Ancient Greek Athletics

Author: Stephen Gaylord Miller
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300115291
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
Presenting a survey of sports in ancient Greece, this work describes ancient sporting events and games. It considers the role of women and amateurs in ancient athletics, and explores the impact of these games on art, literature and politics.

Ancient Greek Athletics

Author: Stephen G. Miller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300100839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
The earliest Olympic games began more than twenty-five-hundred years ago. What were they like, how were they organised, who participated? Were ancient sports a means of preparing youth for warfare? In this lavishly illustrated book, a world expert on ancient Greek athletics provides the first comprehensive introduction to the subject, vividly describing ancient sporting events and games and exploring their impact on art, literature, and politics. Using a wide array of ancient sources, written and visual, and including recent archaeological discoveries, Stephen Miller reconstructs ancient Greek athletic festivals and the details of specific athletic events. He also explores broader themes, including the role of women in ancient athletics, the place of amateurism, and the relationship between athletic events and social and political life. Published in the year the modern Olympic Games return to Athens, this book will be a source of information and enjoyment for anyone interested in the history of athletics and the origins of the world's most famous sporting event.

Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport

Author: David Sansone
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520913325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
How is sport in contemporary society related to sport in earlier civilizations? Why is the expenditure of energy involved in sport considered exhilarating, while the equivalent expenditure of energy in other contexts can be dispiriting? David Sansone offers answers to these questions and advances a revolutionary thesis to account for the widespread phenomenon of sport. Drawing upon ethnological findings to demonstrate the ritual character of sport, he explores the relationship between ancient Greek sport and sacrificial ritual and traces elements common to both back to primitive origins.

Ancient Greek Athletics

Author: Charles H. Stocking
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198839596
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
Présentation de l'éditeur : "This work presents a collection of texts in translation on ancient athletics in Greek and Roman history, including a wide range of topics from the Olympics to ancient conceptions of health and wellness."

Athletics in the Ancient World

Author: E. Norman Gardiner
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486147452
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Concise, convincing book emphasizes relationship between Greek and Roman athletics and religion, art, and education. Colorful descriptions of the pentathlon, foot-race, wrestling, boxing, ball playing, and more. 137 black-and-white illustrations.

Contemporary Athletics & Ancient Greek Ideals

Author: Daniel A. Dombrowski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226155498
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
Despite their influence in our culture, sports inspire dramatically less philosophical consideration than such ostensibly weightier topics as religion, politics, or science. Arguing that athletic playfulness coexists with serious underpinnings, and that both demand more substantive attention, Daniel Dombrowski harnesses the insights of ancient Greek thinkers to illuminate contemporary athletics. Dombrowski contends that the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus shed important light on issues—such as the pursuit of excellence, the concept of play, and the power of accepting physical limitations while also improving one’s body—that remain just as relevant in our sports-obsessed age as they were in ancient Greece. Bringing these concepts to bear on contemporary concerns, Dombrowski considers such questions as whether athletic competition can be a moral substitute for war, whether it necessarily constitutes war by other means, and whether it encourages fascist tendencies or ethical virtue. The first volume to philosophically explore twenty-first-century sport in the context of its ancient predecessor, Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals reveals that their relationship has great and previously untapped potential to inform our understanding of human nature.

Sport and Society in Ancient Greece

Author: Mark Golden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521497909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Sport and Society in Ancient Greece provides a concise and readable introduction to ancient Greek sport. It covers such topics as the links between sport, religion and warfare, the origins and history of the Olympic games, and the spirit of competition among the Greeks. Its main focus, however, is on Greek sport as an arena for the creation and expression of difference among individuals and groups. Sport not only identified winners and losers. It also drew boundaries between groups (Greeks and barbarians, boys and men, males and females) and offered a field for debate on the relative worth of athletic and equestrian competition. The book includes guides to the ancient evidence and to modern scholarship on the subject.

The Smell of Sweat

Author: William Blake Tyrrell
Publisher: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers
ISBN: 086516553X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
A survey of Greek athletics from Homeric times through the fourth century C.E. From the games of the "Iliad, to the foundation of the Olympic games, to the poetry of Pindar and the Olympic Festival, this book covers all aspects of Greek athletics: the events themselves--from the running events held at the first competitions to the later "heavy" events of wrestling, boxing, and the pankration, to the pentathlon, jump, discus, and javelin, held only at festival; the religious and athletic centers; the festivals in which the games took place; the voices of the games' celebrators (like the poet Pindar), critics, and the athletes themselves; the "gyymnasion and its culture; and the evidence--literary, artistic, archeological, and historical. The introduction examines the nineteenth-century bias that created the myth of Greek amateurism. An extensive bibliography aids the reader in pursuing further study.

The End of Greek Athletics in Late Antiquity

Author: Sofie Remijsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107050782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Book Description
A comprehensive study of how and why athletic contests, a characteristic feature of ancient Greek culture, disappeared in late antiquity.

Greek Athletics in the Roman World

Author: Zahra Newby
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191515574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
The enduring importance of Greek athletic training and competition during the period of the Roman Empire has been a neglected subject in past scholarship on the ancient world. This book examines the impact that Greek athletics had on the Roman world, approaching it through the plentiful surviving visual evidence, viewed against textual and epigraphic sources. It shows that the traditional picture of Roman hostility has been much exaggerated. Instead Greek athletics came to exercise a profound influence upon Roman spectacle and bathing culture. In the Greek east of the empire too, athletics continued to thrive, providing Greek cities with a crucial means of asserting their cultural identity while also accommodating Roman imperial power.