The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic
Page 26
Finally, we need to take account of another group of athletic experts who had an even more obvious claim to paideia—those who practiced the medical art of dietetics, sometimes referred to as gymnastikê. The precise definition of that art, its value by comparison with other branches of medical practice, and its relationship with the kinds of training actually practiced in the gymnasium, were matters of debate. It tended, however, to stress the maintenance of health and the prevention of poor health, through good diet, the right kinds of physical exercise and massage, rather than the treatment of illness. And it had a long pedigree, looking back to the writings of Herodicus (who is said to have been himself an athletic trainer)18 in classical Greece, and to the Hippocratic writings (especially the Hippocratic work On Regimen). Clearly some of its practitioners would have been viewed as learned figures whose expertise was likened to the expertise of the doctor. Presumably it could also have given an air of intellectual respectability even to the trainers who drew on dietetic writings only in a relatively cursory fashion, whether in the context of ephebic education or in preparing athletes for festival competition—although in the imperial period at least most writers in the dietetic tradition are hostile to professional trainers, as we shall see further in the final section below.
Admittedly not all gymnasium staff had equally high status. As far as we can tell from the few surviving inscriptions recording gymnasium regulations, some of the lower ranks of gymnasium instructors seem to have been treated as subordinate figures, far below the gymnasiarch in prestige, with a limited amount of autonomy.19 And clearly the expertise of some trainers would have been confined to an understanding of different techniques of athletic competition.20 We even see evidence for that in one remarkable papyrus text which seems to be a wrestling manual, probably written by and for trainers whose main interest was in coaching rather than health, and which falls far short of the more intellectually ambitious, medicalized writings referred to above, consisting of brief instructions for particular wrestling holds.21
Nevertheless, the basic point is clear: gymnasium education was a matter for the elites, and brought high status both for students and (in some cases) for the various experts and benefactors who were involved in it. In that sense it performed many of the same social functions as rhetorical education in imperial Greek society; it could also be represented as a close companion to rhetorical and other intellectual accomplishment.
FESTIVALS
Festivals too played a key role in the performance of Greek tradition, which was also central to literary and rhetorical practice in the Roman Empire. Most Greek cities in the Roman Empire had at least one (and often more than one) major agonistic (i.e., competitive) festival. These were not just occasions for athletic contest; they were also times when the city put itself on show to visitors, and acted out its own identity and its own links with the mythical and classical past through sacrifices and processions which wove their way through iconic sites of local cult worship (and which often included groups of ephebes, along with representatives from other areas of city life).22
Not only that, but athletic contests also often shared a stage in those events with musical, rhetorical, and other literary competitions. The greatest Greek festival of all, the Olympics, involved athletic and equestrian contests only, but it was relatively unusual in that respect, and there were almost equally prestigious models for combined athletic and musical contest in the Pythian and Isthmian games, which similarly dated back to the archaic period. Musical victors were honored in similar terms to victorious athletes in honorific inscriptions. Both musical performers and professional athletes also had guilds representing their interests (and we hear about athletic trainers associated closely with these institutions as well). These seem to have been closely parallel to each other in their function and organization.23
Moreover, literary people often took a close interest in athletic institutions, athletic performance, and athletic history. For example, one of the agonistic festivals of the Lycian city of Oenoanda (in what is now southwest Turkey) was founded by a wealthy grammatikos (teacher of grammar) by the name of Euarestos (hence the name Euaresteia applied to the festival). His benefaction is recorded in the following terms: “Agonothete [i.e., festival funder and organizer] for life, I have provided prizes for the strong in the renowned stadia of athletic Heracles. But as one who has earned his livelihood from the Muses I am obliged also to give gifts to my own Muses. Therefore, having celebrated the festival myself for the fifth time, I have provided prizes welcome to the Muses for artistic performances.” In this extract, it is the musical contests which get the star billing, but it is striking that it is only now, the fifth time that the games have been held, that they have been added: the first four editions seem to have been athletic-only.24 Many well-educated men clearly saw an interest in sporting topics as perfectly compatible with their learned identities.25 Many of the conversations Plutarch records in his Quaestiones convivales are set at festivals, including several at the Pythian festival at Delphi, where Plutarch was a priest. Plutarch and his companions show an interest in the musical and athletic contests alike. 2.4, for example, opens as follows:
We were celebrating the victory party for Sosicles of Coronea, who had won the prize for poetry at the Pythian games. Since the athletic contests were approaching, most of the conversation concerned the wrestlers, for lots of famous ones had come for the contest. And Lysimachus, an epimelêtês [i.e., festival organizer] of the Amphictyons who was present, said that he had recently heard a grammarian show that wrestling was the oldest of the sports. (Quaest. conv. 2.4 [638b])
