The Acrobatic Body in Ancient Greek Society

273 Pages·2017·2.03 MB·English

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Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
7-7-2016 12:00 AM
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Jonathan R. Vickers, The University of Western Ontario
Supervisor: Aara Suksi, The University of Western Ontario
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in Classics
© Jonathan R. Vickers 2016
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Vickers, Jonathan R., "The Acrobatic Body in Ancient Greek Society" (2016). Electronic Thesis and
Dissertation Repository. 3834.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/3834
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Abstract
In this thesis I collate the textual, artistic, and material evidence for acrobatics in sport
and spectacle in Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greece, and analyze gymnastic
performances with regard to their respective socio-cultural contexts. I develop the
theoretical perspective that all body movement is socially qualified in order to
demonstrate how the extreme manipulations of an acrobatic body carry particular social
meaning: in sport, the male acrobatic body approaches superhumanism, and in spectacle
the female acrobatic body approaches subhumanism. I argue, on the one hand, that men’s
tumbling took place at the early Panathenaia festival in Athens, both in martial dances
and in competitions featuring springboards and equestrian acrobatics. Artistic
representations emphasize a participant’s controlled aerialism while he wears armour,
and thereby express his prowess as a warrior-athlete. On the other hand, acrobatics was
also a kind of spectacular ‘wonder-making’, and I argue that the abnormal physical
alterity shown by women’s acrobatic bodies rendered the performer a marginalized and
unnatural ‘other’. I use two particular feats, namely, tumbling among upright swords and
acrobatic stunts on a potter’s wheel, as case studies for my argument that the spectacular
acrobat embodied her social inferiority. In this thesis I offer the first complete treatment
of Greek acrobatics in which careful consideration is given to the relationship between
social realities, text, and art. It is also the first to use sociological theories of the body as a
method for approaching ancient Greek representations of acrobats’ extreme physicality.

Keywords

Acrobatics, Tumbling, Bodies, Sport, Spectacle, Dance, Performance, Embodiment,
Wonder-making, Thaumatopoiia, Thaumaturgy, Wonder, Xenophon, Gendered Bodies,
Ancient Greece.

i
Epigraph
She with daring grace did plunge forthwith
heedless care; and I beyond my wits!
T’ward the daggers, blades naked bared,
and all watched rapt for how she fared.

Hands splayed flat upon the ground,
breadth of space ’tween swords she found;
with effortless spring upright once more,
away the death those untouch’d points bore.

Before relief left our chests it froze,
and then sighs to gasps and chokes arose;
for backward she bent into the ring,
and back through the blades her form did fling!

A knotless arch her body seemed;
lacking spine and frame, I deemed.
as if of willow her figure bent,
til sure was I her limbs had rent.

But ever smooth she danced unfailing,
among the swords with long hair trailing.
Wonder our minds had thunder struck:
she lived! We clapped; O blessed luck!

- J. Vickers

ii
Dedication

To my wife, Christine, and my son, William,

who make up the better portion of our three-ring family circus.

