Map 13.1 Map of Laconia and Messenia.
Aristotle devotes part of Book Four of the Politics to a consideration of how oligarchic groups in ancient Greece went about disempowering other members of their communities. He argues that one means of accomplishing this end was for the wealthy to set up a system in which they were given incentives to attend the assembly, hold magistracies, and participate actively in the legal system, whereas the less well-off received no incentives to do any of these things. Aristotle then goes on to say:
The rich legislate in the same manner about both possessing arms and participating in sport [gymnazein]. For it is possible for the less well-off to not possess arms, but the rich not possessing arms are fined. And if the less well-off do not participate in sport, there is no fine, but there is a fine for the rich, so that the rich will, on account of the fine, take part in sport, whereas the less well-off do not because they do not fear a fine. (Politics 1297a29–35)1
It may come as something of a surprise to find Aristotle mentioning sport in the same breath as overtly political institutions such as assemblies and courts. His observations reflect a fact that needs to be kept front and center in our thinking about Greek sport: sport had powerful political ramifications throughout Greek history.
The goal of this essay is to explore one aspect of the sport–politics nexus in ancient Greece: the relationship between sport and democratization. We will see that sport, by promoting a sense of egalitarianism and unity among the empowered members of democratizing communities, played an important role in consolidating and extending democratization in ancient Greece.
Before proceeding, it is necessary to give brief consideration to terminology, chronology, and evidence. It is difficult to discuss the relationship between sport and democracy in ancient Greece because the term “democracy” resists satisfactory definition. The standard approach is to define “democracy” on the basis of the presence or absence of certain political institutions, such as free and fair elections. However, debate continues about precisely what institutions are constitutive of a democracy, and about whether each such institution is or is not present in any given time or place. (It is, for instance, frequently not obvious whether an election should be understood as having been free and fair.) Moreover, defining democracy solely on the basis of political institutions is problematic because it ignores the important ramifications of nonpolitical forms of inequality.2
The approach adopted here is to focus not on democracy but on democratization, which will be conceptualized in two ways: as either a condition in which the balance between hierarchical and egalitarian relationships in a given situation is tilted strongly toward the latter, or the process that brings such a balance into being, maintains it, or extends it further toward egalitarianism. It is important to bear in mind that democratization as defined here goes well beyond the realm of political institutions. However, the absence of detailed statistical information about ancient Greece makes it difficult to establish the level of societal democratization directly, and so democratization will be tracked primarily through changes in political institutions. Such changes do not represent the only or even the most important form of democratization, but they are, given the available evidence, the most easily documented form of democratization and offer a useful if imperfect proxy for democratization broadly construed.
A second important issue that merits discussion is chronology. The relationship between sport and democratization evolved throughout the course of Greek history, and it would be impossible in the space available here to explore in a satisfactory fashion such a vast stretch of time. We will, therefore, focus on the seventh through the fourth centuries BCE.3 During that time a wave of democratization swept through the Greek world and the practice of sport underwent major changes. The period between 700 and 300, as a result, represents a particularly interesting, important, and illuminating phase of the relationship between sport and democratization in ancient Greece.
A final issue is that, because of the nature of the evidence at our disposal, it is possible to trace in detail the relationship between sport and democratization in the seventh through fourth centuries in just two Greek communities: Sparta and Athens. That is unfortunate because there were, in the time period under consideration here, several hundred distinct, autonomous political units in the Greek world, each of which had its own, unique sociopolitical history. That said, Sparta and Athens were among the largest and most influential Greek states, and they represented lines of development that played themselves out, to a greater or lesser extent, in a substantial fraction of Greek communities. Thus, while what happened in Sparta and Athens cannot give us a full picture of the relationship between sport and democratization, the course of events in those two communities does offer a good general sense of what was going on throughout the Greek world.
The remainder of this essay is divided into four main sections. The first looks at the trend toward democratizing sociopolitical systems that made itself felt starting around 700. The second contains a discussion of the evolution of Greek sport in the years after 700. The third explores four different mechanisms by means of which sport fostered a sense of egalitarianism and unity among the empowered members of democratizing communities: by serving as a model of and for egalitarian relationships, by promoting meritocratic status competition, by acting as a source of social capital, and by promoting group closure. The final section of this essay deals with athletic nudity and its effect on democratization.
Around 700 the level of democratization in the Greek world was relatively limited, as was the extent of participation in sport. Scholarly debate about the nature of the sociopolitical systems in place in various Greek communities in 700 continues, but there is fairly broad consensus that social and political life in most communities was dominated by men from a comparatively small number of wealthy and powerful families. There was a good deal of sport in the Greek world at that point in time, but it was open primarily to men from those same wealthy and powerful families. Moreover, there was little in the way of formally organized athletic competitions or purpose-built athletic facilities. The Olympics was the only regularly scheduled athletic contest in Greece, and formally organized athletic competitions took place primarily in the context of funeral games for prominent men, and hence were intermittent. Architectural spaces specifically dedicated to sport in the form of facilities for practice and competition could be found in neither sanctuaries nor cities.4
A shift toward more democratized sociopolitical systems began in the seventh century, accelerated in the sixth century, and continued in the fifth and much of the fourth centuries. In communities throughout the Greek world men from less wealthy, but still prosperous, families gradually won social privileges and political power. To follow that process, we need some idea as to the nature of the involved parties.
Starting in the seventh century there were typically three more or less distinct social groups in each Greek community. The dividing lines between these groups were based on economic considerations, but also carried over into matters of lifestyle and politics. Plousioi were people from households that were so wealthy and that had enough labor at their disposal from women, slaves, and hired dependents that their adult male members never had to work. Some adult men who were plousioi worked anyway, but Greek males placed a high value on having the leisure to pursue interests such as politics and less value on work as a good thing in and of itself. Penetes were people from households that were prosperous but not rich enough that their adult males were entirely free from labor. The vast majority of households in all times and places in ancient Greece supported themselves through agriculture, and the climate and topography in most places where Greeks lived was such that farms required intense labor at some times of the year and relatively little at others. Adult men who were penetes had to work hard on their farms for part of every year, but also had enough labor at their disposal from women, slaves, and dependents to enjoy a considerable amount of leisure during slack periods. Ptochoi were people from households in which the adult male members had to work regularly, typically because they could not afford to buy slaves or hire laborers. The people in this category ranged from farmers who made a decent but not spectacular living to outright beggars (Markle 1985 and Morris 2000: 109–54).
The sociopolitical struggles that began in the seventh century were fought largely between plousioi and penetes. The ptochoi were almost always largely excluded from social and political influence. What we would call elites were thus more or less the plousioi, and the nonelites were, for our purposes, mostly the penetes. There was not, of course, perfect unanimity among the plousioi in any given community, but a community’s elites did tend to act together with some frequency in order to defend their collective interests. The penetes were initially even less unified than the plousioi but gradually developed a sense of being a group with similar priorities.5
At the beginning of the seventh century, the plousioi in most communities wielded a great deal of social and political influence, but in order to maintain positions of leadership they needed to exhibit a willingness and ability to serve their communities. That entailed regularly demonstrating both martial prowess and generosity. In the seventh and sixth centuries, plousioi in much of the Greek world sought to rewrite this unwritten social contract. During this time period, Greek political and military institutions were becoming increasingly formalized, and plousioi began to ground their power in control of those institutions. They also claimed that they came from superior lineages and hence were entitled to inherit without question positions of leadership, and reinforced those claims by seeking to generate social status through conspicuous consumption.
