Eros and Greek Athletics (review)

Thomas Scanlon's book consists of an introduction, ten chapters, endnotes, bibliography, and index. Most of the text was published separately; only chapters 1, 7, and 9 are original.

The introduction discusses the origin of athletics: games for the dead, contests for obtaining a bride, and markers of transitions through adolescence. Chapter 1 contains a long and baseless speculation on the Olympic games prior to their foundation (or reorganization) in 776 B.C.E., a thorough discussion of them to the completion of the temple to Zeus (before 456), hardly a word about them from the mid-fifth century to the late Hellenistic period, and a nice survey of the Roman Olympics until they were abolished in 394 C.E.

Chapter 3 concerns the relationship between athletics and state-sponsored paiderastia ("pederasty" to Scanlon), the erotic relationship between an adult man, the erastês, and the youth, the erômenos, whom he socializes through adolescence. Scanlon concurs that this institution dates to the late seventh century B.C.E. along with the development of the gymnasium and male public nudity in athletics. Anthropological parallels from other cultures, however, suggest that Greek paiderastia goes back at least to the Middle Bronze Age (cf. Eve Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World [1992], 3-8); classical paiderastia should be merely an aristocratic version.

Chapter 4 concerns the footraces for unmarried women held in honor of Hera at Olympia and organized by the thiasos, "Sixteen Women of Elis." Scanlon suggests that the race took place just before the men's Olympics so that families could travel to Olympia with their marriageable daughters. For Scanlon, these women's footraces "helped girls make the transition to marriage and adulthood by alluding to myths of prenuptial flight and pursuit," but he does not make the same claim for men's Olympic games, which also began only with footraces.

Chapter 5 discusses Spartan women, who exercised in the nude like the men and occasionally with them—again to encourage suitable marriages. Another Spartan thiasos, "Daughters of Leukippos," organized a footrace for Dionysos, an important god for women: the Sixteen Women of Elis themselves served Dionysos, organized choral dances in honor of his first priestess, and called upon Dionysos to "run to them on bull feet." (In Corinna's poem "Daughters of Minyas," Dionysos comes as a bull to three girls—one is named Leukippê—because they avoided his festival.)

Chapter 6 concerns the Arkteia, the girl's festival held at three different locations in Attica. Nude girls pretended to be bears chasing other girls—there was no footrace. The thirty-four vase fragments (appendix) that depict the festival might not, however, portray contemporary reality; one shows Kallisto and her son Arktas with bear heads (Gloria Ferrari Pinney, American Journal of Archaeology 99 [1995]: 303-4, not cited).

Chapter 7 discusses the hunter Atalanta, who lost a footrace to Meilanion because he threw down golden balls; the two consummate their union in a sanctuary, whose divinity turns them into lions (believed incapable of sexual intercourse in antiquity). Again, Scanlon sees the race as "transition from daughter to wife." In some texts Meilanion and Atalanta are passionately in love (Ovid's Ars Amatoria 3.769-88, not cited, lists sexual positions, of which the first describes the rarely depicted frontal entry, as when "Meilanion used to carry Atalanta's legs on his shoulders").

Chapter 8 contains a potpourri of interesting discussions. Scanlon revisits the idea that marriages were arranged at athletic festivals; he cites texts that attest to women's desire for athletes. This erotic construction of athletes is tested, however, by the parallel construction that they needed to conserve their vital energy—sport and sex was (and still is) interchangeable. Many athletes in antiquity had sex only after exercise (with terminology borrowed from wrestling) or they practiced abstinence.

Paiderastia relationships had political...