BMCR 2009.04.67: Brunet on Christesen, Olympic Victor Lists and Ancient Greek History

Paul Christesen, Olympic Victor Lists and Ancient Greek History.
Cambridge/New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2007.  Pp. xvii, 580.
ISBN 9780521866347.  $115.00.

Reviewed by Stephen Brunet, University of New Hampshire
([email protected])
Word count:  2671 words
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If one were to judge only from the first half of its title, Paul
Christesen's Olympic Victor Lists and Ancient Greek History might seem
to be aimed mainly at scholars who work on ancient athletics. In fact,
ancient historians constitute its primary audience since this detailed
and heavily annotated study provides the only complete treatment of the
dating system that underlies the work of post-Thucydidean historians
and, by extension, the chronology employed by modern scholars. Since
Christesen calls into question the process by which Hippias of Elis
constructed a framework for dating events in the archaic period, his
work will certainly play a role in debates over such topics as the
timing of Lycurgus' Spartan reforms and the date of the Pindaric odes.
In addition, Christesen traces the nearly millennium-long process by
which the Greeks first came to organize their history according to
Olympiads, then accommodated the histories of the Romans and other
non-Greek people within this scheme, and finally adapted it to the
needs of an increasingly Christianized world. The production of Olympic
victor lists turns out to be one of the longest-lived and most
practical of Greek intellectual enterprises. Moreover, the attempt to
record all relevant historical events in terms of Olympiads was
comparable to Pliny the Elder's effort to catalog all useful knowledge
about the natural world or Diderot's desire to compile a hierarchically
arranged encyclopedia of essential knowledge. Christesen thus reveals a
side of ancient information science that has not been well explored and
deserves further attention.[[1]]

The evidence for the activities of Hippias, Aristotle, and other
chronographers is fragmentary and not generally accessible. One
valuable feature of Christesen's work is that he has assembled
virtually all the pertinent sources for Olympic victory lists, along
with much of the evidence concerning the victor lists for the Pythian
games and other festivals, and the records of the Sicyonian, Spartan,
and Athenian kings.[[2]] Much of this material is contained in the
seventeen appendices, with both the Greek text and a translation
conveniently provided. Less convenient is the fact that understanding
Christesen's arguments requires constant reference to the appropriate
appendices. Yet this is a small price to pay since he has provided all
the material one would need to debate him about the unreliability of
early Greek chronology or any of his other conclusions. Similarly,
Christesen's collection of material and extensive bibliography has made
it much easier to introduce students to the intricacies of Greek
chronology, especially if Jacoby's Die Fragmente der griechischen
Historiker and similar works are not readily available.

Christesen's first chapter lays out the rationale for undertaking this
study. While individual authors of Olympic victor lists, notably Julius
Africanus, have received considerable attention, surprisingly no large
scale investigations exist of all the types of ancient literature in
which catalogs of Olympic victors play a major role.[[3]] In itself
this may not seem a compelling reason for such an extensive study. The
importance of Olympic victor lists, though, is revealed by the overview
he provides here of the many authors including Aristotle, Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, and Eusebius whose works depended heavily on Olympic
victor lists and whose desire to organize history in this fashion
illuminates the processes of Greek historical thinking. Since his
audience may not be knowledgeable about the Panhellenic festivals, he
includes a brief introduction to the history of the games as it relates
to his later chapters. More important for his later arguments is the
classification scheme he lays out to deal with the potentially
bewildering assortment of treatises focused primarily on listing all or
some Olympic victors, histories of the Olympic games in which victor
lists play a major role, and historical projects that do not relate
directly to the Olympics but in which a chronology based on the Olympic
victors represented an organizing principle or was instrumental to the
composition.