The attempts of the plousioi to rewrite the social contract met with active resistance from the penetes. The penetes probably initially had no aspirations to social or political dominance; the problem was one of incentives. As things stood around 700, plousioi legitimized their positions of leadership through showing an active concern for the well-being of other members of the community and thus had a strong motivation to do so. If the plousioi could base their power on heredity and conspicuous consumption, they would have little motivation to concern themselves with the welfare of others. That would not have been to the benefit of the penetes and was in any case a recipe for a dysfunctional community.
Moreover, military developments shifted the balance of power in favor of the penetes. During the seventh century Greek military forces became more organized than they had been previously, and communities began to field unified forces of heavily armed infantrymen, called hoplites, who fought in a tight, rectangular formation called a phalanx.6 Phalanxes consisted primarily of plousioi and penetes because Greek soldiers paid for their own arms and armor, and hoplite equipment was relatively expensive.7 Penetes could afford this expense, ptochoi generally could not. Ptochoi served in their community’s army, but as lightly armed fighters who were only peripherally attached to the phalanx; in later periods, when some Greek communities developed fleets of oared warships, many ptochoi served as rowers. Insofar as plousioi had long made claims to power based in part on the fact that they played a particularly important role in the defense of their communities, the increasing military prominence of penetes put them on more of an equal footing with the plousioi.
The penetes responded to the maneuvers of the plousioi by overtly rejecting the attempts of the latter to use birth and wealth to set themselves apart. The penetes articulated an alternative set of goals and social rules that emphasized cooperation and sacrifice in the interests of the community and the importance of being an ordinary citizen of a well-ordered community.
The struggle between plousioi and penetes was played out on these terms for much of the seventh and sixth centuries in individual communities all over the Greek world. In some communities the plousioi won out for a time and established themselves as a hereditary aristocracy; only members of their families could hold magistracies, and they inherited fixed positions on top of their community’s social and political hierarchy.
Over the course of time, however, the penetes gained the upper hand in most places, and a new and more democratized sociopolitical system gradually took shape in much of the Greek world. The penetes, who do not seem to have had grand ambitions in 700, came little by little to expect and demand something approximating social and political equality with the plousioi.
That new arrangement resulted in a great deal of democratization in many Greek communities. The plousioi probably represented roughly 4–5 percent of the households in any given town, penetes 30–50 percent.8 The number of men in the dominant group in each town thus became roughly six to ten times larger than it had been. This process of democratization was evident all over the Greek world in the sixth and fifth centuries, but each community was in a sense its own unique case, and the extant sources are such that we can follow it most closely in Sparta and in Athens.
Sparta does not typically figure prominently in modern discussions of ancient Greek democracy, but the wave of democratization that swept through the Greek world starting in the seventh century arrived in Sparta at a relatively early date. Sparta controlled an unusually large territory, as the result of a long campaign of conquest that first gave it control of all of Laconia, the region in which the town of Sparta was located, and then all of Messenia, the region to the west (see Map 13.1).
Map 13.1 Map of Laconia and Messenia.
Before the seventh century the sociopolitical situation in Sparta seems to have been typical in that social and political power was concentrated in the hands of the local plousioi. Change came as the result of a revolt among the conquered Messenians sometime around the middle of the seventh century. Suppressing the revolt required a long and costly war that put immense stress on Spartan society. In the aftermath of that rebellion, Spartan society underwent major changes. Many, perhaps all, of the penetes in Sparta were given large land grants in Messenia with attached serfs called helots, who produced enough food and income that the penetes no longer needed to work to support themselves. Put another way, Sparta’s penetes were converted into plousioi by exploiting the land and labor of the conquered Messenians.
Roughly contemporaneous changes in Sparta’s sociopolitical system effected a good deal of democratization. The sovereign power in the Spartan state was given to an assembly in which all Spartan male citizens, that is, plousioi and former penetes, could vote. All male citizens also had the right to vote in elections by means of which magistrates were chosen, and could themselves stand for office. Furthermore, Sparta’s penetes were given the opportunity to compete on relatively equal terms with plousioi in status-generating activities of all kinds. Democratization and the concomitant expansion of egalitarian relationships between what had been the plousioi and the penetes of Sparta is reflected in the fact that Spartan male citizens called each other homoioi (equals).
Despite the impact of the sociopolitical reforms enacted in Sparta, much inequality remained. Sparta had two hereditary kings who wielded considerable power. Families that had been among the plousioi before the middle of the seventh century continued to enjoy privileged social and political positions for a long period of time, so that some homoioi were, in practice, more equal than others (Hodkinson 2000: 399–445). A substantial fraction of the inhabitants of the Spartan state consisted of people who were enslaved, and women had only limited social privileges and never had any political rights.9
Democratization in Athens unfolded at a slower pace than in Sparta, but more fully. For much of the seventh century Athens was dominated by a small hereditary aristocracy called the Eupatridai (literally “descendants of good fathers”) and was governed by nine magistrates selected by and from among the Eupatridai, and by a council of about three hundred men consisting of former magistrates. Over the course of the sixth century sociopolitical changes initiated a process of democratization. The landmarks in that process were two separate sets of reforms, one instituted by Solon sometime around 590, and a second by Kleisthenes in 508.
The Eupatridai, probably driven by fear of a violent revolution, empowered Solon to make whatever changes he believed necessary to quell unrest among the Athenian populace. Solon assigned every family in Athens to one of four property classes based on how much their farm produced, decreed that magistrates would be elected, and made it possible for any man from a family in the top one or two property classes to run for office, regardless of whether or not he was one of the Eupatridai. He also gave every male citizen of Athens the right to appeal a magistrate’s decision to a jury drawn from men from all four property classes. Athenian juries as constituted by Solon consisted mostly of men from outside the ranks of the plousioi and wielded significant power, and in this way, not just the penetes but also the ptochoi were given a major share in the operation of Athens’s government.
In 508 another round of reforms, this one overseen by Kleisthenes, gave Athens an array of democratic political institutions. Kleisthenes began by creating 10 new, identically structured political groupings called tribes, and every free adult male resident of the Athenian state was assigned to a tribe. All of these men, and their male descendants, were citizens. Kleisthenes gave the sovereign power in the Athenian state to an assembly that met 40 times a year and in which all citizens over the age of 20 had the right to vote. On a day-to-day basis Athens was run by a new governing body called the Council of 500, which consisted of 50 men selected from each tribe.
