Articles

This article explores Herodotus' rather cryptic comments on the graves for the Lakedaimonian soldiers killed at the Battle of Plataia in 479. At 9.85 Herodotus states that after the Battle of Plataia, the Lakedaimonians buried their dead in three separate graves: one for the ἱρέες, one for the rest of the Spartiates, and one for helots. Taken together with 9.71, this passage suggests that all of the Spartiates decorated for bravery at Plataia were priests, which seems prima facie improbable. The interpretive challenges presented by 9.85 have been the subject of lively scholarly debate since the eighteenth century because this passage potentially provides important evidence for Spartiates’ funerary, religious, and educational customs. With an eye to facilitating future research, this article offers a detailed conspectus of the extensive collection of relevant scholarship and, in part by drawing upon evidence from the archaeological excavations of the Tomb of the Lakedaimonians in the Kerameikos in Athens, identifies one reading, which involves athetizing part of 9.85, as the preferred interpretive approach.

This article makes use of recently published graves to offer the first synthetic analysis of the typology and topography of Spartan burials that is founded on archaeological evidence. Our knowledge of Spartan burial practices has long been based almost entirely on textual sources – excavations conducted in Sparta between 1906 and 1994 uncovered fewer than 20 pre-Roman graves. The absence of pre-Roman cemeteries led scholars to conclude that, as long as the Lycurgan customs were in effect, all burials in Sparta were intracommunal and that few tombs had been found because they had been destroyed by later building activity. Burial practices have, as a result, been seen as one of many ways in which Sparta was an outlier. The aforementioned recently published graves offer a different picture of Spartan burial practices. It is now clear that there was at least one extracommunal cemetery in the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods. What would normally be described as extramural burials did, therefore, take place, but intracommunal burials of adults continued to be made in Sparta throughout the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods. Those burials were concentrated along important roads and on the slopes of hills. The emergent understanding of Spartan burial practices takes on added significance when placed in a wider context. Burial practices in Sparta align closely with those found in Argos and Corinth. Indeed, burial practices in Sparta, rather than being exceptional, are notably similar to those of its most important Peloponnesian neighbours; a key issue is that in all three poleis intracommunal burials continued to take place through the Hellenistic period. The finding that adults were buried both extracommunally and intracommunally in Sparta, Argos and Corinth after the Geometric period calls into question the standard narrative of the development of Greek burial practices in the post-Mycenaean period.

This article offers an overview of the sports in ancient Sparta.

Hoosiers has a special, undeniable appeal. This film tells the fictional story of a basketball team from a small high school in Indiana that defeats a team from a much bigger school to win the state championship. When it was shown to test audiences, Hoosiers scored the highest preview rating in the history of Orion Pictures. A poll conducted by USA Today in 1998 named Hoosiers the best sports movie of all time, and it topped ESPN.com’s list of the ‘25 Best Sports Films: 1979-2004’. In 2001, it was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as a motion picture that is notably ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’.

The source of Hoosiers’ special appeal has, however, remained somewhat mysterious. This article seeks to show that Hoosiers has inspired unusually intense devotion because it artfully dramatizes concerns about authoritarianism that are deeply embedded not just in American sports, but in American society as a whole, and because it elegantly presents an emotionally satisfying resolution for those concerns (albeit one that works solely within the bounds of a fictional film).

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In this essay I explore Xenophon's views of ancient Sparta. The essay begins by exploring four traits of Sparta and Spartans that Xenophon seems to have found particularly praiseworthy: military competence, dedication to physical fitness, respect (aidos), and self-restraint. (enkrateia). It then considers what Xenophon saw as three crucial flaws in Sparta and Spartans: a predilection for coerced rather than willing obedience, a lack of prudence (sophrosyne), and a tendency to privilege their own interests at the expense of their allies (pleonexia). In Xenophon's opinion, those flaws proved disastrous when Sparta found itself in the position of hegemon of much of the Greek world after the end of the Peloponnesian War.

