Tuesday, May 07, 2024
Strange
Hugh-Lloyd-Jones (1922-2009), "Pindar," Greek in a Cold Climate (London: Duckworth, 1991), pp. 22-43 (at 31):
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To the modern mind it may seem strange, even ridiculous, that athletes should be coupled with rulers and warriors as bearers of areta. That is not how the archaic Greeks saw the matter. A victory in the games, with their strong religious associations, carried vast prestige; athletes endured arduous training of a kind that fitted them for war as well as triumph in the games. The Aeginetans, for whom Pindar wrote more odes of victory than for any other community, won the prize for valour awarded by the Greek army after Salamis; the Sicilian tyrants, whatever modern moralisers may say about their ideology, saved the Greeks of Sicily from the Carthaginians and Etruscans.