Even in Athens, however, democratization occurred within circumscribed boundaries. Ptochoi, who were disenfranchised in most communities, were unusually influential in Athens, in no small part because in the early fifth century Athens built the largest navy in the Greek world, and ptochoi manned the fleet. They thus became an irreplaceable part of the Athenian military and could make a good claim to social and political privileges on that basis. However, the property classes set up by Solon continued to operate, and many positions in the Athenian government were open only to wealthier citizens. In addition, established families that were wealthy and powerful before 508 continued for well over a century to occupy influential positions in the Athenian government out of all proportion to their actual numbers. Women remained socially marginalized, and a considerable proportion of the population consisted of slaves who were denied even the most basic rights.10
We have seen that sociopolitical privileges and sport participation were both primarily the preserve of elites before 700 and that starting in the seventh century nonelites, more specifically penetes, began to win sociopolitical privileges in some Greek communities. Parallel changes in sport began somewhat later, in the early decades of the sixth century (Christesen 2007b). Major new athletic contests were established at Delphi (in 586), Isthmia (580), and Nemea (573). Communities began to found regularly scheduled athletic contests such as the Panathenaia in Athens (566), and the number of such games multiplied rapidly. Comparable changes also took place in architectural provisions for sport. The earliest stadia were built starting around 550; the earliest gymnasia, places set aside for everyday athletic training, were founded at roughly the same time. Even venerable Olympia was not immune to change; sometime in the early sixth century it received its first permanent stone architecture in the form of a temple dedicated to Zeus and Hera. This edifice was the start of a major building program that in the succeeding decades brought the construction of numerous treasuries (small buildings for the storage and display of valuable dedications) and the first formal stadium.11 Furthermore, individuals began to pour resources into highlighting their participation in sport and their athletic successes. Athletic scenes became common on Greek pottery; the absolute number of surviving Athenian black- figure vases with athletic scenes from the first half of the sixth century is dramatically higher than in the preceding half century, as is the percentage of surviving Athenian black-figure vases with athletic scenes.12 At the same time athletic victors began to pay sculptors to carve statues of them and to hire poets to write epinikia, odes that were specially commissioned to celebrate athletic triumphs.13
Since sport had been a basic part of the Greek social landscape long before the beginning of the sixth century, these changes are difficult to explain unless they are understood as the result of an expansion of sport participation to a broader segment of the Greek populace than had been the case in the past. A broadening of participation in sport is most immediately obvious in Sparta, where former penetes were expected to use their new freedom from labor to undergo as youths long and arduous training to be citizens and soldiers and to serve the Spartan state in those capacities as adults. Regular, mandatory participation in sport figured prominently in that program of training and service. Xenophon (c.430–354), one of our best sources for sport in Sparta, notes that:
Once Lycurgus [a legendary lawgiver believed to have single-handedly designed the Spartan sociopolitical system] realized that those who keep in training develop good skin, firm flesh, and good health from their food, whereas the lazy look bloated, ugly, and weak, he did not overlook this matter either. But although he saw that anyone who trained hard of his own free will appeared to give his body sufficient exercise, he ordered that in the gymnasion the oldest man present should take care of everything, so that they never exercised less than the food they consumed required. (Lakedaimonion Politeia (Constitution of the Spartans 5.8–9), trans. M. Lipka, slightly modified)
When discussing the regulations of the Spartan army, Xenophon points out that all Spartiates “are ordered by law to take exercise while they are on campaign” and that they do so in the morning and evening prior to eating (Constitution of the Spartans 12.5–7). (For a much more detailed discussion of sport in Sparta, see Chapter 9 in this volume.)
Sparta, however, was decidedly unusual because its conquest of Messenia enriched many of its penetes so that they could behave like plousioi, and for that reason the situation in Athens is more typical and hence more instructive. The extent to which nonelites took part in sport in sixth- and fifth-century Athens has been the subject of considerable debate, so it is worth reviewing the relevant evidence in some detail.14 (For an overview of sport in Athens, see Chapter 10.)
Athens made abundant provision for sport, particularly after the democratization effected by the reforms of Kleisthenes in 508. At the end of the sixth century Athens had three separate public gymnasia in addition to an unknown number of privately owned palaistrai, at a time when there were probably about a thousand adult male plousioi in the entire polity.15 (On gymnasia and palaistrai, see Chapter 19.) Both the state government of Athens and the local governments of its numerous constituent communities arranged an array of festivals that provided opportunities to participate in athletic competitions. It is particularly noteworthy that a number of athletic contests were founded in Athens soon after Kleisthenes’ reforms. In an analysis of Athenian festivals that included competitions, Robin Osborne has observed that there was “perhaps a particularly high frequency of competitive innovations in the 50 years after 510” (1993: 27), and Nick Fisher has shown that “in the years immediately following the establishment of the new tribes [as part of the Kleisthenic reforms] there was undoubtedly a massive expansion in numbers of singers, dancers, and athletes competing” (2011: 187). The fact that there was a major growth in government-sponsored sport competitions in the years immediately after an array of democratic political institutions was established strongly suggests that participation in sport was not limited to a small group of wealthy men.
The textual sources from Athens also attest to regular participation in sport on the part of boys and men from families that were not counted among the plousioi. The costs of mounting athletic competitions at festivals were defrayed by having wealthy individuals, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes not, pay for part or all of them. This produced complaints, as is evident in a treatise called the Constitution of the Athenians written by an unknown author, typically called the Old Oligarch, around 430. The writer protests that:
The people have spoiled the athletic and musical activities at Athens because they thought them unfitting (they know they can’t do them). In the training of dramatic choruses and in providing for athletic contests . . . they know that it is the wealthy who lead the choruses, but the people who are led in them, and it is the wealthy who provide for athletic contests, but the people who are presided over . . . in the games. At least the people think themselves worthy of taking money for singing, running, dancing. (1.13, trans. C. Marchant)
The Old Oligarch’s acerbic comments have an obvious satiric element, but they would have been incomprehensible to his contemporaries if participation in sport was limited to plousioi.
Another helpful passage can be found in the writings of Xenophon, which include the following (almost certainly fictional) statement addressed by Socrates to Pericles, to allay the latter’s concerns about civil strife tearing Athens apart: “No, no Pericles, don’t think the wickedness of the Athenians so utterly past remedy. Don’t you see what good discipline they maintain in their fleets, how well they obey the umpires in athletic contests, how they take orders from their chorus trainers as readily as any?” (Memorabilia 3.5.18, trans. E. Marchant, slightly modified). This passage is built upon an unspoken assumption of widespread participation in sport; good behavior on the part of a small minority of wealthy elites would hardly have been cause for optimism about the future of the Athenian democratic state.
If, as seems virtually certain, the sixth century saw sport participation expand to a broader segment of the populace than had been the case in the past, the identity of the new athletes becomes a question of considerable interest. Broad swathes of the inhabitants of the Greek world can be immediately eliminated as potential candidates. There is no doubt that, leaving aside initiation rites and the special case of Sparta, Greek females were habitually excluded from sport. (On female participation in sport in ancient Greece, see Chapter 16.) Slaves of both genders represent another substantial group that was debarred from sport participation, not just by social but also by legal barriers. (On the exclusion of slaves from Greek sport, see Chapter 17.)
Once women and slaves are removed from the equation, there are only two possible groups of any size left: free males from families of penetes and of ptochoi. The dividing line between these two groups was never sharp, and there must have been considerable variation spatially and temporally in regard to who participated in sport. For example, ptochoi enjoyed significantly higher standing in Athens than in most other Greek communities, and that may well have been reflected to some degree in sport. That said, the evidence suggests that the sixth-century transformation of Greek sport was the result of sharply increased participation by penetes and that ptochoi did not take part in sport in large numbers with any regularity.
