Pritchard: Sport, War, and Democracy

Pritchard, David. Sport, War and Democracy in classical Athens.
from In Press Sport in the cultures of the ancient world. Special issue of the Int'l journal of the History of Sport
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Overall, this is an incredibly well-documented and thorough discussion of some of the basic issues which interest me regarding sports, war, and Greece. There are over one hundred footnotes and an extremely useful list of works cited.

Key points:
3 sport atheletes had some of the highest esteem in Athens
3 athletes were rarely targeted by playwrights for abuse
5 athletics were closely associated with justice and moderation
6 two primary roles of athletics in classical athens: festival based agonesand physical education classes
7 athletics one of three traditional subjects in male education; grammar/letters and music were the other two
7 education privately funded; only the wealthiest could afford to send their boys to all three forms of training
8 Athenians held that athletic training was necessary in order to perform well in sports; the result is that only those boys who had been trained were encouraged to compete; hence the athletic heroes of athens were the sons of the rich
9 discussion of role of public schools in England preparing boys to lead the country
10 Orwell: int'l sport creates int'l ill will,not good will
11 popular culture regards sports as safe way to blow of steam & reduce anger
11 steam blowing related to Konrad Lorenz's aggression as innate drive and aggressive activities are drive-discharge catharisis—thus the more sport, the less aggression and war
12 social sciences discredit drive-discharge
12 psych & physiologists for simplifying aggression; phys anthros & biologists for fallacious extrapolation from animals toohumans; cult. anthros for ignoring observed cultural variation in responses to threats
12 multiple studies listed where watching violent sports resulted in agitated folks
12 study of students who responded differently; those who worked out their agg via punching ended up being the angriest and most aggressive
12-13 Berkowitz: aggression related experiences form network in memory and thus current agg potentially summons up past agg
13-14 Sipes finding that war/sport support each other's presence; study on 20 pre-modern culutres found 9/10 violent cultures had combative sports as well

14 battles and sports events were both considered agones
15 agones tested the moral fiber and confirmed/demonstrate the arete of the competitors
16 if men lost in the games, they deserved to receive abuse in the Athenian pespective
17 bc fifth century Athens democratized war
18 poor citizens now experienced war; shared that in common with elite
20-1 experiencing war and that form of agone enabled the poor to identify with the agones of the elite wealthy athletes “As a result, lower-class citizens came to beliee that upper-class athletes exhibited te same moral qualities and experienced the same ordeals as they did when fighting battles.

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