The Sourcebook of Ancient Greek Athletics offers the most comprehensive collection to date of primary sources in translation for the study of ancient Greek athletics. Because Greek athletics was such an essential feature of both Greek and Roman culture, there is an especially strong need for proper treatment and understanding of the texts and other media used to reconstruct practices and ideologies of ancient athletics. The sources in this collection are arranged chronologically from the Archaic Period to the Roman Imperial Era, with an extensive appendix discussing key themes and topics. The organization and in-depth presentation of textual sources is designed to help students, scholars, and general readers fully appreciate the broader social and cultural significance of ancient Greek athletics as it developed in different historical time periods throughout antiquity.

A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity covers the period 800 BCE to 600 CE. From the founding of the Olympics and Rome's celebratory games, sport permeated the cultural life of Greco-Roman antiquity almost as it does our own. Gymnasiums, public baths, monumental arenas, and circuses for chariot racing were constructed, and athletic contests proliferated. Sports-themed household objects were very popular, whilst the exploits of individual athletes, gladiators, and charioteers were immortalized in poetry, monuments, and the mosaic floors of the wealthy. This rich sporting culture attests to the importance of leisure among the middle and upper classes of the Greco-Roman world, but by 600 CE rising costs, barbarian invasions, and Christianity had swept it all away. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion and segregation; minds, bodies and identities; representation. Paul Christesen is Professor at Dartmouth College, USA. Charles Stocking is Associate Professor at Western University, Canada. Volume 1 in the Cultural History of Sport set General Editors: Wray Vamplew, Mark Dyreson, and John McClelland

The Ancient Greek Athletics offers the most comprehensive collection to date of primary sources in translation for the study of ancient Greek athletics. Because Greek athletics was such an essential feature of both Greek and Roman culture, there is an especially strong need for proper treatment and understanding of the texts and other media used to reconstruct practices and ideologies of ancient athletics. The sources in this collection are arranged chronologically from the Archaic Period to the Roman Imperial Era, with an extensive appendix discussing key themes and topics. The organization and in-depth presentation of textual sources is designed to help students, scholars, and general readers fully appreciate the broader social and cultural significance of ancient Greek athletics as it developed in different historical time periods throughout antiquity.

This book offers a new interpretation of ancient Greek sacrifice from a cultural poetic perspective. Through close readings of the Theogony, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and the Odyssey in conjunction with evidence from material culture, it demonstrates how sacrifice narratives in early Greek hexameter poetry are intimately connected to a mythic-poetic discourse referred to as the 'politics of the belly'. This mythic-poetic discourse presents sacrifice as a site of symbolic conflict between the male stomach and female womb for both mortals and immortals. Ultimately, the book argues that the ritual of sacrifice operates as a cultural mechanism for the perpetuation of patriarchal ideology not just in early Greek hexameter, but throughout Greek cultural history.

The topic of force has long remained a problem of interpretation for readers of Homer's Iliad, ever since Simone Weil famously proclaimed it as the poem's main subject. This book seeks to address that problem through a full-scale treatment of the language of force in the Iliad from both philological and philosophical perspectives. Each chapter explores the different types of Iliadic force in combination with the reception of the Iliad in the French intellectual tradition. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the different terms for force in the Iliad give expression to distinct relations between self and "other." At the same time, this book reveals how the Iliad as a whole undermines the very relations of force which characters within the poem seek to establish. Ultimately, this study of force in the Iliad offers an occasion to reconsider human subjectivity in Homeric poetry.