Reviews: The Sporting Life

Every four years sports-obsessed Americans become captivated by a spectacle that traces its origins back nearly three millennia to the shadowy Dark Age of ancient Greece.

We know almost nothing about the first Olympic festival of 776 B.C.E. (or even if it was actually inaugurated on that traditional date). But the athletic-religious festival’s subsequent development and impact on Greek society are the subject of numerous books—some newly published to coincide with the first modern Olympic Games to be held in Greece since their founding in 1896.

The book most obviously pitched at the 2004 Olympics is British classicist Nigel Spivey’s The Ancient Olympics (Oxford University Press, 2004), which examines the military, social, political and commemorative aspects of the games. Like many revisionist scholars, Spivey wants to demonstrate that our view of the Olympics as a peaceful, clean, harmonious, amateur sporting event is completely erroneous; rather, it was characterized by strife, violence, cheating and highly specialized professional training—more NFL than Little League, or what George Orwell called “war minus the shooting.”