Critical Analysis of Stephen G Millers Ancient Greek Athletics - Essay Example

Prof’s Critical Analysis of Stephen G. Miller’s Ancient Greek Athletics Western society, as a culture, tends to lookback to our historical forebears more in terms of government and structure than those that directly came before us. One look at the monumental architecture of Washington, D.C, or many other world capitals shows that we draw connections back to the ancient Romans and Greeks, our distant cultural forebears, far more than we connected to the medieval societies that immediately proceeded our own modern societies. For this reason there are vast amounts of interest in all aspects of Greek culture, especially their athletic games, which we now mirror in the modern era Olympics along with several other international athletic competitions. This has led to an explosion of books on the topic of Ancient Greek athletics of varying qualities ranging from extraordinarily poor and uninformed to brilliant academic works that further the study of Greek athletics for future generations. Miller’s book, Ancient Greek Athletics is certainly somewhere between the two extremes. It is a well researched and well constructed work that is plenty accessible for a lay audience while still being informative and academically rigorous, especially in its citation of primary source materials. The fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of the work, which focus on the political ramifications of the games and the importance of the games to Greek society uphold this general standard: well thought out, well researched, while perhaps not being overly earth-shattering in their conclusions. Because these two chapters are on linked but distinct topics, this essay will deal with each of them separately in order to avoid muddling arguments and evidence between each individual chapter. The fourteenth chapter, titled “Politics and the Games” demonstrates that the games served important political roles in Greek society. It begins by arguing that the games, to a certain extent at least, served as an alternative for warfare, a way of gaining supremacy and competition without having to resort to deadly battle on the open field (Miller, 2004, 216). He then indicates that there is a wide variety of evidence that the states themselves saw the games as extremely important politically, and were willing to devote significant resources to achieving victories in them – so if the states themselves saw the games as politically important as an alternative to warfare, there can be little doubt that they in fact were (Miller, 2004, 220). Miller (2004, 222), argues that the truces that accompanied the Olympic and other pan-Hellenic games were relatively stable and long lasting, and gave political leaders a chance to intermingle with each other and conduct relations of state, even when their cities were ostensibly at war with each other. Finally, Miller (2004, 223) argues that politicians of Ancient Greece did not only consider athletic victories of the game to be politically important, but also that control of the sanctuaries where games themselves were held was an incredibly important political goal for many different Greek states. Essentially, the content of this chapter argues that it is hard to underestimate the importance of the Greek games. Miller makes excellent use of a wide variety of different forms of evidence, using everything from written primary sources to secondary source material and coinage. He uses, for instance, Greek documents to indicate the number of winners from each particular city state in different events, along with the amount of investment that the city-states put into winning them (Miller, 2004, 216). He used pictures of coins to show that games served as important propaganda tools for victors in a wide array of places in the Greek world (Miller, 2004, 219), as well as using secondary sources to record the relative rarity of city-states breaking the sacred truth around major games (Miller, 2004, 220). One of the problems he faces, however, is that he sometimes uses too great an amount of evidence essentially refuting his fundamental point. When discussing the sacred truce as one of the reasons that the Olympics were politically important, he then goes on to list a long string of occasions where the truce was broken, or the games interrupted (Miller, 2004, 220-222). He then eventually concludes that those interruptions actually amount to evidence that the games were rarely if ever disturbed (Miller, 2004, 225), making the reader wonder why he devoted so much energy to describing them if they were relatively historically uncommon and insignificant. Overall, however, Miller uses an excellent assortment of evidence to convince any reader of the political primacy of the athletic competitions in Ancient Greece. Though the depth of Miller’s research is evident throughout the work and his arguments are convincing, they are perhaps not particularly deep or insightful, and many other authors have covered similar ground in greater depth. His argument, for instance, that the Greek games served as a replacement for more destructive warfare is – as Miller himself notes (2004, 216), a common one, and bears remarkable resemblance to arguments about Greeks considering the Olympics a form of “positive strife,” a comparable but significantly less destructive form of strife of warfare that has previously been proposed by Spivey (2004, 4). Miller’s analysis of this idea was, in fact, much less detailed and piercing than Spivey’s. Miller’s other arguments, such as demonstrating that athletes were well rewarded by their city states for victories likewise appear in a wide variety of much earlier sources, such as Finley and Plecket, (1976, 83) or Carteledge (2003, 184). The most original and insightful aspect of Miller’s analysis was perhaps his chronicling of Philip of Macedon’s use of the games as a political tool, and the documentation of using both his military and political power to gain prominence in the games, thus further promoting his military and political power in a self-propelling cycle (Miller, 2004, 224). Overall, Miller does an excellent job giving a novice reader a relatively good base-line understanding of the political importance of athletic competitions to Ancient Greeks, but leaving anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the games asking, “yes, and?”