Athletics and Hellēnikon: Signifying Greek Identity in the Literature of the Roman Empire

Abstract

Using primarily Greek literature of the Roman empire, this project examines the use of athletics as a marker of Hellēnikon, a term I adopt to indicate a particular “Greekness” that goes beyond the educated Hellenism widely accepted in the Roman empire. In “Athletics And Hellēnikon: Signifying Greek Identity In The Literature Of The Roman Empire,” I argue that Greek and Hellenized authors of the first few centuries of our era—a period of literature and culture often referred to as the “Second Sophistic”—responded to the discursively negative Roman/imperial view of Greek athletics in different ways, depending on the audience and occasion. They frequently adopted a negative attitude toward practical athletics when they wanted to elevate learning and philosophy, and thus their own positions as educated men. But athletic activities and spaces remained widely practiced and socially important to Greek communities, intimately connected to the paideia system of Greek education, and inseparable from aspects of citizen training; as such, it also provided the pepaideumenoi, or educated men, with a useful shorthand for a “Greekness” that set Hellenes apart from non-Greeks in the Roman empire. Thus, authors could sometimes use athletics thematically to point out contemporary Greek shortcomings in the face of Roman power, but they could just as easily use athletics to channel the pre-Roman Greek past as a challenge to the Roman present. This project considers some real-life manifestations of these tensions, then considers these ideas in examples of Second Sophistic literature including dream interpretations, miscellanea, and philosophically minded texts. It then uses these ideas and biases about Greek athletics as a framework to explore tensions between “Greek” and “Roman” in versions of the ass story (Apuleius’s Metamorphoses and the Onos found among the works of Lucian) and in the cultural landscape of Pausanias’s Periegesis.