Eros and Greek Athletics (review)

Greek athletics are the subject of considerable scholarly interest at the moment; gender roles and sexuality in the Greek world are only more so. Anyone who has studied either field must know that the two are inextricably linked and must therefore welcome this first book explicitly to explore the links between the two.

Scanlon argues that athletics and the erotic were linked throughout the ancient Greek world—though with great regional variations—in a system of pedagogical and/or initiatory customs that brought Greek adolescents, male and female, to adult status. He argues, however, following Dover (Greek Homosexuality) and Percy (Pederasty and Pedagogy in Ancient Greece [Urbana 1996]), that this system did not derive from prehistoric Indo-European tribal rites; rather, it developed in Greece in the early Archaic period, starting with the eighth-century foundation of the Olympic games and the introduction, in Sparta and Crete of the seventh or sixth century, of athletic nudity and pederasty.

It is not, however, easy to reduce this book to a single argument. Scanlon covers a great number of topics in exhaustive detail. Chapter 2, for instance, argues that the Olympic Games flourished well into the imperial period; chapters 4 through 6 cover a variety of women's contests and rituals; chapter 9 considers resemblances between athletic contests and drama. Indeed, each chapter contains a large number of detailed arguments on topics as widespread as the representation of Atalanta in Athenian vase-painting and the festival of the Erotidaea at Thespiae.

Indeed, copia is both the strength and the weakness of this volume. Scanlon frames the book as an exploration of issues, and only at the end does he state, as concluding remarks, what in another book might be the thesis; he also follows this procedure in several individual chapters. This leaves him room to discuss amply many issues that set the nexus of athletics and the erotic in context. It also, however, makes his argument, at times, difficult to follow. Thus, while his discussion of the Olympic victor-lists of the imperial period is inherently interesting, its connection to his central theme is tangential, and in a more tightly organized book, it might occupy a few paragraphs rather than a chapter. This is also true of his argument about the festival of Artemis Arkteia at Brauron in Attica, the subject of chapter 6, about which he himself concludes that it did not include a race but rather a ritual chase—and was therefore not athletic.

It must also be said that, perhaps owing to the amount of space dedicated to contextual issues, certain issues central to Scanlon's topic, such as the early Archaic graffiti on Thera or the ritual contests embedded in the Spartan agoge, are discussed insufficiently—the latter being barely mentioned. In a number of cases, furthermore, Scanlon relies on earlier scholars to make points essential to his argument. For instance, he cites with approval Percy's (or Aristotle's) idea that pederasty was instituted in early Archaic Crete to control overpopulation. Scanlon regards this as plau-sible; I regard it as an implausible rationalization. In any case, however, in a book on this topic, it is necessary for him to make his case about such a point.

Nonetheless, Scanlon's is certainly an important book: it is the first to address this essential nexus of issues in Greek culture directly, and although it would profit from a tighter structure, it remains a treasury of detailed accounts of many issues in an important area.