The Poetics of Athletics

DiscentesArticles

By Eden Riebling

 

Nagy, Gregory. Ancient Greek Heroes, Athletes, Poetry. Boston: The New Alexandria Foundation/Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature, 2024. $24.95.

Gregory Nagy has lost count of how many times he has visited the Museum at Olympia. But during each visit he stares in awe at the broken sculptures that once graced the Temple of Zeus. In the second century CE, the traveler Pausanias saw those same statues in all their intact beauty, and his descriptions anchor Nagy’s intriguing and intricately argued new book.1 Simply stated, Nagy maps a ritual story-system linking ancient Greek athletes, poets, and heroes in a sacred chain stretching back to Herakles’ mythic struggle with death.2 

Nagy is prone to big thinking based on close reading. Building on the work of his teacher Albert Lord, who assisted the great oral-theorist Milman Parry, Nagy is perhaps best known for his evolutionary theory of Homeric composition.3 As Professor of Classical Greek and Comparative Literature at Harvard, Nagy has exerted, in Homeric studies, something like the gravitational pull of Jupiter. 

Some of the material in this book will be familiar to those who follow Nagy’s work. Serialized over the past four years in the Harvard open-access journal Classical Continuum, the text repurposes passages on athletes from Nagy’s 2013 study The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, which he omitted in a streamlined 2020 revision of the book. Combining that earlier work with much that is new, Nagy foregrounds what we might call the poetics of athletics. 

The book unfolds in four sweeping movements. Nagy opens with a surprising parallel: the athletic prowess of the mythical Amazons measured against male heroes like Hippolytus, challenging long-held views of heroism as exclusively male. The impact of this finding is relatively muted in Part 1, which connects the Olympics and other athletic traditions to stories of Herakles. But in Part 2, by parsing the gods not just as distant voyeurs but direct overseers of the Games, Nagy again disrupts male-centric readings by promoting Hera from her usual background role to a central figure of divine supervision. The conclusion is Nagy at his most expansive: a deep-digging, wide-ranging, mind-blowing synthesis of ritual, heroism, war, sport, and myth, construing them all as tines on the pitchfork of human mortality.

At the core of this book is the equivalence Nagy draws between heroic endeavor and athletic competition. His exploration of the term āthlos, meaning both “labor” and “competition,” reframes Greek heroism as something akin to the Olympics: a brutal, sacred endurance test. “The Greek word for the hero’s labor and for the athlete’s competition is the same: āthlos.”

The focalizing figure of this athletic imaginary is Herakles. He is the cultural and athletic model, the archetype of the dux or warlord, the strongman who earns leadership through mythic labor rather than inherited power. A leader through āthlos instead of logos, he labors in the service of the ruler rather than ruling himself, similar to lines sketched in W. T. H. Jackson’s The Hero and the King. An etymological argument links these “labors” to Indo-European mythological traditions, including Germanic figures like Starkaðr (what Calvert Watkins called the “Hero Slays Dragon” episteme).4 Mythic ritual amounts, then, to the remembrance of feats of strength, not necessarily physical but often so. 

As these Indo-European discourses suggest, Nagy’s approach is that of comparative mythology. On this method he acknowledges debts to the French structuralists Georges Dumézil,5 Ferdinand de Saussure,6 and Émile Benveniste.7 Nagy is generous, even eager, in crediting scholars whose work supports his own; so eager and generous, indeed, that it might seem to be an argument-from-authority, were Nagy not the greater authority in each case.

To Nagy, myths are systems of communication, not randomized references to a distant past. When Pausanias stood in the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, he saw sculptures that told a story. If he mistakenly mapped his knowledge of a myth onto a myth-in-marble, “at least such mistakes were caused by misreadings of something that is systemic—something that Pausanias himself understood to be systemic.” Nagy wishes he could say the same about classicists today. Failing to see myths as systems, our attempts to understand the classical past become “an exercise in pseudo-empiricism.” 