These essays, which appeared in 2015 and 2016, form part of an online database of translations of and commentaries on historical writings from ancient Greece and Rome that survive only in fragments.

This paper explores how sports reflected and contributed to the wave of sociopolitical democratization that transformed the Greek world in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE.

This article offers an overview of sports in ancient Sparta.

This paper examines the evidence for the Olympic victor Ladas and argues that he was a Lakedaimonian perioikos.

This article seeks to situate the athletic activities of Spartiates and their unmarried daughters during the Classical period in their broader societal context by using theoretical perspectives taken from sociology in general and the sociology of sport in particular to explore how those activities contributed to the maintenance of social order in Sparta. Social order is here taken to denote a system of interlocking societal institutions, practices, and norms that is relatively stable over time. Athletics was a powerful mechanism that helped to generate consensus and to socialize and coerce individuals. It thus induced compliance with behavioral norms on the part of both females and males and thereby contributed meaningfully to the maintenance of social order in Sparta. Athletics inculcated conformity to norms that called for females to be compliant, beautiful objects of male desire. Athletics had an equally profound effect on Spartan males because it inculcated compliance with norms that valorized subordination of the individual to the group, playing the part of the soldier, and meritocratic status competition. Athletics may well have also to some degree empowered both Spartan females and males, but its liberatory dimensions can easily be unduly amplified. There is an ever-present dialectic in athletics, between its ability to reinforce norms that underpin the prevailing social order and its ability to foster individual autonomy. In the case of Sparta, the balance in that dialectic always inclined very much toward the former.

This encyclopedia entry provides a brief overview of what is known about the organizers and judges of the Olympic Games, the Hellanodikai.

Arete provides a selection of sources for the history of Greek athletics.

The goals of this essay are to trace why and how treatments of Spartan land tenure in French sources evolved over the course of the period in question and to show that they responded to contemporary political concerns and typically present convenient  caricatures rather than careful analyses of historical evidence. I begin by arguing that in the first half of the eighteenth century a number of inter-related factors helped give Sparta in general, and the system of land tenure in Sparta in particular, prominent places in French thought. The erosion of the controls imposed by French monarchs, evident from the publication of Francois Fenelon's "Telemaque" in 1699, made possible overt discussion of political and economic reform. The decline in the authority of the Catholic Church that came with the Enlightenment and the concomitant replacement of Biblical models with material and precedents from classical antiquity, along with the insertion of Sparta into a long-standing debate about the merits and dangers of luxury, helped produce a general interest in Sparta. Land seizures that were occurring as part of colonialism stimulated theoretical work on the origin and justification of private property. The arrival in France of what has been called classical republicanism generated interest in the highly specific subject of the system of land tenure in Sparta, and Sparta became an example of a polity in which republican government was underpinned by an egalitarian distribution of private property and in which austerity reigned supreme. Montesquieu and Rousseau played particularly significant roles in focusing attention on the Spartan property regime.

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The next part of the paper centers on the second half of the eighteenth century, when an alternative view of land tenure in Sparta- that land was communally held - enjoyed considerable popularity. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably was the first to elaborate that belief, which was vociferously rejected by many of his contemporaries, such as Jean-Francois Vauvilliers. Even the most enthusiastic Laconophiles, however, were at that time not inclined to remake France in Sparta's image. The gap between ancient republic and modern monarchy appeared unbridgeable, and discussions of Spartan land tenure had a rather abstract quality.

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The third section examines a major shift that took place with the French Revolution, which brought republican government to France and made radical societal change seem feasible. Ancient republics no longer felt nearly as distant, and it became possible to contemplate the imposition of a communitarian property regime. During the Revolution Francois-Noel (Gracchus) Babeuf boldly proposed putting an end to private ownership of land and pointed to Sparta as an exemplar. The shift brought about by the French Revolution was subsequently reinforced by the emergence of socialism as a major political force.

