The Poet as Athlete

The subject of the greatest surviving lyric poetry is not love nor death but athletic games. That we have manuscripts only of Pindar’s Victory Odes is a result of a selection made by schoolmasters in late antiquity, but we are lucky to have victory odes rather than hymns or dithyrambs or paeans, because unlike most other Greek public poetry they are written for and about contemporary men, rather than gods or the great heroes of the past. As such they tell us something about the values of aristocratic society, that is, why the games were thought so important that, as Pindar puts it, ‘the victor has sweet fair weather for the rest of his life on account of the contests [he has won]’ (0. i. 97-9); or, in more practical terms, ‘[the victor) would be more honourable for his fellow citizens to look on, and he would get a highly visible front seat ,:t the games, and he would get his provisions from the public storehouse, and a gift from his city that he could put in a treasury’ (Xenophanes 21 B 2. 6-9, i. 128 D-K)

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• Tempering the Dichotomous Flame

  Andrew D Linden•Journal of Sport History•2016

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• Studies in the Terminology of the Greek Combat Sports

  Thomas F Scanlon, Michael B Poliakoff et al.•The Classical World•1984

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• Victory in the Pentathlon

  George Ewart Bean•American Journal of Archaeology•1956

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