The sixth-century changes in Greek sport need to be read against the background of contemporary social, political, and military changes. A prominent role in the defense of the community, social and political privileges, and playing sports were in 700 all defining traits of the plousioi. As penetes became part of hoplite phalanxes and gained social and political privileges, they increasingly enjoyed social standing and social power (the ability to affect the behavior and beliefs of others) that made them similar to if not the precise equals of plousioi, and it would have been remarkable if the penetes had, as part of that process, not eagerly taken up the practice of sport, long the preserve of elites. Ptochoi, on the other hand, remained for the most part militarily and politically marginalized, and thus were in a very different position from penetes when it came to sport participation.
Changes in military practice, sociopolitical arrangements, and sport thus all proceeded together. This is nicely illustrated in the case of Athens by the fact that in the fifth century (and quite possibly earlier) Athenian cavalrymen, hoplites, and archers (but not sailors in the navy) were required to make a yearly contribution toward the maintenance of the shrine of Apollo Lykeios at the Lyceum gymnasion.16 The number of cavalrymen and archers in the Athenian army was relatively small, so most of the men making contributions were hoplites. The Lyceum was regularly used for military training exercises, and Apollo Lykeios was a patron deity for the Athenian army. The presence of both hoplites and athletes at a gymnasion was not coincidental. Three different groups of men – those who enjoyed social and political privileges, those who served in the hoplite phalanx, and those who regularly participated in sport – were largely identical in regard to their members. All three groups consisted largely of plousioi and penetes.
Practical considerations relating to opportunity and means must also have played important roles in creating a de facto exclusion of ptochoi from sport. Regular participation in sport required a considerable amount of free time, which boys and men from families of plousioi and penetes had at their disposal for at least some parts of the year, but which was in much shorter supply among the ptochoi.
Regular participation in sport was also founded on competence developed through formal training provided by paidotribai (athletic coaches), whose fees were within the financial reach of penetes but would have stretched the resources of most ptochoi. Paidotribai seem to have charged roughly 10 to 15 drachmai per year per student. Some sense of the relative cost of hiring a paidotribes can be had from the facts that bare subsistence food for a family of four cost about half a drachma a day and that full equipment for a hoplite soldier cost 75–100 drachmai. Most penetes, who by definition came from the upper half of the socioeconomic pyramid, would have had no great difficulty in paying for their sons’ athletic training, whereas the same sums would have represented a much larger burden for ptochoi. Moreover, given the social importance of sport, families of penetes would have seen such training as something approximating a necessity.17 In one of his speeches in Plato’s Crito (50d), Socrates suggests that Athenian fathers saw giving their sons a proper training in sport and music as a powerful moral obligation. The relationship between wealth and athletic training is evident in Plato’s Protagoras, in which the eponymous character discusses the practice of families sending their sons to tutors to learn reading and writing, music, and sport and observes that “this is what people do who are most able; and the most able are the wealthiest. Their sons begin to go to tutors at the earliest age and stop going to them at the latest age” (326c, trans. W. Lamb, slightly modified). (On paidotribai, see Chapter 14.)
It should not come as a surprise, then, that Greek hoplites tended to show both familiarity with and interest in sport. For example, when a force of roughly ten thousand Greek hoplites serving as mercenaries was forced to make a fighting withdrawal from the center of the Persian Empire in 401, an undertaking that consumed several months, they entertained themselves on numerous occasions by competing against each other in athletic contests (Xenophon Anabasis 1.2.10, 4.8.25, 5.5.6). Most of these men came from families with sufficient resources to pay for hoplite armor, but they were by no means elites in the sense that they came from the very wealthiest families in their respective communities; the sons of those families had little incentive to hire on as mercenaries in foreign campaigns. Most came from among the penetes and had been exposed to sport from an early age.
It seems safe, therefore, to conclude that the sixth century saw the extension of the habit of regularly participating in sport to most if not all boys and men from families of penetes, in Sparta and Athens, and probably in most other Greek communities as well. That in turn makes it possible to supply some rough numbers for levels of sport participation in the Greek world in the sixth and fifth centuries. Plousioi made up roughly 4–5 percent of the total number of households in any given Greek community, penetes somewhere between 30 and 50 percent. The entry of penetes into sport thus increased the number of regular sport participants between six to ten times. In the specific case of Athens, there were probably something like twenty-five thousand adult male citizens in 500 BCE (out of a total population of around a hundred and seventy-five thousand), which translates to roughly a thousand plousioi and ten thousand penetes. One can easily see how a shift from having a thousand to eleven thousand regular participants would fundamentally alter the practice of sport in Athens.
We have to this point seen that starting in the seventh century Greek communities such as Sparta and Athens experienced a significant amount of democratization and that starting in the sixth century major changes took place in Greek sport, as men from nonelite families began to participate in large numbers. These two developments were clearly linked; as men from families of penetes gained sociopolitical privileges, they found themselves in a position to be able to participate in sport. In that sense, democratization in society resulted in democratization in sport, because sociopolitical change opened up an activity that had previously been largely the preserve of a small number of elites. However, sport also had an important effect on society, because, by promoting a sense of egalitarianism and unity among the empowered members of newly democratized communities, it did much to foster democratization in society. There were four separate mechanisms involved, each of which will be examined in turn.
Egalitarian relationships between the plousioi and penetes in individual Greek communities, were, initially at least, not easily formed. The more inclusive sociopolitical system that came into being in the sixth century, in which plousioi and penetes were expected to relate to each other in a largely egalitarian fashion, was the result of a long and difficult struggle. Plousioi had sought to create hierarchical relationships between themselves and all other members of their communities, penetes included, so the expectation of egalitarian interactions between plousioi and penetes was not necessarily easily realized. There was in addition a simple problem with numbers. The size of the group of men that enjoyed full social and political privileges in any given community became roughly six to ten times larger than it had been, and that in and of itself created difficulties in forming networks of egalitarian relationships among the members of that group.
Sport participation helped promote the creation of the requisite egalitarian relationships between plousioi and penetes, and hence helped promote democratization, by serving as a model of and for such relationships. In order to understand how sport modeled egalitarian relationships, it is helpful to think of sport as a ritualized activity. Use of the term “ritualized activity” typically carries the explicit or implicit assumption that almost any activity can potentially take on the qualities of a ritual to a greater or lesser extent. An extraordinarily wide range of activities has been characterized as ritualized, and numerous attempts have been made to find commonalities shared by all ritualized activities. Perhaps the most productive approach to establishing suitable parameters for separating ritualized from nonritualized activities is that outlined by Catherine Bell. She argues that ritualized activities must have an element of performance (i.e., they must involve participants doing something or acting something out) and are distinguished from other activities not so much by their content as by being contrasted with more mundane actions and by being framed as different and special ways of acting (1992: 37–168 and passim).
