Ancient Greek Athletics: Primary Sources in Translation

"Most of what we know about ancient Greek athletics comes to us in fragmentary form from texts representing many topics and genres like history, law, drama, poetry, and biology. This source book gathers all these fragments and arranges them in a way that no scholar had previously done. My book is built around the lives and works of three main figures. The first of these is Charles Stocking , who worked his way through classics graduate school as a strength and conditioning coach for UCLA and Olympic athletes. He is almost certainly the only person in academia who has a joint appointment in both classics and kinesiology, the study of human bodily movement. Stocking and his Stanford colleague, Susan Stevens, assembled this book. In the past, sourcebooks had always been organized by topic. So, you have all the texts referring to the pentathlon in one place, all the texts referring to soldiers’ physical training in another place. That organization made it impossible to discern the evolution of Ancient Greek athletics in a chronological way. It read as if everything took place in one big blob of oldness. But when we talk about ancient athletics, in the Greek and Roman traditions, we’re talking about texts that range from about 750 BC up into the Common Era. These traditions, and even the experience of the body itself, changed dramatically during that time. When Stocking teaches courses on ancient Greek athletics, he’ll often begin by saying to the class: The one thing we all have in common with Ancient Greeks is that we all have bodies—but the question is, are they the same bodies? What Stocking teaches his students, and what readers can learn through this sourcebook, is that people’s experience of our own bodies and their powers has been constructed and radically changed over time. For instance, the warriors in Homer’s Iliad experienced their power not as being centered in their muscles, but in the joints of their knees. The knees had a sanctity in Ancient Greek literature that we have completely lost track of. Even the distinction between mind and body is, as Charles Stocking points out, not an empirical fact, but the result of a long series of decisions that human beings have made. My favorite thing about the sourcebook is that these translations can help readers to discern, step by step, how the idea of a split between mind and body was invented, and how it evolved. Contemporary Western physical culture, for people who actively and energetically participate in it, approaches the all-encompassing quality that it had in Ancient Greece and Rome. As the classicist Paul Christesen at Dartmouth points out, ancient Greeks were among the few societies that took physical culture as seriously as we are now starting to take it. The important caveat is that everything I just said mainly applies to well-educated people who consider themselves to be healthy."