N. is perhaps best known to readers of this journal for the monumental Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis that he edited with M.H. Hansen (2004). In addition to his scholarship on Greek political history in general and that of Arcadia in particular, N. has for the past fifteen years written extensively on ancient Greek athletics. The volume under review brings together N.’s interests in compilation and in Greek athletics. As its title makes clear, this book is divided into two distinct sections, one that surveys the evidence for athletic festivals in Archaic and Classical Greece and a second that explores the relative value attached to victories won at the Nemean Games.
Although some work has been done previously on athletic festivals within specific regions (see e.g. I. Ringwood, ‘Agonistic Festivals in Italy and Sicily’, AJA 64 [1960], 245–51), N. is the first to undertake a comprehensive survey that stretches across the entire Greek world. The major insights offered by this book are that athletic festivals were quite numerous – N. finds evidence for as many as 155 – and that the prestige attached to a Nemean victory, while less than that associated with winning at Olympia, Delphi or Isthmia, was nonetheless much greater than the prestige derived from a victory at any festival other than those three. As N. notes in the preface, ‘the two studies presented here are addressed primarily to specialists in the study of Greek athletics’ (p. 7), but he also quite rightly points out that this book is a contribution ‘to the study of interaction in the Classical Greek city-state culture’ (p. 9). There continues to be strong scholarly interest in exploring the networks that bound together Greek communities scattered throughout the Mediterranean basin (see e.g. C. Constantakopoulou, Aegean Interactions: Delos and its Networks in the Third Century [2017]), and athletic festivals, both Panhellenic and local, played an important role in creating and maintaining networks of widely varying scales. In addition, N.’s work supplies a useful compendium of the evidence for festival activity in specific Greek communities and so will be of value to scholars with epichoric interests. This book thus represents a welcome addition to the extant scholarship.
The first of N.’s two studies begins (Section 1.2) with a brief discussion of funerary games as they are known from poetic and epigraphic sources. N. then examines the emergence in the sixth century of the recurring religious festival as the primary venue for athletic contests (1.3.1); in doing so he focuses on the careers of two athletes, Nicolaidas of Corinth and Theogenes of Thasos, who won at a substantial number of different sites, as anecdotal evidence that athletic contests were numerous and widely dispersed. That impressionistic conclusion is then massively buttressed by a detailed examination of attestations of athletic contests in epinician poetry (1.3.2) and by a separate investigation (1.3.3) of other types of evidence for the existence of athletic festivals in the Classical period. In carrying out the latter, N. makes use of textual (literary and epigraphic) and archaeological sources for athletic contests and for the existence of stadia, gymnasia and palaestra, which N. takes to be a good if not perfect proxy for athletic contests. All this evidence is organised geographically, on the basis of the regional divisions employed in the Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis.
N. addresses the issue of diachronic change by making an effort to establish which contests can be traced back to the sixth century (1.3.4). He also treats the methodological challenges involved in proving the existence of an athletic contest on the basis of the available evidence (1.4); in doing so he discusses the complications involved in interpreting sources such as representations on pottery and fragmentary inscriptions, the uncertainty involved in extrapolating from the presence of gymnasia and palaestrae to the existence of athletic contests, the reliability of later sources, and difficulties in dating many inscriptions. All the evidence treated in Sections 1.2–1.4 is summarised in a catalogue, presented in Section 1.5.1.
N. concludes the first of his two studies by offering a ‘snapshot’ of the Greek athletic landscape in the fifth century (1.5.2) and some observations on the significance of athletics for ancient Greeks (1.6). He shows that there were, at the bare minimum, 76 athletic contests beyond the periodos (the Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean Games) in the late Archaic and Classical periods and that the evidence suggests the existence of as many as 155 athletic contests organised by over 90 different poleis in more than 30 different geographic regions. At least 30 of those contests, in 20 different geographic regions, were already extant in the sixth century. As N. quite rightly notes (p. 158), the corpus of relevant evidence is certainly incomplete and these numbers should be taken as minimums. Hence he concludes that ‘in the fifth century … athletic festivals are found practically everywhere in the Greek world’ (p. 156).
The ubiquity of athletic contests speaks to their importance, and N. points out further reasons why they played an important role in Greek culture. Athletic contests served, in the Greek imagination, as a distinctive ethnic marker; they were an ideal setting for the pursuit of kleos; and they created environments for interactions and – because most contests at most festivals were open to competitors from outside the host community – fostered the growth of intercity networks and a cohesive Greek identity.
The second of N.’s two studies is, in terms of both length and significance, markedly the junior partner. This study responds in part to S. Hornblower's observation that the terms of the Peace of Nicias required a copy of the text to be displayed at Olympia, Delphi and Isthmia but not at Nemea (Thucydides 5.18) and that Nemea was the only of the periodos sites that did not receive a commemorative victory dedication after the Persian defeat in 479 (A Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 2 [1996], p. 483). Also relevant is a short article by F. Cairns which shows that, in epinician poetry, the Nemean Games were the least prestigious contest in the periodos (‘Some Reflections on the Ranking of the Major Games in Fifth Century b.c. Epinician Poetry’, in A. Rizakis [ed.], Achaia und Elis in der Antike: Akten des 1. internationalen Symposiums, Athen, 19.–21. Mai 1989 [1991], pp. 95–8).
N. points out that Nemean victories were listed in selective victory catalogues in epinicians (Section 2.2) and that at least eleven epinicians were written by Bacchylides and Pindar to celebrate Nemean victories (2.3). Nemean victories also feature prominently in necessarily relatively brief victor inscriptions associated with honorary statues at Olympia (2.4) and in athletes’ hometowns (2.5–6). On the other hand, it was exceptional for epinicians to be commissioned to commemorate victories in non-periodos games or for victories in those games to be included in selective catalogues found in epinicians or inscriptions. N. acknowledges that the prestige derived from a Nemean victory did not compare with that of an Olympic victory, while arguing (2.7) that a win at Nemea was seen as much more noteworthy than a win at any contest outside the periodos. He also suggests that the Nemean games enjoyed roughly the same level of prestige as their counterparts at Isthmia. In a postscript (2.8), N. makes the case that Nemea did not receive a celebratory dedication after 479 bc because it was tainted by its close association with Cleonae and Argos, both communities that, as neutrals, were conspicuously absent from Salamis and Plataea.
This is a well-constructed, clearly argued book that rests squarely upon and showcases N.’s erudition and command of an enormous body of source material. N. demonstrates throughout an overt and commendable awareness of the aforementioned methodological challenges and displays consistent good sense and restraint in his interpretation of often difficult sources.
In closing it is worth noting that, while N. aimed at producing a comprehensive survey of athletic contests, the collection of information presented is necessarily incomplete, both because of the sheer scale of the possibly relevant evidence and because of ongoing additions to that evidence. N. is aware of this issue and, in a footnote (n. 305 on p. 57), invites readers to email him to bring oversights to his attention. This sort of post-publication crowdsourcing can be extremely useful for projects involving the compilation of data, and it would clearly be helpful if the evidence assembled by N. was made available in a fashion that permitted regular updates and easy access to the most up-to-date version of the data set. (N. states that new information brought to his attention will be cited and acknowledged in future publications, but that access to that information is necessarily limited.) At the same time, concerns of ensuring proper credit for one's work (books still typically carry more weight than websites) and about stable and continuing access need to be addressed. In that way, the book highlights the extent to which the opportunities created by digital dissemination remain unrealised. None of that of course detracts from N.’s achievement in producing this very useful and stimulating work.
