The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics by David C. Young, Greek and Roman Athletics, A Bibliography by Thomas F. Scanlon (review)

134 BOOK REVIEWS/CO~'IPTES RENDUS DAVID C. YOUNG. The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics. Chicago: Ares Publishers, 1984. Pp. x, 202. Paper, U.S. $10.00. THOMAS F. SCANLON. Greek and Roman Athletics, A Bibliography, with Introduction, Commentary and Index. Chicago: Ares Publishers, 1984. Pp. 142, Paper, U.S. $10.00. Ancient amateurism is a myth... Ancient athletes regularly competed for valuable prizes in other games before they reached the Olympics, and they openly profited from athletics whenever they could. (7) Thus directly does Young open his work, which only with understatement can be termed controversial or revisionist. Young's valuable work challenges all those interested in ancient sport or the Olympic Movement to reconsider their views. This study of the myth of Greek amateurism and of "Greek athletic profitll (vii) covers the periods of 776-350 B. C. (regarded popularly as an age of amateur athletics) and 1866-1913 A.D. (when the amateurist movement had its strongest formative influence on modern sport). Young's justification for his study is simple: he sees previous standard works as flatly wrong or worse; due to the distorting influence of the modern Olympics and the status of the study of athletics, published research works, especially general ones, have been few, out of date and weak in philology. Young's intention is to debunk the popular (in both senses of the term) notion of Greek amateurism, a notion pushed by the Olympic Movement and aided by traditional classical scholarship. The notion holds that early Greek athletes were all idealistically motivated, noble amateurs during a brief period of Pindaric amateurism down to the fifth century before professionalism and money brought decline and degeneration. Young shows this to be a modern myth without ancient foundation, a myth in the sense of a lIuniversal belief" (viii) and also in the sense of a comforting falsehood held by Olympists. He asserts that the Greeks lacked both BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 135 the ideology and the vocabulary of amateurism. Ancient athletes earned wealth and were not amateurs; they did not demonstrate aristocratic exclusiveness or JOC-style idealism, a set of values which Young sees as an imposition of nineteenth-century Victorian amateurism upon Greek history. The book is in two parts, liThe Myth" (7 chapters) and liThe Reality" (9 chapters); the former is a history of the myth and the latter an exercise in demythologizing. Part One treats the development of the popular notion of Greek amateurism from nineteenth-century roots, and shows that various elements in the myth can be traced to modern and unsatisfactory rather than ancient and reliable works. Part Two (especially Chapter 5 on Croton) argues that Greek athletes were professionals in a financial sense. He discusses ancient athletic prizes (their sources and worth) and draws inferences from training, performances and records to conclude that, ... the concept of amateurism in any sense is wholly foreign, often even antithetical, to the nature and vocabulary of Greek athletics.... In classical studies "amateurism" is an irrelevant distraction. (164) Both halves of Young's work show the skill and industry of his earlier works on Pindar and Pindaric scholarship. He casts his nets afar, from Victorian England to Archaic Croton, from ancient epigraphy to modern memoirs. There is much to applaud here. We must agree that the professional/amateur issue has been an overworked source of confusion, that amateurism (in the Olympist sense) is modern myth not ancient history, and that there are serious flaws in many major general works on ancient sport and the Olympics (ancient and modern). By demonstrating that ancient athletes earned large sums, Young finishes off an imposing myth (one already seriously wounded by H. W. Pleket). He also destroys several related and lesser myths: ancient athletes did not put participation above victory; profit and training were not disdained; Greek athletics were not recreation or childhood diversion. Furthermore, Coubertin was r,ot the founder of 136 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS the modern Olympics, and amateurism was not the original state of modern athletics before an encroachment by professionalism. Part One is a fascinating unravelling of manipulations, misdatings and misinformation concerning the Western world's perception of ancient Greek sport and the earliest...