The ensuing discussion, which explores the plausibility of Lysimachus’s suggestion at length, is closely parallel to a similar conversation (Quaest. conv. 8.4 [723a–724f]), also set at a symposium at the time of the Pythian Games, on the antiquity of the poetry contest at Delphi. More generally speaking, athletic, and especially Olympic, history was a great treasure store for authors who were interested in delving into the Greek past and tracing its links with the landscape of contemporary Roman Greece: books 5 and 6 of Pausanias’s Periegesis, on Olympia, are the most obvious example of that.26
Finally, athletic competition was also parallel in many ways to the prestigious rhetorical practice of the sophists. Like the great sophists of the Roman Empire, victorious professional athletes were linked prominently with particular cities eager to appropriate something of the glow of their victories, and happy to hand out citizenship in order to achieve that.27 Like the sophists, the great athletes of the empire were valued partly because they had a very high level of expertise in areas mastered at a much more casual level by other members of the elite, who could therefore point to them as examples of what could be achieved through elite virtues and elite education without having to prove it within their own lives.28 In some cases they would even have been on display in similar contexts. For example, Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists mentions several classical orators who gave speeches at Olympia or Delphi (Gorgias 1.9, 493; Hippias 1.11, 495–496; Isocrates 1.17, 505), in addition to similar performances by a number of second-century sophists, among them Herodes Atticus (1.25, 539; 2.1, 557).29 The sophist Herodes Atticus was also a prominent athletic benefactor in the city of Athens: he built the great stadium there, which in its restored form is still a major tourist attraction;30 and he was also a benefactor of the Athenian ephebes, who are said to have escorted his body after his death to be buried in the stadium.31 It should be no surprise that athletic metaphors are used so often as a metaphor for sophistic activity, as they also were for many other kinds of intellectual accomplishment.32 One classic example comes in a story told by Philostratus in Lives of the Sophists (22, 525–526) about a series of encounters between the sophists Polemon and Dionysius of Miletus, where they represent themselves playfully as wrestlers: on hearing Polemon speak for the first time Dionysius is said to have exclaimed “This athlete has strength, but not from the palaestra” (VS 1.22, 525); and later Po
lemon is said to have approached Dionysius and “leaned his shoulder against him, just like those who are embarking on a wrestling match in the stadium” (1.22, 526), and teased him with a line about the degeneracy of the men of Miletus. That is not to say that Polemon and his sophistic contemporaries would always have been complimentary about athletes and athletics if asked. If anything, the opposite seems more likely: there seems to have been a tendency for the sophists, Polemon especially—at least as Philostratus represents him—to denigrate the representatives of other professions, and there is no reason to think that he would have viewed his athletic contemporaries any differently.33 But even if the sophists and professional athletes of the Roman Empire were rivals, it is clear that they did sometimes move in the same circles and that their target audiences overlapped to some degree: cultivated, educated Greeks who no doubt enjoyed the spectacle and theatricality of sophistic and athletic performance, but who could also appreciate the way in which they displayed traditionally Greek skills, and the way in which they acted as living links with the classical past.
CRITICISMS AND ADAPTATIONS
I have tended so far to emphasize the connections and overlaps between athletic and literary activity. For many, these two strands would have been viewed as complementary and similarly valuable elements in the education of the young, and as complementary components in the empire’s cultural life. It is also important to stress, however—in line with what I have just suggested for Polemon—that this was not always a mutually supportive relationship. There was an extensive and longstanding tradition of criticizing athletes for their stupidity, and complaining about the way in which they receive public adulation which could better be directed at intellectuals.34 In line with that tradition, athletes and their trainers are regularly denigrated by imperial Greek authors who feel that enthusiasm for athletics distracts from more important educational goals. In the process some of these authors attempt to appropriate and redefine the skills of the trainer according to their own criteria.
The most often-cited example is Galen’s vehement criticism of athletic trainers in several works dating from the late second century, especially the Thrasyboulos and the Protrepticus. He is hostile especially to those who train full-time athletes, although his criticism also extends to those who work with young men in the ephebeia. He represents them as intruders into the field of philosophical medicine, incapable of providing good health or intellectual nourishment for their charges. And he outlines instead his own views on the proper uses of physical exercise—designed for day-to-day use rather than the dangerous rigours of festival contest—from a medical-philosophical perspective. Equally important is Philostratus’s Gymnasticus, written (probably at least partly in response to Galen), in the 220s or 230s CE. Like Galen, Philostratus expresses dissatisfaction with some aspects of contemporary training,35 and sets out to construct a version of the art of training which is acceptable. In doing so, like Galen, he draws heavily on traditional dietetic writing. The difference, however, and the thing which makes the Gymnasticus so remarkable by the standards of writing in the medical-philosophical tradition (also by comparison with the work of Plutarch, which I discuss further below), is the fact that Philostratus’s positive version of gymnastic expertise is aimed not so much at private individuals trying to look after their own health, but rather at professional athletic trainers, preparing athletes for competition—in other words precisely the figures reviled by Galen most viciously of all.36 That point is made quite clear when he sums up toward the end of the work: “If we follow the advice I have given, we will demonstrate that athletic training is a variety of wisdom [sophia], and we shall give strength to the athletes, and the stadia will regain their youth thanks to good training practices” (54).