It requires no great intuitive leap to see that sport can easily become a ritualized activity. Sport is inherently performative and is framed as being set apart and different. Johan Huizinga, in his famous Homo Ludens, characterized sport as a form of play and defined play as a “free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life” (1950 (1938): 13). If other considerations, such as the provision of special playing fields and uniforms (or, in this case, nudity), are taken into account, the identification of sport as at least a potentially ritualized activity becomes almost an inevitability. The ritualized dimension of sport is reflected in the regularity with which it is compared to religion.18
Ritualized activities are “flexible forms of symbolic activity that reaffirm cultural values and a sense of order” (Bell 2005: 7849). As such, they can serve as models of and for certain kinds of social relationships. As models of society, ritualized activities have the capacity to present idealized and simplified visions of how society and relations between individuals could or should be.19 The anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously described cockfights staged by the inhabitants of Bali as “a story they tell themselves about themselves” (1973: 448). The fact that ritualized activities are by definition set apart from everyday life is particularly significant, as they are for this reason immune to many of the mundane necessities of existence that otherwise can generate a divergence between the normative and normal. As a result, ritualized activities frequently, perhaps typically, reflect social norms with a degree of faithfulness that is otherwise difficult to achieve.20
Greek sport can be understood as presenting a paradigm of plousioi and penetes interacting as equals. Sport was an activity set apart from everyday life and offered a figurative level playing field that strongly muted status differences based on factors such as lineage and wealth that were prominent in other contexts. To the extent that there were status differences among participants, they were largely the product of demonstrated competence at sport. Moreover, the mere willingness of two men to compete against each other in sport was an implicit statement of their relative equality. Sport thus provided a particularly clear model of what egalitarian relationships between plousioi and penetes might look like.
The impact of the egalitarian relationships embodied in sport was greatly amplified by the fact that they also served as a model for behavior in other social contexts. The power of ritualized activities to shape behavior is greatly enhanced through performance. The participants in ritualized activities do not simply hear about societal norms, they themselves enact those norms. As Geertz put it, “In a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world” (1973: 112). Performance constitutes an essential bridge between ritual activities serving as models of social norms and as models for actual behavior because participants reproduce idealized forms of behavior they are expected to manifest in some form in their daily lives.
The behavior enacted in ritualized activities teaches habits and dispositions that shape the actions of individuals in all settings and thus serves as a model for activity outside the ritualized sphere. Bell has argued that regular participation in ritualized activities physically inculcates the thought and behavioral patterns underpinning such activities and that “as bodies . . . absorb the logic of spaces and temporal events, they then project these structural schemes, reproducing liturgical arrangements out of their own ‘sense’ of the fitness of things.”21
The influence of the model of egalitarian relationships provided by sport on behavior in other contexts was particularly strong because of the identity of the participants. Democratization resulted in a sociopolitical system in which plousioi and penetes were expected to interact as relative equals. Most plousioi and penetes participated in sport, and so the people involved in egalitarian relationships in sport were exactly the same as those who were expected to form egalitarian relationships in other contexts, an overlap that made the transfer of behavioral patterns from one to the other a much more straightforward proposition.
The drawing of a connection between meritocratic status competition and democratization requires some justification, because meritocratic competition can have the effect of undercutting the very egalitarianism that lies at the heart of democratization. Meritocratic systems have the potential to inhibit democratization because they stress equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. A purely merit-based approach entails giving the largest possible number of individuals equal chances to compete to become unequal. The immediate rewards go to the winners of such competitions, and, as more merit-based competition takes place, more inequality is generated. Furthermore, perfect equality of opportunity is an unrealizable ideal, and merit-based competition can reproduce or extend extant social inequalities by assigning rewards based on the results of competitions in which some individuals have advantages accruing directly or indirectly from factors, such as inherited wealth, that have nothing to do with talent or motivation.
Sport can impede democratization because it is an arena for meritocratic competition that invariably creates status differences between winners and losers. As the sport sociologist John Hargreaves has noted, “sport approximates more to the ideal of a meritocratic social order than any other sphere of social life” (1986: 111). When sport participants compete against each other, the rewards of success are differentially distributed, which creates inequalities.
Nonetheless, meritocratic competition in sport promoted egalitarian relationships among the plousioi and penetes, and hence democratization, because status hierarchies based on success in sports competitions did not necessarily align with those based on lineage and wealth, which in turn reduced net inequalities. One of the ways sport contributed to democratization in ancient Greece was that it offered a form of meritocratic competition that assigned status in ways that cut across and diminished the importance of distinctions based on lineage and wealth. During the seventh and sixth centuries, plousioi had sought to tie social status to lineage and wealth, and those traits always remained important sources of power and privilege, even in the most democratized communities. Sport represented an alternative, nonheritable source of status and social power. The continuing importance of sport as a source of social status in later periods is perhaps most evident from the facts that in the fifth century a limited number of great athletes literally became objects of worship and that athletic success throughout Greek history could serve as a springboard to a political career (see Chapter 20 as well as Kurke 1993 and van Nijf 2001). On a more mundane basis, sport shaped everyday relationships between males from families of plousioi and penetes; most of them played sports with some regularity, and it was an important means of determining relative standing. The nature of the relationship between two individuals could be profoundly affected by the outcome of their competitive interaction on the playing field, regardless of their relative standing in other social spheres. The leveling potential of athletic competition is evident in the comment of Alexander the Great to the effect that he would enter a footrace at the Olympic Games when he had other kings as competitors (Plutarch Alexander 4.10).
The importance of the equalizing capacity of sport was amplified by the fact that it was impossible to transfer athletic skill reliably from one generation to the next, as opposed to lineage and wealth, which were entirely heritable. The relative stability of distinctions based on lineage and wealth made it feasible for families to accumulate on a gradual basis social power in amounts sufficient to create relatively steep social pyramids. The sharp differentials in athletic ability within and among generations of families pushed in the other direction, and, by introducing an element of instability, acted as a check on the formation of steep social pyramids.
To explore the relationship between sport, social capital, and democratization in ancient Greece, we must begin with a definition of the term “social capital” and distinguish between origins, substance, and effects.22 Social capital originates in repeated and cooperative interactions, which frequently focus on achieving a shared goal, between people of similar social standing. The substance of social capital consists of interpersonal networks built around egalitarian relationships. The formation of social capital has the effect of promoting solidarity, cooperative collective action, and consensus among the members of a network.
One of the most important developments in sport sociology in the past two decades has been the appearance of a significant body of scholarship that leaves no doubt that sport can be a crucial source of social capital. To give but one example of a substantial collection of work, in 2006 Ørnulf Seippel published the results of a study of the relationship between sport and social capital among members of sports clubs in Norway. Seippel found that “the analyses support previous studies and confirm that being a member of voluntary organizations in general . . . but also sport organizations in particular, has a positive effect on certain kinds of general social trust and some political attitudes and activity” (2006: 178). The data and his analysis of that data led him to conclude that sport was indeed a source of social capital.