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In the fourth section of the paper I seek to show that nineteenth-century French discussions of Spartan land tenure had a much more serious air than in previous centuries. Revolutionaries and socialists were eager to portray Sparta as a successful polity in which land was communally owned and to present Sparta as a precedent and model. Other, more conservative thinkers strongly opposed this characterization and use of Sparta.

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Finally, I argue that the politicization of discussions of Spartan land tenure extended into what was ostensibly purely scholarly work. This is apparent in the series of exchanges that took place in the years 1864-1889 between Fustel de Coulanges, one of the most influential ancient historians of the nineteenth century, and the Belgian economist and socialiast Emile de Laveleye. Both men wrote repeatedly on the question of land tenure Sparta; Coulanges composed a substantial treatise on that specific subject.  Despite his protestations of political innocence, Coulanges consistently went out of his way to attack the socialists' conception of Sparta; and both Coulanges and Laveleye produced notably partial treatments of Sparta's property regime. After the end of the nineteenth century, Spartan land tenure rapidly became a largely academic matter. Marx and Engels evinced little interest in Sparta, and the rise of Marxism as the dominant form of European socialism meant that the question of Sparta's property regime no longer resonated with contemporary political concerns.

This article provides a brief discussion of the evidence for the date of the first Olympics.

Chionis of Sparta won multiple Olympic victories in the seventh century and sometime around 470 BCE received at both Sparta and at Olympia honorific monuments that portrayed him as a seven-time Olympic victor and one of the oikists of Cyrene. After reviewing the relevant evidence, I seek to show that those monuments were erected as part of the process of making Chionis into an object of heroic cult. Regardless of how one reads the evidence, it is clear that Chionis was singled out by the Spartans for special honors long after his death. I suggest that this was the result of the Agiad royal family attempting to use Chionis to help restore their standing in Spartan society; their position had been severely damaged by the actions of Pausanias, titular head of the Agiad dynasty, who in the years after the Persian Wars became notorious as a Medizer and fomenter of helot rebellion. The elevation of Chionis benefi ted the Agiads because their social status was enhanced by close association with a prominent Olympic victor and because the characterization of Chionis as an oikist of Cyrene facilitated the establishment or renewal of close ties between the Agiads and the Battiad monarchs of Cyrene. Those ties added signifi cantly to the power and prestige of the Agiads in Sparta while legitimizing the Battiadsʼ position in Cyrene.

This paper discusses six ways in which Macedonian religions was distinctive: (1) deities of particular significance to Macedonians, (2) an understanding of death as passage into an afterlife, (3) openness to foreign cults, (4) the tendency to expend resources on the construction of tombs rather than temples, (5) the role of the king as chief intermediary between the gods and the Macedonian people, and (6) the deification of rulers.

The goal of this article is to pursue answers to two questions about Ephorus' Histories: How was the Lycurgan politeia portrayed in the Histories? How did Ephorus' portrayal of Sparta in general and the Lycurgan politeia in particular fit within and contribute to the overall narrative structure of the Histories? There are numerous other aspects of Ephorus' description of Sparta - the foundation of the Spartan state, Lycurgus' biography, Sparta's actions in the numerous wars fought in the fifth and fourth centuries, to name just a few - that would repay detailed analysis. However, the Lycurgan politeia seems to have been of critical importance to Ephorus' conception of Sparta and to his understanding of historical process in the broadest sense of the term and so merits pride of place. We will see that the narrative in the Histories was constructed as a diadochy of hegemonies and that Ephorus sought to elucidate a universally applicable explanation for the rise and fall of hegemonic states. Ephorus had a special interest in Sparta because he took it as a prime example, possibly the archetype, of the reasons for the acquisition and loss of hegemony. The Lycurgan politeia warranted close attention because Ephorus saw it as the source of Spartan hegemony. According to the account found in the Histories, the instauration of the Lycurgan politeia in what we would call the early ninth century, along with favorable geography, led directly to Sparta assuming the position of hegemon for nearly five hundred years. The Lycurgan politeia was derived from the Cretan politeia established by Minas and Rhadamanthys and transmitted to Lycurgus by Thales during the former's visit to Crete. Lycurgus made Sparta a hegemon by fostering homonoia (concord) and andreia (courage) among its citizens. He cultivated homonoia by imposing austerity and self-restraint, in part by means of mandatory commensality for adult males, and by eliminating tryphi (luxury) and pleonexia (greed), in part by means of instituting an unusually high degree of communalization in regard to wives, children, and property. He cultivated andreia by ensuring that citizens received proper agoge (discipline) and paideia (education). Hegemony helped ensure Sparta's eleutheria (freedom), which Lycurgus saw as the greatest good for a state. The Spartans eventually lost their hegemony because of the erosion of their andreia due to gradual neglect of Lycurgus' ordinances and the infiltration of tryphe and pleonexia, evident in the introduction of gold and silver coinage in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War.

