Since the establishment of the modern Olympic games in the late nineteenth century, Olympic authorities have consistently claimed a link with the ancient Olympics. In this view the modern games are but a ‘revival’ of their ancient predecessor. This is a striking claim which seems to have been almost unquestionably accepted by modern media and the global Olympic audience. Even though both the modern and recently the ancient Olympics have been extensively dissected by scholars, the process of forging a hybrid classicising-cum-modernist Olympic tradition has received less scholarly attention. Moreover, the ancient Olympics had their own traditions as well. These were often created on the basis of mythology, politics and athletic performance records. Tradition is therefore an overarching theme of this volume: traditions in the ancient Olympics as well as the impact of classical tradition on the modern games.
As is usually the case with anthologies, and given its wide chronological scope, the book is something of a mixed bag. G.'s insightful introduction focusses on the appropriation and exploitation of Hellenism and the ancient Greek Olympic ‘ideal’ in the modern Olympics. She argues that ancient Greece is performed and negotiated in every modern Olympiad in a manner that drives the development of the games as an institution. She then goes on to discuss specific examples of how this has been done in practice since 1896, the year of the first modern Olympics.
In the first part, five papers deal with classical antiquity. N. Spivey explores the tentative links between Pythagorean philosophy and Greek competitive sport during the archaic period. D.G. Romano provides an engaging comparative study of prominent Olympic victors and their records in antiquity and modern times (for sport records in the ancient world see also D. Young's article in Nikephoros 9 [1996], 3–25). He also discusses several instances of cheating and rule-breaking in the ancient and modern Olympics. D. Stocking revisits the komos occasioned by athletic victories and Pindar's epinician poetry. He applies G. Bataille's concept of ‘non-productive expenditure’ and argues that epinician poems and komoi occurred in the context of spectator exuberance and destabilisation of subjectivity. E. Volonaki explores the intrinsic ambiguities of Olympic epideictic oratory with its dual emphasis on Greek unity and its critical attitudes towards some Greek states. The part of the book dealing with ancient Greek athletics ends with an insightful analysis by S. Brunet on the ways athletes of the Roman period negotiated, through agonistic inscriptions, a spot of athletic glory vis-à-vis famous athletes of previous eras.
The second half of the book contains papers which deal with various aspects of the reception of ancient Greek sport in the modern world. H.M. Lee outlines the contribution of Gilbert West, an eighteenth-century English poet and antiquarian, in early modern scholarship on ancient sport. L.'s paper is thematically related to W. Pressly's examination of the mural painting Crowning the Victors at Olympia by James Barry, an Irish painter active in England in the eighteenth century. Ancient Greek sport was most keenly received in Victorian Britain. Victorian perceptions of ancient Greek sport and bodily culture had a great impact on the budding nineteenth-century athleticism and muscular Christianity movements. Focussing on the writings of Charles Kingsley, D. Challis explores the association between the study of ancient Greek sport and ideas of bodily health, class and urban living in Victorian Britain. Proceeding in chronological fashion, A.M. Keen examines the Palazzo and the Palazzetto of Sport, two landmark buildings constructed for the 1960 Rome summer Olympics which emphasised Rome's classical past and its modern present. S.'s paper consists of a detailed and at times creative examination of a BBC promotion trailer for the Athens 2004 summer Olympics. The book ends with a piece by A. D'Angour on past and present (including the author's own) attempts to compose Pindaric-style odes for modern Olympic host cities.
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. Despite its great potential, this is a subsection of classical reception studies that is still in its infancy. However, the constant interest in the ancient and modern Olympics, as demonstrated by this volume and the spate of other scholarly and popular publications on the Olympics that appear in every Olympic year, portends well for the future of the study of Greek sport and its modern reception.
