Chapter 6 - Becoming Greek through Athletics

Summary

Concentrating on questions of ethnic identity, this chapter analyzes cases of non-Greek participation in sporting events of the Hellenistic period. Since “Greekness” was not a biological but a cultural category, athletics became a vehicle for integration into the Hellenic world. Yet this vehicle was used in very different ways. With the aim of becoming part of the Hellenistic world at large, Phoenician competitors participated in major sporting events since the third century, whereas Roman athletes of the Late Hellenistic period competed almost exclusively on the local level in order to enhance their integration into the Greek community they were living in. In both cases, participation in athletic competition served as a marker of Greek identity, as it did in Hellenistic Jerusalem. But although the attempt to become Greek through athletics appears as a well-known behavioral pattern of non-Greek victors, simple self-Hellenization was not necessarily the goal but could take the form of a “subversive submission.”