A number of currently popular video games focus on the ancient world, and the experiences that the generation of students now entering high school and college have had playing such games is enormously important in shaping their view of ancient Greece and Rome. The purpose of this article is to suggest ways in which video games might be used as a tool for teaching about the ancient world. We look specifically at three games, "Rome: Total War," "Glory of the Roman Empire," and "CivCity: Rome," and assess the pedagogical potential of each.

This essay explores the origin of the date of 776 BCE for the first Olympics. That date was established by Hippias of Elis c.400 BCE when he compiled the first complete list of Olympic victors. Contrary to what one might expect, Hippias did not arrive at the date of 776 on the basis of written records pertaining to the Olympics or to Olympic victors. Instead, he calculated the date of the first Olympiad by associating that Olympiad with a famous Spartan lawgiver named Lycurgus, who was a member of one of the Spartan royal families and who was believed to have helped organize the Olympic Games. Hippias used a list of Spartan kings to determine the number of generations between his own time and that of Lycurgus. He then assigned a fixed number of years to each generation and ended up with a date for Lycurgus and hence the first Olympiad. The inaccuracies inherent in this approach mean that the date of 776 for the first Olympiad is at best an approximation. The excavators at Olympia have suggested a date closer to 700.

This paper argues that athletics became a much more prominent and important part of everyday life in the Greek world in the sixth century BCE due to ongoing, broader shifts toward a more democratized sociopolitical order.

Olympic victor lists are critical to our understanding of the chronological underpinnings of Greek history. Over 100 fragments from roughly twenty different Olympionikai have come down to us, but Eusebius' Chronika supplies the only extant, complete list. The last critical edition of Eusebius' Olympic victor list is that of Alfred Schoene, Eusebi Chronicorum libri duo (Berlin, 1866-1875). A revised critical edition of this list - based on Paris, BNF, gr. 2600 and on an Armenian translation made ca. A.D. 450 - is here given together with an English translation and an array of relevant background information.

Xenophon's Cyropaedia can be read as a pamphlet on practical military reform with special relevance to the Spartan state. The inclusion of a series of proposals for the reform of the Spartan army in the work has not been recognized because Xenophon presented those proposals in the guise of a reform of the Persian army undertaken by Cyrus. There was, however, no historical basis for this part of the Cyropaedia, and there is no trace of a major military reform in either the Greek or the Persian tradition about Cyrus as it existed before Xenophon ; Cyrus' military reform was thus an authorial invention. Xenophon inserted a military reform into the Cyropaedia as a way of presenting a proposal for the restructuring of the Spartan army. The program of military reform enacted by Cyrus, if implemented in Sparta, would have the effect of increasing the number of men in their phalanx and assembling a sizeable, highly trained group of horsemen. Xenophon thus used Cyrus' army in the Cyropaedia to show what a revamped Spartan military might look like, at a time when the Spartans were struggling desperately to maintain their position in the face of a powerful Boeotian army.

