Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art
9781465642561
255 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Before attempting to trace historically the development of monuments of victors in the gymnic and hippic contests at Olympia, and before attempting to reconstruct their different types, it will be useful to devote a preliminary chapter to the early history of Greek athletics and victor prizes in general. It is a truism that the origin of Greek athletics is not to be found in the recently discovered Aegean civilization of Crete, nor in the latest phase of the same culture on Mycenæan sites of the mainland of Greece. Their origin is not to be sought in the indigenous Mediterranean stock which produced that culture, but rather among the northern invaders of Greece, the fair-haired Achæans of the Homeric poems, and especially among the later Dorians in the Peloponnesus. It was to the physical vigor of these strangers rather than to the more artistic nature of the Mediterraneans that the later Greeks owed their interest in sports. As these invaders settled themselves most firmly in the Peloponnesus, Greek athletics may be said to be chiefly the product of South Greece. It was here that three of the four national festivals grew up—at Olympia, Nemea, and on the Corinthian Isthmus. It was in the schools of Argos and Sikyon that athletic sculpture flourished best and in later Greek history physical exercise was most fully developed among the Dorian Spartans. Centuries before the Achæan civilization of Greece had bloomed, there developed among the Minoans of Crete a passion for certain acrobatic performances and for gymnastics. These Cretans, though strongly influenced by Egypt and the East, did not borrow their love of sport from outside any more than did the later Achæans. On the walls of the tombs of Beni-Hasan on the Nile are pictured many athletic sports, including a series of several hundred wrestling groups, but these sports did not influence, so far as we know, Cretan athletics. At Knossos bull-grappling seems to have been the national sport, as we see from the frescoes on the palace walls. In the absence of the horse, which did not appear in early Aegean times in Crete, it is not difficult to understand the development of gymnastic sports with bulls. At Knossos a seal has been found which shows the rude drawing of a vessel with rowers seated under a canopy, superimposed on which is drawn the greater portion of a huge horse. In this design, dating from about 1600 B. C. and synchronizing with the earlier part of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, we doubtless see a graphic way of indicating the cargo, and consequently a contemporary record, it may be, of the first importation of horses from Libya into Crete. The Cretan bull seems to have been a much larger animal than the species found upon the island to-day. Bull-grappling at Knossos was the sport of female as well as male toreadors. A fragmentary rectangular fresco, dating from about 1500 B. C.(Pl. 1), was discovered there by Sir Arthur Evans in 1901 and is now in the Candia museum. It is executed with extraordinary spirit and shows a huge bull rushing forward with lowered head and tail straight out. A man is in the act of turning a somersault on its back, his legs in the air, his arms grasping the bull’s body and his head raised, looking back to the rear of the animal, where a cowgirl is standing, holding out her arms to catch his flying figure as soon as his feat is concluded. Another cowgirl, at the extreme left, seems to be suspended from the bull’s horns, which pass under her armpits, while she catches hold further up. However, she is not being tossed, but is taking position preliminary to leaping over the bull’s back. Both the man and the women wear striped boots and bracelets; the women are apparently distinguished by their white skin, short drawers, yellow sashes embroidered with red, and the red-and-blue diadems around their brows.
