Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece

Introduction: Shipwreck

Z Z Z Introduction Shipwreck Sometime in the first century BCE, a ship destined for Rome, carrying a cargo of Greek sculptures by various artists of the Classical period, went down off the island of Antikythera. For millennia, the shipwreck and its contents remained submerged in the waters of the Ionian Sea, until accidentally discovered by sponge divers in 1901. Found in the cargo was a well-preserved bronze statue of a nude youth (Figure 1), standing 6 feet 4 inches and sporting a broad muscular frame. The statue exhibits a relaxed grace, with the weight resting on the left leg, right arm extending outward, hand holding some sort of round object (now lost). Aside from speculations about the date and creator of the figure— ranging from the fifth century BCE until Hellenistic times and attributed to various teachers and schools (Hyde 1921: 83)—the major question confounding archaeologists and scholars of ancient sculpture has to do with its identity: what kind of body is this? how might it be classified ? is the statue a rendering of god or of mortal? Some believe the statue depicts Perseus holding Medusa’s head in his hand, Paris displaying the iconic apple, or Hermes in his role as guardian of the gymnasium .1 Others read it as an athlete of some sort, perhaps a pentathlete, holding a ball or even a crown or some other prize of victory (Gardner 1903: 152). Still others associate the statue with rhetorical performance, reading the arm as the sweeping, emphatic gesture of an orator (Hyde 1921: 83). Perhaps, such scholars speculate, the statue is Hermes Logios , the god of words, or a mortal rhetor standing on a bema speaking to an assembly.2 3 I begin with this shipwrecked statue not to try to solve the problem of its identity, but rather to introduce a consideration of ancient bodies and bodily arts that would examine the way identity and value circulate through particular bodies as they practice and perform various arts. Such circulation operates, as this book’s last chapter suggests, on partner registers of visibility and intelligibility—seeing and recognizing . These registers are most evident in observations like that made by the orator Aeschines, who pointed out that anyone ‘‘can recognize an athlete by his bodily vigor (euexia) without visiting the gymnasium’’ (Against Timarchus 189). Euexia, literally ‘‘good bodily disposition,’’ may be located in muscles and sinews as well as in the overall manner of walking, speaking, and carrying oneself, is bound up with the more abstract ancient notion of aretē, or virtuosity, to the extent that for the Greeks, such virtuosity inhered in corporeality, inseparable from bodily actions.3 As Aeschines suggests, then, euexia can be recognized— even out of context—if one knows what qualities to look for. Like Aeschines’ wandering athlete, the shipwrecked statue exhibits a readable disposition and manner, a bodily comportment—what the ancients called hexis. Yet while the hexis-in-action of Aeschines’ athlete can be successfully ‘‘read’’ in an associative manner, even outside its expected location (the gymnasium), the dislocation of a shipwreck for a bronzed body is enough to confound modern archaeologists and classical historians. The only certainty is that the statue exhibits a hexis that exudes carefully cultivated aretē and its associated confident manner. What’s more, the shipwrecked statue and the axes of the debates about it—god or mortal? athlete or orator?—suggest a convergence of athletics and rhetoric as arts of hexis, in other words, as bodily arts. The cultural, conceptual, and corporeal connections between the arts of rhetoric and athletics, not unlike the shipwrecked statue, have been more or less submerged since ancient times. To account for this submersion, though, would require a long meditation on disciplinary division, overspecialization, and mind-body separation, all of which this book labors, for the most part, to forget. Such an omission is made possible by the example of the ancient Athenians, to whom strict disciplinary division would have made little sense. In Greece, the Archaic and Classical periods instead marked a time when training was broad, when arts were intricately interwoven, and when mind and body moved and thought together. As such, this book rests on a set BODILY ARTS 4 of syncretic premises that draw together body and mind; learning and performing; classical studies and rhetorical studies. Body-Mind The most explicit link between rhetoric and athletics as arts was made by Isocrates...