For scholars interested in Archaic and Classical Greece, the second
chapter is of prime importance since it deals with Hippias' decision to
assemble the first list of Olympic victors. Christesen's thesis is that
Hippias was inspired to work on Olympic chronology not out of an
interest in the subject per se but due to a desire to engage in the
debate over Elis' relationship to its neighbors, especially Sparta.
Christesen is inclined to think that Hippias settled on a 776 B.C. date
for the start of the Olympics because it synchronized Iphitus and
Lycurgus. This would imply that the "renewal" of the games in Iphitus'
time was done with Spartan support for Elis' control of the Olympics.
Even discounting this scenario, Christesen establishes that the Eleans
did not possess any record of victors that Hippias could simply
publish, as has often been assumed. Rather Hippias was forced to
compile this list himself and the evidence he had at his
disposal--notably reports by families of their victorious ancestors and
inscriptions--was not easily datable. Putting the earliest victors in
order, much less working back from his own time to figure out the date
of the first Olympics was largely a process of guesswork. The
consequence is that we can have far more confidence in the names
Hippias provides us for early victors than in the dates he assigned to
their victories or even their relative order.

Since the archaeological evidence for the introduction of athletic
contests at Olympia is equivocal at best and cannot be used to confirm
the date Hippias picked for the start of the Olympics (a point that
Christesen might have emphasized more in his introduction), the whole
scaffolding on which eighth- and seventh-century chronology has been
erected becomes quite shaky. Christesen does not explore the potential
ramifications in great detail but cases that come to mind include the
dates of many early authors, the connection between the Messenian wars
and Spartan history (cf. pp. 112-122, appendix 10), and whether Pheidon
of Argos was responsible for a standardization of weights and measures,
along with the introduction of coinage.[[4]] For sports historians,
certain of the supposed facts about the early games also come into
question. Notably, Spartan dominance of the games early on may have
simply been the result of Hippias packing the early Olympiads with
Spartan names (pp. 160, appendix 10). Christesen is also able to adduce
a new solution to the vexed question of when athletic nudity was
introduced (pp. 353-359). In short, Orsippos was the first athlete to
be crowned naked but the 720 B.C. date assigned to Orsippos was the
result of guesswork. This would resolve the conflict with Thucydides'
claim that nudity had only been introduced shortly before his time.

Chapter three provides a synoptic view of anagraphai, histories of the
Olympic games that included registers of victors. This discussion is
followed by an examination of what Christesen terms "standard
catalogs." These lists of Olympic victors represented an outgrowth of
anagraphai but lacked any information beyond a listing of names and
circulated as independent documents. He views anagraphai as having a
very limited life, beginning with Hippias in c. 400 B.C. and ending
with Eratosthenes in c. 316 B.C., at which point they were rendered
obsolete by local histories and specialized accounts of the games (how
such accounts differed from anagraphai is not made entirely clear). Our
understanding of the content and format of anagraphai depends largely
on Aristotle's work in this area: the fragments of his Olympic
anagraphe, the slightly better attested anagraphe of the Pythian games
he completed in conjunction with his pupil Callisthenes, and the
sections of the Pindaric scholiasts and Pausanias' account of Delphi
and Olympia that Christesen argues were dependent on Aristotle. In
addition, we have fragments of Eratosthenes' Olympic anagraphe and his
work appears to have resembled Aristotle's closely. Judging from these
works, anagraphai included historical information, such as military or
political attempts to control the games, accounts of the programs of
the games, especially with regard to the addition and deletion of
events, discussions of the development of athletics, stories about
famous athletes, and catalogs not just of victors but of athletes who
had won the periodos or multiple events at one iteration of the
Olympics. It might have been useful to ask whether Aristotle's
methodology in his other works would help us understand how he
approached revising Hippias' work. On the other hand, the fact that
Christesen is able to establish a connection between the limited
remains of Aristotle's anagraphai and authors such as Pausanias
suggests than many of the stories about early athletes and the games
that figure prominently in later authors derive from Aristotle, even if
the connection cannot be proved.

