Introduction to “Aryballos I: Studies in Honour of Nigel B. Crowther”

This is the first publication project of Aryballos: Canadian Research Group for Ancient Sport (ancientsport.wordpress.com). The group was formed in 2014 after a conference celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Austrian journal Nikephoros, the journal of record for ancient sport, where the founding members of Aryballos met and planned future collaborations. These were Reyes Bertolín Cebrián, who served as president of Aryballos from 2014 to 2018; Peter Miller, who serves as president currently; myself, who served as Secretary from 2014 to 2017; Jonathan Vickers, who serves as Secretary currently; Mark Golden; and Charles Stocking. Since 2014, many other Canadian and international scholars have joined the group.

Aryballos wishes to acknowledge and promote the long and rich history of ancient sport research in Canada, and we offer this collection of papers in honour of Nigel B. Crowther, Professor Emeritus in Classics at Western University, a major figure in this field.

At that conference in Graz where Aryballos was formed, Paul Christesen spoke of how the study of ancient sport had by then reached an inflection point. We hope that this collection illustrates the kaleidoscopic possibilities revealed when sport itself and individual sporting events are used to interpret cultures long understood as agonistic. Moreover, we hope that the subjects presented here—iconography, sport in literature, the realia of ancient sport, and the ancient and modern Olympics—do some justice to the wide-ranging contributions of Nigel Crowther.

These papers grew out of a panel at the 2016 annual meeting of the Classical Association of Canada in Québec City in honour of Nigel Crowther, entitled “Sport and Ancient Cultures.” Subsequently, several colleagues stepped forward to offer papers to the honoree, resulting in this collection of six papers, which we believe represents the many ways that sport figures in the lives of ancient Greeks and Romans, and which reveals new details of the ancient world using sport as a critical lens.

The collection begins with a section on the iconography of sport featuring an important and well-illustrated paper by Louis Brousseau on the use of sporting motifs on coins, especially in the Greek world, but also touching on Roman coinage. Brousseau shows that sporting iconography is sometimes a consistent feature of a city’s coins but more often is occasional, celebrating a particular event or victory. The section on sport in literature contains insightful articles by Christopher Brown and Peter Miller. Brown argues that athletic victory in Pindar’s Eighth Pythian represents the transition to manhood for the competitor, while athletic failure marks the inability to make that transition. Miller’s paper addresses an issue in Posidippus’ equestrian epigrams, showing that the horse metaphorically stands for the herald in signalling victory and is the focus of praise intended to reflect on the elite victor. The section on the realia of ancient sport includes an illuminating paper by Carolyn Willekes that shows what can be learned about ancient horse-breeding techniques from modern practices. This section also contains an excellent paper by Jonathan Vickers on equestrian acrobatics. Vickers finds that while the equestrian acrobat is presented as a warrior–athlete with all the attendant social implications, the current state of evidence does not permit us to determine whether equestrian acrobatics was a competition or a nonagonistic display. The final section on the ancient and modern Olympics features a wide-ranging paper by Stamatia Dova on the changing ideals of athletic heroism from ancient Greece to the Olympic revival to our own times.

I would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their hard work, Mark Golden for his assistance and advice, the Classical Association of Canada for their warm reception of our efforts in Québec City, and the editors of Mouseion for offering these papers a fitting home.