Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games

Description

This book is the first to focus on the theme of tradition as an integral feature of the ancient and modern Olympic Games. Just as ancient athletes and spectators were conscious of Olympic traditions of poetic praise, sporting achievement, and catastrophic shortcoming, so the revived Games have been consistently cast as a legacy of ancient Greece. The essays here examine how this supposed inheritance has been engineered, celebrated, exploited, or challenged. The Athens Games in 2004 were widely represented as a return to ancient, and modern, origins; the Beijing Games in 2008, meanwhile, saluted a radically different ancient civilisation. What is the Olympic future for ancient Greece? Thinking the Olympics brings together contributions from various disciplines, including cultural history, classics, comparative literature, and art history. Together these perspectives foreground two opposing plots which recur and collide ritually on the occasion of the Games. On the one hand, the Games present themselves as an ideal enactment of pure, intrinsic Olympic values; on the other, the Games appear as a messy performance of extrinsic investments by diverse parties with their own interests, commercial and political. Power, money, property, and identity are persistently at stake in the Games. But in a time when credit and trust among nations are in short supply, the Olympic arena and its flexible traditions may be where exchange can be done.

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

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