Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece (review)

The argument of this lucidly written book is laid out in the introduction: in the period 550–440 B.C. the professional drivers, jockeys, and trainers who regularly contributed to victory in the athletic and equestrian events were "rigorously excluded" from memorials for victors, this exclusion being the product of "an aristocratic ideology of athletics" (1) that professed disdain for the kind of commodity exchange required to purchase the services of these professionals. This attractive and plausible thesis is repeated so insistently that one is inclined to accept it, but it is difficult to argue that what is absent has been "not simply passed over, but purposefully excluded" (18) and more difficult still to assign a motive to that exclusion. Nicholson's explanation of that motive involves the ascription of anxiety (a word that occurs some three dozen times in the course of the book) to the faceless sportsmen of archaic and early classical Greece, a claim that is easier to make than it is either to substantiate or to refute.

In fact, much of the book is concerned to explain, or explain away, the evidence that we have for the inclusion of these professionals in victory monuments. Part 1 deals with riders and drivers in the equestrian events. The bronze charioteer from Delphi is briefly dismissed as giving a mistaken impression of the prominence of charioteers in victory monuments (27); the marble statue from Motya is considered perhaps to be a representation of Hamilcar (78); and most of the relevant painted vases are relegated to a footnote (224). The description of a vase painting that is illustrated ignores the fact that the jockey is holding a victory branch, while the man identified as the victor is not (107). Nicholson is on firmer ground when he deals with literary texts, which he does much more extensively and knowledgeably. He spends a good deal of his time showing that those few charioteers who are named (notably in Pindar) are represented not as hired professionals but as men having a close personal relationship to the aristocratic victor. So Nicomachus in Isthmian 2 becomes a "trusted servant" (71), and Phintis of Olympian 6 is "a senior and trusted servant" (89).

Part 2 concerns itself with the trainers who prepared competitors for the athletic contests. Nicholson is anxious to account for the fact that several of these are named on vases and in epinician poems. (He does not, however, explain or even note the fact that trainers are very often depicted on vases wearing crowns, although a named and crowned wrestling coach appears prominently on the book's dust jacket.) Some trainers "were able by the weight of their records to force themselves into the victory memorials" (214), while one coach of the pankration "is so central a problem" in Nemean 3 that he is not mentioned in the poem (198). In other words, it seems that both inclusion and exclusion of athletic trainers are used as evidence of anxiety on the part of aristocratic patrons and their publicists. Further, Nicholson never makes clear how he understands the term "aristocratic" in the first place, relying on the assumption that, having been told that aristocrats denounce commodity exchange, his readers will somehow accept the denunciation of commodity exchange as definitive of aristocracy.

Despite the fundamentally circular character of the book's argument, it contains a number of perceptive and learned discussions, particularly of selected odes of Pindar and of the evidence available to us for those men and boys who contributed to athletic and equestrian success in the games. The volume is very well produced and carefully proofread, but readers ought to join this reviewer's protest at the publisher's reprehensible practice of printing the notes at the end of the book rather than at the bottom of the page.