. Miller’s next chapter, fifteen, focuses on the games’ impact on Greek society and culture. Again, like in his chapter on politics, the fundamental principle of this chapter seems to be that the games had a significant impact on Greek society and culture, forming a major part of the backbone of Hellenistic culture that went beyond city-state allegiances. One of Miller’s major focuses in this chapter is the role that games, and especially the games at Olympia, played in setting a consistent chronology for Greek peoples, which was especially useful for later historians (2004, 230), who would not have necessarily been able to set Before Common Era dates to events in Greek history without the constant tally of Olympiads for a millennium. Furthermore, Miller argues that the Olympics were incredibly important to Greek art, which largely evolved as a way to record the events of athletic competitions, and without their influence it is possible Greek sculpture and painting would never have moved past highly stylized figures into more realistic depictions of humanity (2004, 231). As in the chapter on politics, Miller’s primary aim seems to be to provide a list of ways that the games had an impact on or reflected the realities of Greek Society. Unlike the previous chapter on politics, however, in this chapter Miller largely eschews detailed use of primary sources to demonstrate his ideas, relying instead on more generally understood facts and secondary research surrounding Greek society. To fortify his argument that the Olympics formed the backbone of common Greek chronology, for instance, Miller simply informs the reader about the wide variety of other methods of time keeping that the Greeks used. He indicates, for instance, that many city-states usually kept a coherent chronology simply by referring to the current leader during the timing of an event (Miller, 2004, 227). This would be much like modern-day Brits referring to something occurring in the third year of Blaire’s Prime Ministry, or the twentieth year of Elizabeth’s reign. He also informs his readers that each city state often had unique names for each lunar month, meaning that even if the year were to be understood, the time of year might not be (Miller, 2004, 227), without the tally of Olympiads, that is. Likewise, when arguing that the games played an important role in the development of art, Miller simply describes what art looked like over several different time spans, while giving photographic evidence of art that was made to record the events of the games (Miller, 2004, 228-229). The evidence used in this chapter is largely an amalgamation of secondary sources and logic, or common sense. As in the previous chapter focusing on politics, an informed reader might read this chapter and understand everything being presented, believe in its veracity, but still be somewhat disappointed in the shallowness of research and explanation. The idea that Olympiads were an incredibly important unit for measuring time in the Greek world, for instance, and that it served as the central chronology for the unified Greek culture has been commented on by countless authors, including Swaddling (1980, 17), Philips and Prichard (2003, 183) and Parke (1992). The idea of the importance of the athletic games to other parts of society, such as arts and music, is likewise well documented. Miller also completely misses the opportunity to discuss the social importance of the Greek festivities as a form of connection between the Greek people and their gods, based both on foundational myths of the games as well as their placement at important religious areas like Olympia and Delphi. These weaknesses may be a consequence of the general purpose of this book – ostensibly to give a somewhat lay-reader a good groundwork on the function, role and practice of athletic competition in Greek society, but this does not diminish the fact that one still yearns to see a somewhat more in depth or insightful analysis of the importance of the games to the Greek world. Miller’s work, Ancient Greek Athletics, seems to serve admirably as a general-purpose work that can give a reader a relatively detailed and insightful understanding of the incredible importance and wide array of functions that ancieng games served in the Greek world. He uses primary source quotations, archeological evidence and secondary sources to great effect to give the reader an excellent groundwork for further reading or informed research on the topic. He fails, however, to make many interesting or original points that cannot be found more thoroughly developed and explored in other texts, meaning that someone with an already existing knowledge of Greek sport may come away from this text somewhat disappointed. The work makes its points well, but the points would perhaps be better if they were more original and insightful. Works Cited Carteledge, P 1984. The Greek religious festivals. In : P.E. Easterling and V.J. Muir ed. Greek Religion. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, pp. 98-127. Miller, S.G. (2004). Ancient Greek Athletics. Yale UP. Parke, H 1992. Athletic Festivals. Ithica. Phillips, D and Pritchard, D 2003. Sports and Festival in the Ancient Greek World. Swansea. Spivey, NJ 2004. Ancient Olympics. Oxford: Oxford UP Swaddling, J 1980. The Ancient Olympic Games. London. Read More