"Hippias' Ὀλυμπιονικῶν ἀναγραφή can be dated to 400-360 BCE.  The list of Olympic victors compiled by Hippias is of considerable interest, particularly since it was the first such list and later lists of Olympic victors were based upon it. This project was above all political; it was intended to reinforce Elean claims to Olympia in the face of Spartan hostility. 

The existing scholarship on the reasons why the Spartan mirage came into being
emphasizes the discontent provoked by democratic governance in Athens, the
polarization created by the long-running hostility between Sparta and Athens,
the penchant, common among Greek philosophers and political theorists, for
constructing ideal states, the need to explain the decline in Spartan power in
the fourth century, and the role of early Sparta as the embodiment of virtue
in Hellenistic philosophy. While it is dear that these were all factors of some
importance, they focus solely on the political and military spheres. The ancient
sources, on the other hand, manifest an abiding fascination with the structure
of economic activity at Sparta. It is, therefore, well worth asking the question of
why economics played such a large role in ancient descriptions of Sparta.

The answer is to be found in a widely-shared value system that incorporated
normative conceptions of how households were expected to acquire and
consume resources. This value system enshrined an idealized economic order,
which retained its conceptual force in spite of a general awareness that it was
unrealizable. There was, as a result, a strong and persistent desire to make this
ideal economic order real, or at least to imagine a place where that was possible,
a desire that was satisfied in part by projecting the idealized economic order
onto Sparta. This was not mere happenstance. The Lycurgan politeia was the
product of a series of reforms that pushed economic realities in the direction of
the ideal. As a result, the divergence between the normative and normal was
smaller in Sparta than in much of the rest of Greece, making it the perfect site
for a pseudo- historical utopia.

This paper presents four arguments.  First, civic nudity was created in Sparta in the seventh century with the merging of initiatory athletic nudity with a pre-existing custom of clothed, everyday athletics.  Second, civic nudity rapidly spread to other poleis and was an integral part of Greek life by the second quarter of the sixth century BCE.  Third, the dissemination of civic nudity greatly increased the level of daily athletic activity in Greece and resulted in the creation of numerous new athletic festivals including the Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean Games.  Fourth, the emergence of civic nudity had important effects on the nature of competition at Olympia.  The first three arguments are treated only briefly, both because it is impossible to expatiate on all four arguments here and because the setting of this conference makes a focus on the Olympic Games particularly fitting.

There has been growing interest in the importance of value systems. The incentives embedded in value systems play a role in structuring economic activity. This in turn brings economic rationalism to the fore, since economic analysis tends to take account of value systems through varying degrees of economic rationalism ; different definitions of economic rationalism contain different assumptions about values. A re-examination of evidence for income-maximizing economic rationalism in 4th-cent. Athens, especially in regard to silver-mining and to investment practice (e.g. Demosthenes 35, 10-13 ; 36, 11 ; Aeschines 1, 105), leads to the conclusion that rationalism played an important role in shaping economic activity but was not the only factor.

This encyclopedia article provides a brief overview of the economic history of Italy between 1000 BCE and 500 CE.

A detailed diachronic analysis of the usages of γυμνάζω in occurrences listed in the TLG-D database reveals that this verb was coined to describe "civic nudity," which can be defined as regular, nude exercise that took place in gymnasia. With an appendix listing all the occurrences organized by author, by type of author and by date.

We argue that the "Satyricon" should be read against the background of the Roman literary tradition of the early Empire, with its fondness for the transgression of generic boundaries and its evident resistance to producing continuous narrative. Petronius' work is a purposefully constructed generic monstrosity, a multi-layered fusion of elements drawn from a large number of highly divergent literary forms which are combined and re-combined in order to surprise, delight and entertain an educated Roman audience highly attuned to the subtleties of genre. It is, to use Trimalchio's words, ex omnibus in unum, nee hoc nee illud (50.7).

These encyclopedia articles provide brief overviews of the various elements of ancient Greek history.