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Stadia and Starting-Grooves

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

H. A. Harris
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Extract

For the Greeks, athletics occupied the place in life which in the modern world is taken by football and cricket. Ball games were not unknown to the Greeks, as two famous reliefs in Athens show, but literature is silent about them, while it abounds in allusions and metaphors drawn from athletics—running, jumping, boxing, wrestling, and throwing the javelin and discus. Their popularity continued for many centuries: we read of them in Homer; even the unathletic St. Paul cannot avoid frequent metaphors drawn from the games; and the great athletic festivals were discontinued only when, in the fourth century a.d., the Christian Roman emperors put an end to them as pagan rites.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , March 1960 , pp. 25 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1960

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References

page 25 note 1 Il. iv. 387–90Google Scholar; Od. viii. 104–232.Google Scholar

page 25 note 2 Il. xxiiiGoogle Scholar, imitated by Virgil in Aen. v.

page 26 note 1 Athletics of the Ancient World (Oxford, 1930), 32.Google Scholar

page 26 note 2 v. 21.

page 27 note 1 Preliminary reports on these excavations appeared in the Illustrated London News of 15 01 1955Google Scholar, 15 Sept. 1956, and 28 Feb. 1959. The second of these articles is the most important for our purpose.

page 28 note 1 Modern writers sometimes call this rounded end the σφενδόνη. In fact the word is not used of a stadium by any Greek author.

page 29 note 1 ii. 1.7.

page 29 note 2 vi. 20. 8.

page 29 note 3 Vi. 1. 12.

page 32 note 1 An inscription from Delos of the second century b.c. (Inscr. Délos 1400. 9Google Scholar) suggests that ϋσπληξ was used for the whole gate, άγκών for the arm, παραοτάς or κίων for the post. Lucian's phrase ἔπεσεν ἡὕσπληξ shows that by the second century A.d. ὕσπληξ was used for the arm, which seems also to have been called κανών (Schol. Dionysius Periegeta 121). The trigger by which the gate was worked was the σχαστηρία. βαλβίς, another word for the starting-gate, seems to have been a wider term than ὕσπληξ, as it was used also for the ‘box’ marked out on the ground for the discus-thrower to throw from (Philostr. Imagines i. 24. 2).Google Scholar

page 32 note 2 This is the one point where I venture to differ from Broneer, who suggests (Illustrated London News, 15 09 1956)Google Scholar that the grooves were used only for setting out the starting-line. The clay filling which he describes must surely have been put on when the line was replaced by the later grooved sill.

page 32 note 3 σύριγγες τῶν ὑσπλήγων, Inscr. Délos 1400. 9.Google Scholar

page 34 note 1 vi. 20. 10–13.