More than fame and glory. Honours and benefits given by Greek poleis to victorious athletes

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Christoph Begass; Professor Dr. Christian Gregor Mann
• Subject Area: Ancient History
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 421148524

Ancient athletic victors did not only receive a prize from the organizers of the contest, but were also richly rewarded by their hometowns: There was a large variety of symbolic honours and material benefits, of which seats of honour (prohedria), free meals in the prytaneion (sitesis), monthly pensions and exemption from taxes (ateleia) are the most prominent. Such rewards for victorious athletes are attested already in the Archaic period, they were legally formalized in the Classical and Hellenistic periods and existed till the age of the tetrarchy.This phenomenon has never been studied in its entirety, and the project is intended to fill this gap, it covers the whole period of civic rewards for athletic victors (ca. 500 BC – ca. 300 AD). The importance of the topic is obvious: It is situated at the intersection of the polis and athletics, two crucial elements of ancient Greek culture that underwent deep transformations during the centuries but nevertheless remained important. With the athletic rewards, the public discourse of how top-performing citizens should be awarded – an important topic in studies on the Greek polis – is observable in the longue durée, and changes can be analyzed in the historical context. For it was not the polis alone that decided about the rewards for athletes, external players also had their interests: the organizers of the contest, for the ranking of the contests depended of the rewards the victors were given by their hometowns; the Hellenistic kings who were interested in athletics as a source of legitimation; the administration of the Roman Empire that regulated the rewards with laws; the athletes’ association that fought for the privileges of its members. The project is thus intended not only as a contribution to the history of sport, but as a contribution to the research on the Greek polis in its various connections. The first step is collecting the evidence; besides literary and epigraphic sources special attention is given to the papyri. In a second step the honours and benefits attested in the sources will be integrated into a scheme in order to make visible general developments and peculiar structures in single poleis or regions. On this basis an analysis of the phenomenon will follow, both in its entirety and in its many details. The central question is the following: Which poleis, and in which historical circumstances, were willing to render which honours and benefits to the athletes, and what were the discourses that structured the transfer of economic and symbolic ressources? The multitude of the variables is the reason for the complexity, but also for the scholarly potential of the project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants