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  • Sport in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Volume 1: Early Greece, the Olympics, and Contests ed. by Thomas F. Scanlon, and: Sport in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Volume 2: Greek Athletic Identities and Roman Sports and Spectacle ed. by Thomas F. Scanlon
  • Paul Christesen
Thomas F. Scanlon (ed.). Sport in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Volume 1: Early Greece, the Olympics, and Contests. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 388. $65.00 (pb.). ISBN 978–0-19–921532–4.
Thomas F. Scanlon (ed.). Sport in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Volume 2: Greek Athletic Identities and Roman Sports and Spectacle. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 389. $65.00 (pb.). ISBN 978–0-19–870378–5.

The two volumes that make up Sport in the Greek and Roman Worlds form part of a series, Oxford Readings in Classical Studies, designed to offer a representative selection of influential scholarly essays on particular authors, works, [End Page 138] or subjects. Both volumes have an identical introduction in which the editor, Thomas Scanlon, provides a history of how the study of ancient sport has evolved over the course of the past century. The essays that follow are placed under six headings: “Greek Heroes and Origins,” “Contesting the Olympics,” “Enigmas and Solutions of the Greek Contests” (all in volume 1), “Identity, Status, and the Greek Athlete,” “Greek Sports in the Roman Era,” and “Etruscan and Roman Sports and Spectacle.” For each heading Scanlon provides a brief introduction that explains the significance of the essays he has chosen for inclusion as well as notes on key pieces of relevant scholarship above and beyond those essays.

Sport in the Greek and Roman Worlds represents a notable addition to the resources available for the teaching and study of Greek and Roman sport. The essays assembled by Scanlon are of consistently high quality and, taken together, cover much of the relevant subject matter and periods with minimal overlap. Scanlon’s expertise and insight are evident not only in the selection of essays, but also in the excellent work he does in supplying introductory material and bibliographic suggestions. These volumes will be particularly helpful in undergraduate courses on ancient sport; the essays they contain would perfectly complement a standard textbook such as D. G. Kyle’s Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World (second edition, Malden, Mass. 2015). The fact that all the essays in the collection, many of which were originally published in French, German, or Italian, are given in English ensures that everything will be accessible to an undergraduate audience.

There are, inevitably, a certain number of complaints one might make, all of them minor. Two of the essays—W. H. Willis on athletics in epic (from 1941) and H. A. Harris on Roman chariot racing (from 1972)—are at this point somewhat antiquated. The Willis article, in which much is made of identifying distinct chronological layers in the Homeric poems, may well be more confusing than enlightening to many readers. Some topics (for example, representations of sport in literature and art) receive short shrift, but Sport in the Greek and Roman Worlds does not purport to be comprehensive. The listing of original publication information for the essays is found between the bibliography and index, in a section with the title “Acknowledgments,” and one suspects that many readers will have difficulty locating this information. Golden’s article on equestrian competition and democracy is placed in a section with articles on how Greek athletic contests were organized, but it fits much better with the section on identity and status. Finally, in the second volume, Scanlon writes that we know “perhaps 25 percent of the names of all ancient victors” (26) and cites S. G. Miller’s Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven 2004). This statement is imprecise to the point of being misleading, and the citation is odd. We know perhaps 25 percent of the names of Olympic victors, but we know only a tiny fraction of the names of victors in all other Greek athletic contests. Furthermore, the figure of 25 percent for the names of Olympic victors was calculated by Andrew Farrington...

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