Overview

Ancient peoples, like modern, spent much of their lives engaged in and thinking about competitions: both organised competitions with rules, audiences and winners, such as Olympic and gladiatorial games, and informal, indefinite, often violent, competition for fundamental goals such as power, wealth and honour. The varied papers in this book form a case for viewing competition for superiority as a major force in ancient history, including the earliest human societies and the Assyrian and Aztec empires. Papers on Greek history explore the idea of competitiveness as peculiarly Greek, the intense and complex quarrel at the heart of Homer's Iliad, and the importance of formal competitions in the creation of new political and social identities in archaic Sicyon and classical Athens. Papers on the Roman world shed fresh light on Republican elections, through a telling parallel from Renaissance Venice, on modes of competitive display of wealth and power evident in elite villas in Italy in the imperial period, and on the ambiguities in the competitive self-representations of athletes, sophists and emperors.

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9781905125487

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Nick Fisher is Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University. For the Classical Press of Wales he has co-edited with Hans van Wees Archaic Greece (1998) and Aristocracy in Antiquity (2015). He is the author of Hybris: A Study in the Values of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greece (1992). He has also published numerous articles on Ancient Greek social behaviour. Hans van Wees is Reader in Ancient History at University College London. He is the author of Status Warriors: War, Violence, and Society in Homer and History, editor of War and Violence in Ancient Greece and joint editor of the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare.

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