Nagy himself is nothing if not systematic. Sweeping statements abound, teasing significance from what we otherwise might have seen as just running and jumping. “Athletic competitions were not merely sporting events but also sacred rituals that re-enacted the ordeals of heroes​.” The Olympics are not just spectacles but sacred repetitions of death-defiance. More than mere games, they are the pulse of a civilization confronting its own fragility. Victorious athletes do not simply perform—they reenact, renewing the honor (timē) once conferred on fallen heroes. The Olympic flame carried by Snoop Dogg symbolizes ceremonies as old as Homer’s funeral games for Patroklos. The cyclical compensation for mortality creates what Nagy calls an “eternal series of such victories,”​ echoing into eternity. 

It is no coincidence that the Olympics were named for Olympus. This, finally, is the point: the Olympics, that corporate sprawl of logos and sponsorship, began as something both bloodier and more profound. The games were ritual contests overseen by Zeus and Hērā themselves, their synergy expressing the dynamic of conflict and resolution essential to both gods and athletes​. Herakles’ name means Hērā’s kleos (glory), and Mount Olympus, Nagy reminds us, was as much a mythic summit as a literal one—a theological Everest blurring divinity and athleticism into the summit and symbol of cultural supremacy. With divine and Panhellenic sanction, the games immortalize Herakles’ monstrous combats: he is not just slaying monsters, but playing for the greatest stakes, struggling against death itself.

In the end, aren’t we all locked in that same struggle? Aren’t we all trying to figure out “how to get through life this life of ours,” as Boswell said to Hume, “with death in the eye”?8 One of Nagy’s acknowledged influences, Walter Burkert, argued that we overcome that death through ritual activities, such as festive meals, which affirm our will to live.9 Along these same lines, if Nagy is right, the popularity of the Olympics—surely one of the world’s oldest surviving institutional rituals—lies in the cyclical compensation for mortality, symbolizing and celebrating the tragic-noble battle of every life at every time. 

 

Eden Riebling (Duke ‘29) is the builder-owner of Sing O Muse, a GPT generating Homeric poetry at OpenAI.

 

Endnotes:

 

  1. Nagy mentions or quotes Pausanias’ Hēlládos Periḗgēsis (Description of Greece) 389 times in the text (Scrivener statistics check).
  2. Cf. Nagy 1990, 140–142.
  3. Parry advanced the argument, now widely accepted, that the Homeric poems were originally oral rather than written compositions. Building on Parry’s work, as codified by Lord, Nagy argues that the Homeric epics evolved for a thousand years or more, within an oral and then a textual tradition, until stabilizing into the fixed texts we now read. See esp. Nagy 1996 and 2003.
  4. Watkins 1995, 301–303.
  5. Dumézil’s genius, as Nagy sees it, was to take the comparative methodology of Indo-European linguistics beyond the level of pure language and to apply it on the level of myth as expressed by language. In this sense, Nagy conceives comparative mythology as comparative philology. Just as the Greek language is cognate with other Indo-European languages, including Old Norse, so also various Greek institutions are cognate with the corresponding institutions of other populations speaking other Indo-European languages. Among Indo-European institutions are the traditions of myth in general, and of epic in particular. Dumézil analyzes, for instance, myths about a Strong Man in the service of a King.
  6. Saussure 1916.
  7. Benveniste 1969.
  8. Quoted in Ignatieff 1984, 7.
  9. Foley 1991, 179.

 

Sources

 

Benveniste, Émile. 1969. Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

Dumézil, Georges. 1968, 1971, 1973. Mythe et épopée.  3 vols. Paris.

Ignatieff, Michael. 1984. The Needs of Strangers. London: Penguin.

King, W. T. H. 1982. The Hero and the King. New York: Columbia.

Nagy, G. 1990. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore.

Nagy, G. 1996. Homeric Questions. University of Texas. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homeric_Questions.1996

Nagy, G. 2003. Homeric Responses. Harvard. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homeric_Responses.2003

Nagy, G. 2013. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Paperback 2020. Cambridge, MA. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_NagyG.The_Ancient_Greek_Hero_in_24_Hours.2013.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de Linguistique Générale. Paris, 1916.

Watkins, C. 1995. How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Photo Caption Credits: Marcello Bacciarelli—Hercules and the Nemean Lion, 1776–1777 (Wikimedia Commons).