Ancient Greek Athletics Primary Sources in Translation

by Stocking, Charles H.; Stephens, Susan A.

• ISBN13: 9780198839590
• ISBN10: 0198839596
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-10-25
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Sourcebook of Ancient Greek Athletics offers the most comprehensive collection to date of primary sources in translation for the study of ancient Greek athletics. Because Greek athletics was such an essential feature of both Greek and Roman culture, there is an especially strong need for proper treatment and understanding of the texts and other media used to reconstruct practices and ideologies of ancient athletics. The sources in this collection are arranged chronologically from the Archaic Period to the Roman Imperial Era, with an extensive appendix discussing key themes and topics. The organization and in-depth presentation of textual sources is designed to help students, scholars, and general readers fully appreciate the broader social and cultural significance of ancient Greek athletics as it developed in different historical time periods throughout antiquity.

Author Biography

Charles H. Stocking, Associate Professor, Classical Studies, Western University, Ontario,Susan A. Stephens, Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University

Charles H. Stocking is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Western University. His work focuses broadly on poetics, religion, and embodiment in antiquity and modernity, with publications including The Politics of Sacrifice in Early Greek Myth and Poetry (Cambridge 2017), The Cultural History
of Sport in Antiquity (Bloomsbury 2021), along with numerous articles ranging from Homeric poetics to the advent of modern bodybuilding. Prior to becoming a professor of Classics, Charles Stocking was an NCAA Division 1 Strength and Conditioning Coach for the Athletics Department at UCLA, where he
trained multiple collegiate and Olympic athletes.


Susan A. Stephens is Sara Hart Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics at Stanford University. Trained as a papyrologist, her work includes contributions to the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Yale Papyri in the Beineke Library (1985), and Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments, co-authored with Jack
Winkler (Princeton, 1995). Subsequent scholarship has focused on the political and social context of early Alexandrian writers. Books include Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003), Callimachus: The Hymns (Oxford, 2015), and The Poets of
Alexandria (Bloomsbury, 2018) as well as numerous articles on Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, and Posidippus. Recent work has focused on the politics of Greek athletics in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

Table of Contents

TEXTS
1. The Archaic and Early Classical Period
Epic
Victory Odes
Elegy
Epigram
2. The Classical Period
History
Tragedy and Comedy
Hippocratic Corpus
Attic Oratory
Philosophy
3. The Hellenistic Period
4. The Roman Period
Inscriptions
5. Olympia
6. Delphi
7. Sparta
8. Athens
9. Other Significant Inscriptions
Papyri
Appendices
Appendix A: The Athlete in Greek Culture
Appendix B: Sites and Conduct of Festival Games
Appendix C: The Events