In addition to collecting material of interest to later scholars,
Aristotle and Callisthenes made one other essential contribution, the
decision to number groups of Pythian victors starting from the
beginning of the games and then to extend this practice to Olympic
victors. The numbering of successive Olympiads is a feature that
Christesen argues was not present in Hippias' work but was a prominent
feature of standard catalogs of Olympic victors. That these catalogs
originated as part of anagraphai is demonstrated by the order in which
the victors are listed, which follows the order events were introduced,
an important topic in anagraphai. Likewise, these catalogs include very
little information about the victors because these athletes'
contributions to the development of their respective sports and other
such topics were dealt with separately in anagraphai. Christesen does
not consider the significance of the extra material that is included,
e.g. the notation that a wrestler won akoniti (without facing any
competition) or the strange note that an athlete won the pentathalon in
"the friendliest fashion" (POxy XXIII 2381). I suspect these details
might provide a clue to the intended audience of standardized catalogs
since these lists resemble modern baseball statistics more than
something that could be used for dating historical events.

In view of the importance we attach to absolute dating, historians were
surprisingly slow to realize that Olympic registers could be used to
represent the temporal relationship of events outside the world of
athletics. Once recognized, though, numerous authors composed treatises
that utilized Olympic victor lists as a chronological framework. Based
on the typology developed in chapter one, Christesen divides these
works into two categories: Olympic chronographies, his term for the
works comprising numbered lists of stadion victors synchronized to a
few key events, notably archon and other eponym lists, and Olympic
chronicles, extensive collections of events arranged according to
Olympiads. Chronographies are the subject of chapter four, although
some authors wrote both types of works. Dionysius of Halicarnassus is
discussed at this point; Castor of Rhodes is largely relegated to the
next chapter. Christesen starts with Eusebius, presumably because his
chronography is the best preserved and involves the most complex
questions concerning sources and originality. Following the lead of
Mosshammer and others, Christesen argues that the Chronographia evolved
in the following fashion.[[5]] The stories about athletes that now come
at the end of the list of victors in the Greek but not the Armenian
version were added by Panodoros when he copied and updated Eusebius.
Christesen does not consider Panodoros' source for these stories,
although this might reveal what material he had at his disposal besides
Eusebius since he mentions some well known athletes like Cleitomachos
but also a wrestler from the time of Theodosios the Great. The
remainder of the Chronographia was not just copied from Africanus, as
long supposed, but was Eusebius' own work. He did draw on Africanus but
ultimately relied on the Olympic victor list of the otherwise unknown
Cassius Longinus. Eusebius' victor list included only stadion victors
numbered by Olympiads and a few references to other events, such as the
founding of Rome, since this was sufficient to establish the
relationship between Olympiads and other landmark dates. All of this
was done as a prelude to the creation of the Chronikoi Kanones, a
massive timeline that cross-referenced Olympiad dates with many other
systems, including the Athenian archon list and, since Christian
chronology was of foremost importance for Eusebius, years figured from
the birth of Abraham.

The desire to create an Olympic chronography as a preliminary to
projects of wider historical reach was typical of the two other
chronographies for which we have evidence. In the case of Timaeus, the
chronology formulated in his Olympic victor list did not become a
central feature of his historical works but was utilized only when he
desired to establish an especially important date. In contrast,
Dionysius of Halicarnassus synchronized Olympiads, Athenian archons,
Roman magistrates, and Pontic kings in his Chronoi to establish the
chronological organization for the whole of the Antiquitates Romanae.
While the Antiquitates Romanae start with Olympiad 68 since his
interest there is in Roman affairs, his Chronoi seems to have reached
back to the first Olympiad, as was standard practice for victor lists
of all types, and in composing it he had access to Timaeus, Polybius,
(both of whom had already dated the founding of Rome in terms of
Olympiads), Eratosthenes, and several Roman historians, some of whom
seem to have already employed Olympiad dates. The subject of why and
how Roman historians came to use a Greek chronological system might
bear further investigation.

