Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games

About the Book

This book is the first to focus on the theme of tradition as an integral feature of the ancient and modern Olympic Games. Just as ancient athletes and spectators were conscious of Olympic traditions of poetic praise, sporting achievement, and catastrophic shortcoming, so the revived Games have been consistently cast as a legacy of ancient Greece. The essays here examine how this supposed inheritance has been engineered, celebrated, exploited, or challenged. The Athens Games in 2004 were widely represented as a return to ancient, and modern, origins; the Beijing Games in 2008, meanwhile, saluted a radically different ancient civilisation. What is the Olympic future for ancient Greece?

Thinking the Olympics brings together contributions from various disciplines, including cultural history, classics, comparative literature, and art history. Together these perspectives foreground two opposing plots which recur and collide ritually on the occasion of the Games. On the one hand, the Games present themselves as an ideal enactment of pure, intrinsic Olympic values; on the other, the Games appear as a messy performance of extrinsic investments by diverse parties with their own interests, commercial and political. Power, money, property, and identity are persistently at stake in the Games. But in a time when credit and trust among nations are in short supply, the Olympic arena and its flexible traditions may be where exchange can be done.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Game Plan - Barbara Goff
1. Pythagoras and the Origins of Olympic Ideology - Nigel Spivey
2. True Heroes and Dishonourable Victors at Olympia - David Gilman Romano
3. To Give Over One’s Heart: Pindar, Bataille and the Poetics of Victory - Damian Stocking
4. Epideictic Oratory at the Olympic Games - Eleni Volonaki
5. Living in the Shadow of the Past: Greek Athletes during the Roman Empire - Stephen Brunet
6. Gilbert West and the English Contribution to the Revival of the Olympic Games - Hugh Lee
7. James Barry’s Crowning the Victors at Olympia:Transmitting the Values of the Classical Olympic Games into the Modern Era - William Pressly
8. The Race for a Healthy Body: The Ancient Greek Physical Ideal in Victorian London - Debbie Challis
9. Nervi’s Palazzo and Palazzetto dello Sport: Striking a Delicate Balance between Past and Present in 1960 Rome - Ann Keen
10. Trailing the Olympic Epic: Black Modernity and the Athenian Arena, 2004 - Michael Simpson
11. Pindar at the Olympics: The Limits of Revivalism - Armand D’Angour
Afterword: London 2012 - Tessa Jowell
Bibliography
Index

About the Author :

Barbara Goff is Professor of Classics, University of Reading.
Michael Simpson is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Goldsmiths University of London.

Review :
[T]his book has much to offer all historians. Highlighting the value of sport as an alternative, indeed frequently revealing, prism through which to view past and present, Thinking the Olympics offers illuminating insights into changing perspectives over time regarding the classical tradition; the invention of tradition, and particularly the use of an idealized version of ancient Greece for both overt and covert present-day purposes at varying time periods for diverse audiences; and the problem that "so much is speculation" because of fragmentary and partial evidence. Individual papers are in general of high quality and the book is well edited. Many classicists will no doubt be attracted by the chapters dealing with the ancient Olympics. But the most notable achievement of the volume lies perhaps in drawing attention to the complex and diverse impact of ancient Greek athletics on modern sport practices and ideas about sport. The overall quality of this eclectic collection is very high, and both experts and non-experts will find much of interest. Better still, while focused and erudite, the essays are nevertheless generally accessible to non-insiders and will be valuable to instructors looking to diversify their course readings … [A]welcome and useful contribution to a growing field.