Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (Greek Culture in the Roman World)
Cambridge University Press, 3/11/2010
EAN 9780521070089, ISBN10: 0521070082
Paperback, 420 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm
Language: English
From the first to third century AD Greek athletics flourished as never before. This book offers exciting readings of those developments. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, it sheds light on practices of athletic competition and athletic education in the Roman Empire. In addition it examines some of the ways in which athletic activity was represented within different texts and contexts. Most importantly, the book shows how discussion and representation of athletics could become entangled with many other areas of cultural debate, and used as a vehicle for many different varieties of authorial self-presentation and cultural self-scrutiny. It also argues for complex connections between different areas of athletic representation, particularly between literary and epigraphical texts. It offers re-interpretations of a number of major authors, especially Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, Pausanias, Silius Italicus, Galen and Philostratus.
1. Introduction
2. Lucian and Anacharsis
gymnasion education in the Greek city
3. Models for virtue
Dio's Melankomas and the athletic body
4. Pausanias and Olympic panhellenism
5. Silius Italicus and the athletics of Rome
6. Athletes and doctors
Galen's agonistic medicine
7. Philostratus' Gymnasticus and the rhetoric of the athletic body
Conclusion.