The relationship between sport and social capital ties into an exploration of sport as a democratizing force in ancient Greece because social capital can play a pivotal role in creating and sustaining democratization. The roots of recent scholarly work on this subject stretch back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40), in which Tocqueville argued that the “habits of the heart” that sustained American democracy were nurtured in a wide array of voluntary associations that helped create a participatory culture and egalitarian relationships. In the past twenty years Robert Putnam has carried out a seminal series of studies that has demonstrated that social capital helps ensure the smooth functioning of democratic political institutions. Putnam also pointed to sport as a particularly important source of social capital.23
The insight that bonds of friendship formed through sport can have strong political ramifications goes back, as so much else, to Plato. As David and Richard Ned Lebow put it, Plato believed that “at the personal, society, and interstate levels, cooperative relationships are created and sustained through a dense network of social interaction and reciprocal obligations that build common identities along with mutual respect and affection” (Lebow and Lebow forthcoming). Plato saw those interactions as taking place in a variety of different social and political contexts, including sport. Pausanias, one of the characters in Plato’s Symposium, argues that:
The Persian empire is absolute; that is why it condemns erotic attachments as well as philosophy and sport. It is no good for rulers if the people they rule cherish ambitions for themselves or form strong bonds of friendship with one another. That these are precisely the effects of philosophy, sport, and especially of erotic attachments is a lesson the tyrants of Athens learned directly from their own experience. (182b–c, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, slightly modified)
The recent scholarship that demonstrates sport to be an important source of social capital, and social capital to be an important factor in democratic societies, thus extends and reinforces ideas with strong roots in ancient Greece.
The conclusion to be drawn from the preceding discussion is clear: the social capital formed in sport can be an important wellspring of democratization. More than anything else this is because social capital formation in sport involves the creation of social networks built around egalitarian relationships. When democratization is understood as a process involving a shift in the balance between egalitarian and hierarchical relationships toward the former, the capacity of sport to facilitate the growth of social capital and hence the growth of egalitarian relationships means that sport has a corresponding capacity to facilitate democratization. This relationship between sport, social capital, and democratization was operative in ancient Greece, and continues to hold true today.
The history of democratization can be seen as a story of exclusion retreating before successive waves of change that bring progressively greater levels of inclusion. As John Dunn put it in an account of the history of democracy, from ancient to modern times, “Democracy’s triumph has been the collapse of one exclusion after another, in ever-greater indignity, with the collapse of the exclusion of women, the most recent, hastiest, and most abashed of all” (2005: 136).
The history of democratization could, however, also be told the other way around and treated as the story of the forms of exclusion that accompany and enable broadened inclusion. If inclusion is understood as involving membership in a group with some degree of coherence, inclusion and exclusion are inextricably linked. Groups achieve coherence in part through closure, the maintenance of boundaries that separate them from others, and hence through exclusion (Giddens 2006: 496). The significant expansion of a group is likely to entail the construction of new boundaries, so that inclusion necessitates exclusion.
One of the more unusual aspects of the relationship between sport and democratization in ancient Greece is that sport promoted democratization by serving as a means of social exclusion that helped create a clear boundary around newly formed dominant groups consisting of plousioi and penetes. The more inclusive vision involving the sharing of social and political privileges between plousioi and penetes took root in part because the plousioi and penetes in most communities came together to form a single, coherent group that maintained relatively egalitarian relationships among its members. That coherence was achieved in no small measure through the construction of boundaries that separated males born into families of plousioi and penetes from other members of their communities.
Sport contributed significantly to group closure among plousioi and penetes. In some sense this can be understood in very simple terms, as part of the process of the formation of social capital, in which the creation of in-group loyalties that comes with the growth of social capital can be accompanied by a sharpened sense of difference with out-groups. In addition, sport can be seen as part of a distinctive lifestyle that helps define a particular group: most plousioi and penetes regularly participated in sport; most other people in their communities did not.
One unique feature of Greek sport that greatly magnified its ability to create boundaries was nudity. Sociologists and social psychologists who study group formation have found that membership is frequently linked to clothing; a distinctive, shared style of dress helps bind group members together (see, for instance, Worchel and Coutant 2001: 466). In the case of ancient Greece, however, it was not clothing but its absence that was important.
The custom of athletic nudity was a relatively late arrival; Greeks did not begin exercising in the nude until the seventh century. Throughout the Bronze Age (c.3000–c.1100) and Early Iron Age (c.1100–c.700), Greeks played sports but always did so wearing at least some clothing. This is most evident in the Homeric poems, where men invariably compete wearing a loincloth (see, for instance, Iliad 23.710). The only exceptions came in the context of footraces held as part of initiation rites, the participants in which sometimes wore an exotic outfit or went nude (Bonfante 1989: 553 and passim; cf. Leitao 1995). Those occasions were, however, by definition unusual and very far from being something that happened every day. The relevant literary, artistic, and archaeological evidence shows that by the middle of the sixth century it had become standard practice for Greek men to do all their sports, other than equestrian events, in the nude. The beginnings of athletic nudity cannot be dated more precisely than somewhere between roughly 700 and 575, and it is in any case likely that it took a good deal of time for this custom, which represented a radical innovation, to become widely accepted (Christesen 2007a: 353–9; McDonnell 1991). (On sport in Bronze-Age Greece, see Chapter 2; on sport in the Homeric poems, see Chapter 3.)
The habit of stripping down completely for exercise rapidly became something that set the Greeks apart from all of the neighboring cultures in the Mediterranean basin, and it was seen as one of the defining elements that made Greek culture unique. For instance, in Plato’s Republic, one of the speakers proposes that women training for leadership roles in the ideal state should play sports and should do so in the nude. The speaker then adds, “We will ask the critics to drop their usual practice and to be serious for once, and remind them that it was not so long ago that the Greeks thought – as most non-Greeks still think – that it was shocking and ridiculous for men to be seen naked” (452c, trans. D. Lee, slightly modified).
Even among Greeks athletic nudity represented a distinctly anomalous practice, and throughout their history Greeks had a strong distaste for public nudity. Sport was the only exception to the general rule that to be nude in public was a form of humiliation. Spartans seem to have had an unusually relaxed attitude toward nudity but, as Ephraim David has pointed out, “for all its importance, the practice of nudity in Sparta should be kept in its proper perspective: this was not a nudist society. In most public contexts the Spartans, like the other Greeks, were dressed and . . . they were extremely careful about their dress.”24 Furthermore, athletic nudity remained a source of some discomfort, as is evident from the design of palaistrai and gymnasia, both of which used walls to shield their users from outside view. (For more on palaistrai and gymnasia, see Chapter 19.)
Strange as it may seem, Greeks of later periods knew very little about why and how athletic nudity became a widespread custom. A key problem was that the practice of writing careful historical accounts was pioneered by the Greeks, but not until the fifth century, by which time the origins of athletic nudity were largely lost in the mists of time. There was some agreement that the Spartans had something to do with it, but that was about it. Greeks did, however, show notable ingenuity in inventing explanations for it. For example, some people speculated that a runner had tripped over his loincloth and died during a race, and that athletes thereafter took to nudity for safety reasons.25 It is, as a result, difficult to reconstruct the origins of athletic nudity or to explain the reasons for its persistence, but it is possible to say something about its effects with respect to democratization, in part because Thucydides seems to have been exceptionally well informed about this matter.