By their nature, Olympic chronicles tended to be outdated once a new
version was composed. Somewhat oddly, the two best preserved examples
are not discussed in detail in chapter five, Dionysius of
Halicarnassus' Antiquitates Romanae because it was already covered in
chapter four and Diodorus Siculus' Bibliotheca Historica on the grounds
that it is well known and had been treated earlier in connection with
Timaeus. Of the remaining authors of Olympic chronicles (Philochorus,
Ctesicles [vel Stesicleides], Castor, Thallus, Phlegon, the anonymous
authors of POxy I 12 and XVII 2082, Cassius Longinus, and Dexippus),
some included complete lists of Olympic victors but the more common
practice was to use numbered Olympiads and the name of just the stadion
victor. Several adopt an annalistic format with Olympiads subdivided
into years, often marked in terms of Athenian archons. Information
listed might include such events as the Athenian census under Demetrius
of Phaleron, the careers of the Pergamene kings, and events before the
founding of the Olympics, and, if we include Diodorus and Dionysius,
the development of Roman power. As a form of literature, Olympic
chronicles had a long life, stretching from Philochorus late in the
fourth century B.C. to Dexippus early in the third century A.D., at
which point Roman emperors replaced Olympiads as the significant
chronological marker.

Overall Christesen is careful not push the evidence beyond what it can
bear, especially given that we often possess only the name of a work or
a glancing reference to its contents. In addition to the appendices,
Christesen's arguments are bolstered by numerous charts which often
collect evidence that is interesting for other purposes, e.g. table 7
collects all the inscriptions recording victors in local contests.
Christesen's desire to assign every Olympic victor list to a specific
category, however, may have obscured a crucial issue, namely why
authors came to view Olympic chronology as a useful historical tool. In
particular, while Christesen is not unaware of the connection between
Eratosthenes, Timaeus, and Philochorus, their contributions are
relegated to different chapters. One loses sight of the fact that their
works were inspired by a common desire for a chronological system that
would span the Greek world. This desire in turn arose from an interest
in composing histories covering wide swaths of territory, including
interactions with the Romans, somewhat in the style of Ephorus'
universal history but in a chronological, not topical fashion. Of the
available chronological systems, Olympic victor lists represented the
best available tool since they established absolute dates for famous
individuals who were not just of local importance but who came from
throughout the Greek world. While not answered by Christesen, this
represents the sort of question it will be possible to explore now that
he has traced how, in a process that was neither simple nor automatic,
athletes became the basis on which Greeks assigned dates to all the
significant events in their history.


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Notes:


1.   For other recent work on ancient information science, see J.
Koenig and T. Whitmarsh (edd.), Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire.
Cambridge University Press, 2007.

2.   The exceptions are authors whose works are easily accessible (e.g.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus), along with Julius Africanus, Eusebius, and
Panodoros. As Christesen realized, a new edition and translation of
Africanus was forthcoming at the time he was writing: J. Wallraff,
J.Martin, R. Umberto, K. Pingge/ra, W. Adler (edd.), Chronographiae:
The Extant Fragments. W. de Gruyter, 2007. For Eusebius, Christesen
provides extensive material drawn from P. Christesen and Zara
Martirosova-Torlone, "The Olympic Victor List of Eusebius: Background,
Text, and Translation." Traditio 61 (2006) 31-93.

3.   See, in particular, Martin Wallraff (ed.), Julius Africanus und
die christliche Weltchronistik. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte
der altchristlichen Literatur 157. W. de Gruyter, 2006 (also includes
articles on Eusebius, particularly the Armenian text).

4.   For a wide-ranging reassessment of these dates, see P.-J. Shaw,
Discrepancies in Olympiad Dating and Chronological Problems of Archaic
Peloponnesian History. Historia Einzelschriften 166. Franz Steiner
Verlag, 2003. Chapters 1 and 2 also contain an interesting discussion
of the relatively late development of the "chronological imperative,"
the belief that the temporal relationship of historical events can and
should be expressed in terms of a some absolute standard, e.g. numbered
Olympiads or archon dates.

5.   A. Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius and Greek Chronographic
Tradition. Bucknell University Press, 1979.