Between Mortals and Immortals Kleos-driven Heroization of Athletes in 5th-century BC Greece MA Thesis Ancient History Faculty Of Humanities Leiden University By Mirte Louise (Lotte) Aartsma Supervisor: dr. K. Beerden Second Reader: dr. F.G. Naerebout Word Count: 23.535 Date: 02-08-2018 2017-2018 Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 New Heroes ............................................................................................................................ 3 Heroic Athletes in Scholarship ............................................................................................... 5 Goal and Methodology ........................................................................................................... 8 Sources .................................................................................................................................. 10 Case studies .......................................................................................................................... 11 Structure of this Thesis ......................................................................................................... 12 Chapter One: Theoretical Background ................................................................................ 13 Athletes in Greek Society ..................................................................................................... 14 The Periodos Games ......................................................................................................... 15 Founding Myths and Sites ................................................................................................ 15 Victory Tokens .................................................................................................................. 18 Dúnamis ................................................................................................................................ 20 Aretē ...................................................................................................................................... 22 Kleos ..................................................................................................................................... 23 Chapter Two: Dúnamis .......................................................................................................... 26 Dúnamikos Athletes .............................................................................................................. 26 Other Heroic Athletes ........................................................................................................... 30 Non-heroized Athletes .......................................................................................................... 32 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 35 Chapter Three: Aretē ............................................................................................................. 37 Emulating the hero ................................................................................................................ 37 Enáretos Athletes in Military and Politics ........................................................................... 41 Non-heroized Athletes .......................................................................................................... 43 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 47 Chapter Four: Kleos ............................................................................................................... 48 Heroic Athletes and Mysterious Deaths ............................................................................... 48 Heroic Athletes and Virtuous Deaths ................................................................................... 51 Non-heroized athletes ........................................................................................................... 55 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 58 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 59 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 62 Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................ 62 Primary Sources .................................................................................................................... 62 Secondary Literature ............................................................................................................. 65 Figures ..................................................................................................................................... 70 Introduction These men set imperishable fame about their dear country, and threw around themselves the dark cloud of death. They died but are not dead: their valour gives them glory above and brings them up from the house of Hades.1 Throughout Greek antiquity, beliefs about death and mortality were many and diverse. While man was mortal, immortality as ‘inability to die’ was explicitly reserved for deities like the Olympic gods. As such, this can be understood as a seemingly clear dividing line between what it means to belong in the mortal world or the immortal realm. Especially in the early epic and poetic traditions, man’s mortality was highlighted and the gods’ immortality was most noticeable.2 Still, however clear the partition between the two might theoretically be, mortality and immortality are complex concepts and ancient Greek notions of especially the latter were fluid, non-canonical, subject to the contemporary Zeitgeist, and never precisely defined according to a single Greek model.3 Instead, certain ‘degrees’ of mortality can be identified, varying in time and place, and a ‘grey area’ exists between the world of the exclusively mortal and that of the strictly immortal. Scholarship on the subject has focused on what places a person in which realm and what exactly defines immortality, as well as whether or not a certain amount of effort made movement between the domains a possibility.4 The grey area was occupied by those who were deemed not fully mortal nor unconditionally immortal, immortals who had been faced with mortality, and mortals who had 1 Simonides, Epigrams IX. Trans. David A. Campbell, LCL 476. 2 Werner Jaeger, ‘The Greek Ideas of Immortality: The Ingersoll Lecture for 1958’, The Harvard Theological Review 52:3 (1959) 135-157, at 136; Cf. Henk S. Versnel, Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology (Leiden 2011) 391: “The standard ingredients to be found in text books may be summarized in the following definition: a god is a being who surpasses man in: 1) length of life: immortality, 2) comfort and joy, 3) knowledge of what takes place behind the scenes of life, 4) power over nature and human life.” 3 See also Ellen Oliver Collins, Psychologically Preparing for Death: Facing your Mortality and Creating your Symbolic Immortality (PhD diss. Pacifica Graduate Institute 2017) 19: “Immortality is a complex subject. A belief in some form of immortality is inevitably tied to the particularities of history and culture, to time and place.” 4 On the definition of immortality and the ‘grey area’ between mortals and immortals, see i.a. Lewis Richard Farnell, Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality (Oxford 1921); Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks (New York 1925); Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton 1991); Deborah Lyons, Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Ancient Greek Myth and Cult (Princeton 1997); Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore 1999); Bruno Currie, Pindar and the Cult of Heroes (Oxford 2005); Jennifer Larson, Ancient Greek Cults: A Guide (New York 2007); Jan Nicolaas Bremmer and Andrew Erskine, The Gods of Ancient Greece (Edinburgh 2010); and David James Lunt, Athletes, Heroes, and the Quest for Immortality in Ancient Greece (PhD diss. Pennsylvania State University 2010). 1 experienced immortality.5 The most striking group associated with it, and arguably the most debated one, was the ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος: “race of men-heroes.”6 Classed as a special race of old that was believed to have included super-humans that portrayed “extraordinary and indefatigable”7 bodily excellence and were often said to be descendants of the gods, heroes were neither regarded as truly mortal like humans nor decidedly immortal like the gods. Overall and in the broadest sense a hero was no one other than a deceased mortal who retained the power to influence human affairs, deserving a degree of continuing honours that was not reserved for the ordinary dead.8 The primary condition for becoming heroized was therefore to die, but even though this made it impossible for heroes to be considered deathless and without agony like the gods, it was believed that their struggles and perils in life were rewarded with heroic immortality.9 Heroic immortality was not a literal or strict immortality like that of the gods, but metaphorically prolonged