Competition in the Ancient World ed. by Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees (review)

This collection, born from a 2006 conference at Lampeter, defines both competition and the ancient world very widely. Its contents range from wartime headhunting to choral competitions, villas, and elections, from Assyria to the Aztecs via Greece and Rome (with side-trips to Venice, south Wales, the Mbuti pygmies and late Palaeolithic Anatolia). No one could review all this, least of all me. (I hear that Olmec Donald had a farm, but otherwise I know nothing about ancient Mexico.) But the variety serves to illustrate the editors’ main contention: competition – “striving to be superior to others in some respect”(1) – has been a vital but unrecognized motor for historical change everywhere and at all times, from the simplest societies studied by anthropologists until today.

Van Wees’ ambitious introduction stresses that competition coexists with abundance as well as with scarcity and may more often involve intangibles – reputation, status, power – than material resources. It is this open-ended competition, in which establishing superiority is the goal rather than a means to wealth or some other end, which especially interests him. A trait common to all human societies, it provides an explanation for historical development (sometimes for the better, sometimes not) independent of natural forces such as population dynamics and environmental change. But the forms competition takes differ and lead to different outcomes. So the Near East in the mid-fourth millennium bce was generally peaceful, characterized as it was by competition in wealth, accelerated economic growth, and monuments of material culture; in Egypt and Europe, competition focussed instead on physical prowess in hunting and war. Societies that put equal weight on each type of competition, like China, both grew rapidly and aggressively sought empire and its revenues. Well-informed and rich in persuasive insights, van Wees’ chapter is a tour de force, building on and refining authorities like Colin Turnbull, Marshall Sahlins and Brian Hayden. It is worth every historian’s while to read it. Two observations: van Wees believes group rivalries are more influential than those of individuals, on the reasonable assumption that they involve more people and resources. Among the groups he mentions are political parties, religions, nations – but not (despite insisting that rivalry is not restricted to elites) social classes. Proletarii indeed appear in the index, but the Roman kind only; historical materialism is oddly absent from this discussion of the role of competition in historical change. On the other hand, there is one Marxist formulation van Wees and the other authors seem to follow: men make history. None of the rivalries in this wide-ranging survey or the book it introduces takes women into account.

Many of the case studies which make up the rest of the book likewise emphasize historical change, though Frances Berdan has a different view of the role of economic scarcity and overpopulation than the editors (80 n. 7) and Christoph Ulf suggests that the concept of competition, once marginal in histories of ancient Greece, moved to the fore only in the mid nineteenth century as a byproduct of new economic theories. (The editors are similarly broadminded in admitting a number of inconsistencies in the form of references, including two spellings of one of their surnames.) Three are of particular interest to students of Greek culture. Nick Fisher offers another installment of his debate with David Pritchard on the social status of participants in Athenian festival competition. Supported by helpful tables setting out the festivals, their events, and the numbers of liturgists, gymnasiarchs and participants in each, this concludes that involvement in choruses and athletics extended well beyond the Athenian leisure class, though it did not (as Fisher once thought) include many thetes. “The average team for tribal events ... had a broad mixture of middling and more elite participants, while selection, training, motivation and financial support were provided by very rich liturgists” (200). The participation of so broad a cross-section of citizens contributed to the social cohesion...