Most of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War (431–404) focuses on his own time, but he does provide a little background in order to prove that the war about which he was writing was the biggest one ever fought by Greeks. As part of that background he mentions Sparta and provides this information:
The Spartans were the first to adopt the moderate manner of dressing that is now the standard custom, and with respect to all other things the richer citizens conducted themselves in a fashion that as much as possible put them into an equal position with the general populace. The Spartans were the first to strip naked and to disrobe openly and anoint themselves with oil after playing sports in the nude [gymnazein]. Formerly, even in the Olympic Games, the athletes who contended wore loincloths; and it is but a few years since that practice ceased. And even now among non-Greeks, especially among those in Asia Minor, who hold contests in boxing and wrestling, the competitors still wear loincloths.26 (The Peloponnesian War 1.6, trans. P. Christesen)
The account provided by Thucydides indicates that athletic nudity was connected to democratization in Sparta. Immediately after commenting that it was in Sparta that the rich first adopted a relatively simple lifestyle that put them on an equal footing with the other members of their community, he observes that the Spartans were the first to play sports in the nude. This implies that there was some connection between athletic nudity and democratization, but Thucydides did not make the nature of that connection explicit. In order to understand what he was getting at, we need to recall that the plousioi had used conspicuous consumption, which included dressing elaborately, to try to create status differentials between themselves and others. Democratization in Sparta and elsewhere was accompanied by the imposition of social and in some cases legal constraints on conspicuous consumption.27 Thucydides strongly implies, though he does not explicitly claim, that athletic nudity was part of the same process and that playing sports in the nude reduced social inequalities in Sparta.28 His interpretive instincts were undoubtedly sound on this point; as modern-day sociologists have discovered, “the wearing of special clothing, or little clothing at all, tends to mask social differences and buttresses the impression of harmony and lack of social division” (Hargreaves 1986: 169).
Although this subject is not addressed by Thucydides, the introduction of athletic nudity also promoted group closure by giving plousioi and penetes an unusual uniform that set them apart from all other members of their communities. We have already seen that nudity was highly exceptional in ancient Greece, which meant that the men who adopted the practice of athletic nudity took up a custom that visibly distinguished them.
Athletic nudity also contributed to group closure by helping limit sport participation by free but not affluent men, the ptochoi. The extent to which ptochoi would participate in the process of democratization was an open question. Athens gradually moved toward a political system in which ptochoi exercised a good deal of influence, but in most Greek communities they remained socially and politically marginalized straight through the fourth century. Although that clearly had a dampening effect on overall societal democratization, it did serve to consolidate the democratization effected by the extension of social and political privilege to penetes by restricting the size and heterogeneity of the emergent dominant groups in individual Greek communities and thereby facilitating the formation of stable egalitarian relationships between the members of those groups.
The extension of political and social privileges to the ptochoi was in the interests of neither the plousioi nor the penetes, and they took active, and largely effective, steps to prevent that from happening. In some communities ptochoi were excluded from political rights through the imposition of property qualifications (Johnstone 2011: 99–102). However, the effectiveness of legal restrictions of this sort was limited because the privileges at stake were as much social as political, and it was difficult to legislate lifestyles. The plousioi and penetes needed means of excluding the ptochoi socially.
Sport in general and athletic nudity in particular were important means by which plousioi and penetes ensured the continuing marginalization of ptochoi. We have already seen that the combination of the practical necessities of free time and training and of the restricted resources at their disposal meant that it was difficult for ptochoi to participate regularly in sport. As Veblen (1912: 35–67) noted in his acerbic comments on early twentieth-century CE America, leisure activities, because they are economically unproductive, can be an important form of conspicuous consumption. This was certainly true in Greece, where sport was a form of conspicuous consumption that plousioi and penetes could afford, and ptochoi for the most part could not. Sport was, therefore, a convenient means of social exclusion.
Athletic nudity reinforced the exclusionary capacity of sport because it made socioeconomic status apparent in bodily appearance. Regularly exercising in the nude gave athletes a smooth, all-over tan that was unique, because there were no other acceptable contexts for being fully nude on a regular basis. Men from poorer families typically spent much of their time outside working on farms while wearing a short tunic and as a result had the ancient equivalent of a “farmer’s tan.” Alternatively they worked indoors, as craftsmen, and hence were notably pale. These men could come to the gymnasion to exercise, but they had to strip down and in doing so immediately made their socioeconomic status evident to everyone present. That would have acted as a powerful deterrent that kept poorer men from participating in sport. It is probably not coincidental that there were specific Greek words for “white rumped” (leukopygos or leukoproktos) and “dark bottomed” (melampygos) and that the first meant “cowardly and unmanly” and the second “brave like Herakles.”
The multiple dimensions of athletic nudity all contributed meaningfully to the formation of egalitarian relationships between plousioi and penetes. It removed a status marker associated with wealth and thereby helped establish egalitarianism among athletes, and it also promoted group closure by marking out men from families of plousioi and penetes and by helping to restrict sport participation by ptochoi.
As we saw at the beginning of this essay, Aristotle understood sport as an activity that had powerful political ramifications; would-be oligarchs sought to encourage sport participation among the wealthy and to discourage it among the other members of their communities. The preceding exploration of the relationship between democratization and sport has shown that those would-be oligarchs had good reason for acting as they did.
Sport played an important role in consolidating and extending democratization in ancient Greece because it promoted a sense of egalitarianism and unity among the empowered members of democratizing communities. It did so in a number of different ways. Sport served as a model of and for egalitarian relationships among plousioi and penetes. It promoted meritocratic status competition that helped ensure a relatively high degree of egalitarianism among plousioi and penetes. It acted as a source of social capital and thereby helped build cooperative social networks characterized by egalitarian relationships that bound together plousioi and penetes. It helped construct a boundary that separated plousioi and penetes from other members of their communities and thereby helped empowered individuals in newly democratized communities see themselves as members of unified groups. The custom of playing sports in the nude, which appeared in the seventh and sixth centuries, precisely the time that sociopolitical systems and sport were undergoing profound changes, also contributed to democratization. Athletic nudity promoted egalitarianism among sport participants and enhanced the capacity of sport to unify groups of plousioi and penetes by giving them a special “uniform” only they wore with any regularity.
One must always bear in mind that there was a dark side to the tale of sport and democratization in ancient Greece, because, while sport helped build egalitarian, unified groups of plousioi and penetes, it also contributed meaningfully to the social and political exclusion of other members of Greek communities, most notably ptochoi. One of the paradoxes of democratization is that the expansion of power and privilege to broader segments of a society is frequently, perhaps inevitably, accompanied by a heightened sense of difference between the newly enlarged group of the empowered on the one hand and the other members of their communities on the other. Plutarch quotes a saying to the effect that “there is nothing to match either the freedom of the free man at Sparta or the slavery of the slave” (Lycurgus 28.5); at the same time that male ptochoi were experiencing an unusual degree of empowerment in Athens, Athenian women seem to have been losing social power and to have ended up with less in the way of social and political rights and privileges than women in many other Greek communities (Jameson 1997).
We can and should be troubled by the presence of large numbers of slaves in the Greek world, and the way women and the poor were treated. However, compared to other, contemporary societies in the Mediterranean basin, Greek communities represented bold, path-breaking experiments in democratization. The story of democratization in ancient Greece remained unfinished, but that is also true of the modern world. While many societies in the present day are significantly more democratized than any ancient Greek community, there is no society that is not marked by continuing inequalities.
