Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (review)

Rhetoric and athletics shared a vocabulary and pathways to produce and circulate honor. Hawhee, once a college basketball player, now teaches English (University of Pittsburgh). She examines intersections of athletics and pedagogy, sports, and oratory, in Classical Greece. She writes for students of rhetoric, pedagogy, and the body. Her study of "rhetoric as a bodily art" generally delivers shared metaphors, perhaps borrowed by ancient educators to entice indifferent athletes (131 reports Cicero's telling observation: De or. 2.5.21). Similarly, her treatment of "Gesture" delivers more (verbal) metaphor than comportment or displacement of limbs.

Hawhee cleverly begins with the statue of the Antikythera youth with arm and hand extended. If interpreters cannot choose between icon of man or god, between athlete or orator, perhaps this identity of attributes results from convergent corporeal and conceptual premises. Chapter 1 argues that classical Athenians (the book's actual subject) acknowledged aretê through the agôn, in athletic, court, and dramatic contests.

Plato thought that the body and mind need separate but comparable development, but his frequent use of agonistic terminology, where sophists are present, seems "curious" to Hawhee (37). His own fierce competitor for the educational pie, Isocrates, believed that gymnastics and artistic discourse were already joined at the hip (Antidosis 180–183). Learning to use the body and the mind involves similar, endless training in metis ("cunning" here) and hexis (body habit). The book meditates on this important athlete-speaker analogy.

Chapter 2 examines the honor available from metis or cunning, for Odysseus and for Sophists. Hawhee's rhetoric, however, can produce mental hammerlock, as when she describes an octopus' wrestling match on a Toledo vase: it "operates in a matrix of response production" (45). More wittily, Zeus' incorporation of Metis exemplifies the slogan "you are what you eat" (49). Chapter 3, unhelpfully entitled "Kairotic Bodies," focuses on crisis moments in competition. Hawhee ignores the related concept of hora, discussed, for instance, in Norman Austin's profound Archery at the Dark of the Moon. This source problem perhaps results from dependence on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae's database. She also misspells, however, Werner Jaeger's last name and misaccents Jean Delorme's name and book title. On a higher level, few classicists will agree that rhetorical kairos provides a departure from reason—"even from consciousness" (78).

Chapter 4 discusses physical self-fashioning, transformations wrought in the gym by habit, phusiopoiesis, a word found in verbal form once in Democritus. Chapters 5 and 6 examine how combinations of nature and practice (see Clint Eastwood's movie Million Dollar Baby) developed in ancient gymnasia. Sophistic pedagogy's new "3Rs"—rhythm, repetition, and response—provide a mantra (135). The athletic victory is itself first visible; "thunderous crowds" then circulate kleos, but its subsequent commemoration is only audible in the poets' and sophists' discourse of honor, a necessity for sustaining athletes' reputations—Pindar and more prosaic Athenian epitaphioi (chapter 7; no discussion of tombstones).

Hawhee has read widely in contemporary rhetorical scholarship. One applauds her attempts to discover complexity in Greek descriptions of the synergy of mind and body, although she cites modern parallels of dubious heuristic value (pharmacology, physics, etc.). She lightly quotes scholarship recently written or translated into English. She does not mention negative ancient views of athletics or other systems of mnemotechnics, or differing practices in other areas and epochs, such as one meets in Raffaella Cribiore's Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton 2001). The book may enlighten students of rhetoric who entertain simplistic ideas of their ancient Athenian forebears.

Classicists, however, will question Hawhee's control of Greek sources. She quotes Democritus, Aristotle, and Oppian as equal authorities. She undependably recalls Greek literature (18: Achilles wins the footrace in her Iliad 23; 94: Presocratic Xenophanes is confused with Xenophon), Greek grammar (e.g., 34, 97, infinitive mistaken for participle...