of athletics in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Rather, and more related to the social history of sport, athletics ended in the ancient world when the society of which they were a part and the systems on which they relied changed and fell apart. The end of athletics is thus a key argument for its complete integration into Greco-Roman society in the preceding centuries.The question of Hellenic exclusivity is another mainstay of research on Greek sport that has been challenged recently. Thomas Heine Nielsen points out that we have no evidence of an athlete being turned away for not “being Greek” (see his chapter “Panhellenic Athletics at Olympia” in A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity). The story of Alexander I of Macedon (Herodotus 5.22) suggests that identity could be challenged, but it is noteworthy that the story does not say that anyone checked ethnic identity in the absence of a challenge or that it was a necessary question for every athlete. Indeed, it may be more accurate to say that competing confirmed or produced a “Greek” identity. The more nuanced view of how ethnic identity was created in the act of competing, especially at the Panhellenic Games, lends support to Lunt's argument for their importance for “Panhellenism.”Despite these three observations, the book is a welcome addition to the somewhat crowded field of introductions to ancient Greek sport or overviews thereof. By combining a sound survey of recent archaeology and a thorough understanding of the literary and documentary sources, Lunt's book achieves its goal, to show how the Panhellenic circuit, not just the Olympic Games, are signal aspects of ancient Greek sport specifically, and ancient Greek culture in general.

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