Here, however, I want to focus primarily on Plutarch’s work Precepts of Healthcare, which has many features in common with Galen’s work, despite having been written a couple of generations earlier, in the late first or early second century CE, but which has had much less attention in recent studies of imperial athletic culture. The text is in dialogue form, but the bulk of it is taken up with the words of a single speaker, Zeuxippos, who offers a common-sense version of the principles which were central to much ancient dietetic writing, recommending above all moderate consumption of food and drink, and moderate exercise, all based on careful observation of the specific needs of the individual. In one striking passage, Precepts 20.133b–d, Zeuxippos makes a number of scathing comments about athletic trainers.37 We should not be ashamed, he suggests, to distract our appetites by reading or music or mathematical puzzles in order to prevent ourselves from over-indulging, nor should we pay much attention to those who disagree: “the utterances of aleiptai and the talk of paidotribai [these two words both refer to athletic trainers, and are almost indistinguishable in their meaning in other contexts], who claim at every opportunity that scholarly discussion at dinner spoils the food and makes the head heavy, are to be feared” (133b) only by those who attempt to introduce inappropriately complicated logical puzzles into sympotic conversation.
But if they do not allow us to investigate or philosophize about anything else at dinner, or to read any of those things which have pleasurably alluring and sweet qualities as well as being beautiful and useful, we shall order them not to annoy us, but to go off to the gymnasium colonnades and the palaestras and talk about these things with their athletes, whom they have made as shiny and stone-like as the pillars of the gymnasium by tearing them from their books, and by accustoming them to spend their days in mockery and coarse joking. (133c–d)
The anti-intellectual qualities of professional training seem to be Plutarch’s main target here. The athletes are deprived of books and accustomed to a style of conversation which relies on uncultivated mockery (for Plutarch, knowing how to joke and tease in a cultivated way was a central part of admirable, philosophical sympotic behaviour).38 And his comparison between athletes and glossy gymnasium pillars is presumably intended to suggest that the athletes have no inner, philosophical life beneath their physically imposing surfaces.
Plutarch’s denigration of athletes and their trainers in this work is in many ways similar to what we find in Galen—in fact, it is a strikingly close precursor to Galen’s more lengthy rejection of athletic training (although there is no particular evidence to suggest that Galen knew this text by Plutarch) and a sign that Galen’s views were far from unusual, based on a long history of defining common-sense dietetic knowledge by contrast with the excesses of professional training which stretches back into the Hellenistic and even classical Greek literature. For both Galen and Plutarch, the criticism of rival intellectuals and rival disciplines is a key element in the process of displaying one’s own authority. The point about the lack of interiority in athletes finds parallels in several passages within Galen’s work, most stridently in Protrepticus 11 (K1.27): “they are so busy accumulating a mass of flesh and blood that their soul is extinguished as if beneath a heap of filth, and they are incapable of thinking about anything clearly.” There are admittedly differences between them too. For one thing, the presence of the paidotribês Meniskos as fellow symposiast to Plutarch in Quaestiones conviviales 9.15, already referred to above, should perhaps make us pause for a moment: it suggests that Plutarch’s criticisms in Precepts of Healthcare might have been read as rather more playful and teasing than Galen’s astonishingly vehement mockery of trainers. That view seems all the more likely when we remember that these points are not being made in Plutarch’s own voice, but rather ascribed to his character Zeuxippos. Plutarch and Galen also represent medicine in rather different terms. Galen’s anti-athletic writing is a response to what he perceives as a threat specifically to the medical profession—that is the intrusion of ignorant upstarts who are attempting to take over the territory of the doctor when in fact their own relatively trivial area of expertise in training should be viewed as subordinate to the wider medical art.39 By contrast, Plutarch’s speaker Zeuxippos identifies his
own perspective primarily as a philosophical one, which tends to prefer commonsense self-care without any particular interest in technical medical knowledge. But even here the gap between Plutarch and Galen is not so wide as it initially appears, given that Zeuxippos and his interlocutor Moschion are characterised as figures who accept (as Galen repeatedly does in his writing) the importance of combining medicine and philosophy. In the opening paragraphs of the dialogue they are contrasted with another doctor, Glaukos, who is said to be hostile to Zeuxippos’s views and who is keen (in a way which would have scandalized Galen) to keep philosophy and medicine separate. Clearly, then, it is not medicine per se that Plutarch (or Zeuxippos) objects to, but rather excessively specialist medicine which separates itself from the guidance of philosophy (1.122b–e).40