Although in hindsight the imperfect but still impressive democratization movement that swept through the Greek world in the seventh through fourth centuries may seem inevitable, there was always strong resistance to democratization. Furthermore, the changes set in motion by the Macedonian conquest of Greece and much of the eastern Mediterranean starting in the 330s and 320s reversed much of the democratization that had occurred in the preceding centuries.
The role of sport in solidifying innovative, democratizing sociopolitical arrangements probably outweighed its role in limiting the number of people who benefited from those arrangements. The fact that the increasing empowerment of African-Americans and of women in the United States in the twentieth century was accompanied by their growing participation in sport suggests that the capacity of sport to contribute to societal democratization continues into the present day.
NOTES
1 On the translation of gymnazein, see Christesen 2002. The discussion that follows draws heavily throughout on Christesen forthcoming, which discusses these issues at much greater length and in more detail. What follows here does not purport to be a complete examination of all the ways in which sport is influenced by and influences societal democratization. Of the three basic elements in sport practice – participation, organization, and spectatorship – the focus here is squarely on participation. Participation has the most powerful and direct effect on shaping behavior, not least because democratization requires active participation by the members of a society in shaping their own lives.
2 On definitions of democracy, see Dunn 2005: 13–22 and Grugel 2002: 1–31.
3 All dates in the remainder of this essay are BCE, unless otherwise indicated.
4 On sport and society in Greece around 700, see the discussion in Christesen 2012b: 119–34 and the sources cited therein. For detailed discussion of sport in Greece around and before 700, see Chapter 3 in this volume.
5 On the sociopolitical history of Greece during the period under consideration here, see Christesen 2012b: 135–45 and the sources cited therein.
6 On the history of warfare in ancient Greece, see the articles in Sabin, van Wees, and Whitby 2007.
7 On the cost of hoplite equipment, see van Wees 2004: 47–60.
8 On the relative numbers in different segments of Greek communities, see Davies 1967, 1984 and Ober 1996. Estimates of the percentage of adult males in Greek communities that served as hoplites are also relevant. On that issue, see van Wees 2004: 47–60.
9 Some ancient sources and much modern scholarship characterize Spartan women as enjoying considerable economic and social privileges, at least relative to other Greek women. This characterization is less well founded than it might seem. For an up-to-date discussion of what is known about Spartan women, see Millender forthcoming.
10 On the influence of naval developments on the political history of Athens, see Raaflaub 2007. On the continuing influence of rich families, see Davies 1984 and Connor 1992 (1971). On groups that experienced social and political exclusion in democratic Athens, see Patterson 2007.
11 On the architectural history of Olympia in the sixth century, see Mallwitz 1972, 1988 and Scott 2010.
12 On trends in the depiction of athletes in Greek vase painting, see Goossens and Thielemans 1996; Hollein 1988: 71–103; and Legakis 1977.
13 On athletic victor statues, see Kurke 1993: 141–9 and Lattimore 1988. See Golden 1998: 74–88 for a brief history of epinikia.
14 The idea that sport remained the preserve of a small elite has been repeatedly argued by David Pritchard. See, for instance, Pritchard 2003, 2004, 2009. The view adopted here, that participation in sport was relatively widespread in Athens in the fifth century, has been well articulated before, most notably by Nick Fisher. See Fisher 1998, 2009, 2011.
15 The population of ancient Athens at any given point in time can only be estimated within broad limits (see Hansen 2006).
16 This is known from an inscription, Inscriptiones Graecae I3 138, which is discussed in detail in Jameson 1980.
17 On the cost of hiring a paidotribes, see Athenaeus Deiphnosophistae 584c and Marrou 1956 (1948): 146. On the cost of living in ancient Athens, see Markle 1985.
18 On the overlaps between sport and religion, see the articles collected in Hoffman 1992 and Prebish 1993.
19 This is a close paraphrase taken from the excellent discussion of ritual found at Kowalzig 2007: 34.
20 A brief introduction to ritual theory can be found in Bell 2005. For a more detailed overview, see Bell 1997. The view of rituals as models of and for society is elucidated in Geertz 1973: 87–125.
21 Bell 2005: 7853. For a full discussion, see Bell 1992: 94–117.
22 This useful approach to thinking about social capital is taken from Adler and Kwon 2002. There are, technically speaking, three different kinds of social capital: bonding, bridging, and linking. The discussion here centers on bonding capital, the kind of social capital most closely associated with sport. On social capital, and social capital and sport, see Christesen 2012b: 66–78.
23 See in particular Putnam 2000.
24 David 2010: 152. David also points out that public nudity was typically humiliating in Sparta and was used as a form of social exclusion (149–52).
25 This tradition is recorded in scholia B and T to Iliad 23.683, on which see Erbse 1969.
26 Cf. Xenophon’s observation that Spartiates “adorn themselves not with costly dress but with the fine condition of their bodies” (Constitution of the Spartans 7.3). See also Aristotle Politics 1294b24–9.
27 On sumptuary laws in ancient Greece, with a particular focus on those applying to clothing, see Culham 1986 and Mills 1984. On the “democratization” of clothing in Athens, see Geddes 1987.
28 For an argument that something similar happened in Athens after the establishment of a democratic form of government, see Miller 2000.
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GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
The relationship between sport and democratization, past and present, is discussed in detail in Christesen 2012b; the discussion found here builds directly on that work. On definitions of democracy and democratization, see Dunn 2005 and Grugel 2002.
For a relatively brief survey of Greek history, see Pomeroy, Burstein, Donlan, et al. 2007. For a more detailed account, see the relevant volumes in the Cambridge Ancient History series. An introduction to ancient Sparta and its history can be found in Kennell 2010. For a more detailed account, see Cartledge 2002. An introduction to Athenian democracy can be found in Thorley 2004. There is among modern-day scholars a wide range of perspectives on sociopolitical developments in the Greek world in the seventh through fourth centuries. The perspective articulated here is based on Donlan 1999; Morris 2000; Raaflaub 1997; and Raaflaub and Wallace 2007. On the history of warfare in ancient Greece, see the articles collected in Sabin, van Wees, and Whitby 2007.
On the changes in Greek sport in the sixth century, see Christesen 2007b. On sport in Sparta, see Christesen 2012a and forthcoming. On sport in Athens, see Kyle 1987. The extent to which nonelites participated in sport in Athens has been the subject of extended debate in recent years, most notably between Nick Fisher and David Pritchard (see Fisher 1998, 2009, 2011 and Pritchard 2003, 2004, 2009). There has been a great deal of inconclusive debate about the socioeconomic status of the families that produced elite athletes such as Olympic victors; see, for instance, Pleket 2001 and Young 1984: 107–70. The relevant evidence is insufficient to reach any firm conclusions, and the significance of those conclusions would in any case be quite limited. Even if most elite athletes came from very wealthy families, that would say little about the socioeconomic background of the vastly more numerous group of less accomplished athletes.
There is no single, comprehensive work on athletic nudity in ancient Greece. Perhaps the single most important piece of scholarly work on that subject can be found in Bonfante 1989, though see also Scanlon 2002: 205–10. On the date of the introduction of athletic nudity, see Christesen 2007a: 353–9 and McDonnell 1991. The relevant ancient Greek terminology is discussed in Christesen 2002. The relevant ancient sources can be found in English translation in Sweet 1987: 124–33.