iii
Acknowledgments
During the course of the research and writing for this thesis more people than I can
recount helped along the way, some in small ways and others tremendously. First and
foremost, I offer my heartfelt thanks to my supervisor, Aara Suksi. From start to finish
Aara has been a constant source of support, encouragement, insightful (and
indispensable) criticism, and helpful suggestions. This project owes much to her, and I
am extremely grateful for her expertise; I cannot thank her enough. My thanks also go to
the members of my thesis supervisory committee, Christopher Brown and Charles
Stocking. Chris has been, and continues to be, an academic role model and has given
much inspiration; Charles has helped in more ways than I can list, but especially for
argumentation, and the theoretical perspectives in the first three chapters. Thank you, too,
to the members of the examination committee, Robert Barney, Mark Golden, and Bernd
Steinbock, who agreed to read and evaluate the project.
I wrote the majority of this thesis at the University of Western Ontario, and while there is
not a single member of the faculty in the Department of Classical Studies who did not
help in some way, I would like to give particular thanks to several. Bernd Steinbock read
and commented on my work regarding Xenophon’s Anabasis, and has otherwise inspired
the way I teach. David Wilson spent several hours discussing vase paintings with me, and
shared his perceptive appraisal of dozens of images of acrobats. Randall Pogorzelski,
Aara Suksi, Charles Stocking, and Debra Nousek all gathered for multiple meetings of a
‘theory reading group’, at which I was the one most in need of enlightenment. Randy and
Charles continued to ‘talk theory’ with me on many other occasions. Our inimitable
administrative staff, Judy LaForme and Kathleen Beharrell, kept the thesis on track and
ensured its completion.
I benefited from financial support for this project from different sources. The early
research was aided by OGS and SSHRC grants. Western’s Mary Routledge Fellowship
allowed me to present my work at conferences in Canada and the United States. The Eve
Harp and Judith Wiley Classical Studies Travel Award, in combination with UWO’s
Graduate Thesis Research Award, made possible a trip to the British Museum to inspect
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vases in person, travel to a conference on ancient sport in Austria where material from
Chapters Two and Three were presented, and museum visits in Athens and Olympia. I
was also the grateful recipient of the Crake Doctoral Fellowship in Classics for 2015-16
from Mount Allison University, and I thank the Crake Foundation for their support. My
sincere gratitude goes to the faculty at Mount Allison, who were excellent friends and
colleagues while I completed the writing of the thesis. Special thanks, too, to the students
in my seminar class on the body in Greek culture, for their enthusiasm, sharp wits, and
stimulating class discussions. Abridged versions of the arguments I propose in this thesis
were delivered at Mount Allison and Memorial University of Newfoundland, and I thank
the audiences for their comments and questions.
Finally, I thank my friends and family. Of my fellow students at Western, Ashley Fox,
Tim Wright, Ben Moser, Ally Dawson, and Mary Deminion all deserve particular
acknowledgement for more than I can adequately express. My inlaws have given support
and love throughout my entire graduate career. My parents and siblings can never be
thanked enough, even if they do not realize the degree to which they actually helped.
Finally, my ultimate thanks and acknowledgement go to my wife, Christine (without
whose love and encouragement this thesis would not have been written), and my son,
William (who was born in the middle of it and reminds me why life is so wonderful). It is
to them that I warmly dedicate this project.
v
Table of Contents

Abstract and Keywords.........................................................................................................i
Epigraph….......................................................................................................................…ii
Dedication….......................................................................................................................iii
Acknowledgements….........................................................................................................iv
Table of Contents…............................................................................................................vi
Abbreviations.................................................................................................................viii
Introduction…......................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1: Tumbling in Sport and Men’s Martial Dance..................................................17
1.1: Introduction….................................................................................................17
1.2: Athletics and Ideology…................................................................................18
1.3: Somatic Memory and Spectator Experience…...............................................20
1.4: Dance in Book Six of Xenophon’s Anabasis..................................................28
1.5: Acrobatics and the Pyrrhiche….....................................................................41
Chapter 2: Springboard Tumbling in Greek Athletics.......................................................51
Chapter 3: Horseback Tumbling in Greek Athletics..........................................................79
3.1: Introduction….................................................................................................79
3.2: Paris, Cab Méd. (Bib. Nat.) 243….................................................................81
3.3: ‘Acrobatic’ Horseback Feats…....................................................................108
3.4: Conclusion…................................................................................................129
Chapter 4: The ‘Wonders’ of the Acrobatic Body….......................................................137
4.1: Introduction…...............................................................................................137
4.2: The Acrobatic Body as Spectacle….............................................................140
4.3: The ‘Generic Pose’…...................................................................................147
4.4: Thaumatopoiia..............................................................................................158
4.5: Embodied Thaumatopoiia.............................................................................175
4.6: Synopsis……................................................................................................191
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Chapter 5: Sword-Tumbling and Potters’ Wheels………...............................................192
5.1: Sword-Tumbling….................................................................................…..192
5.2: Acrobatic Feats on the Potter’s Wheel....................................................….218
5.3 Conclusions....................................................................................................231
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................234
Bibliography....................................................................................................................238
Curriculum Vitae.............................................................................................................262

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Abbreviations
For most Greek names, I use the conventional English spelling (e.g. Achilles, Ajax, etc.).
I transliterate most Greek words, but sometimes reproduce the original language if it
seems warranted; my apologies if some of my choices to use the Greek seem arbitrary.
Abbreviations for ancient authors and texts follow the standards for academic discourse
in Classics, and/or the standard abbreviations in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (fourth
edition). Other abbreviations are listed here.

CVA: Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum.
CEG: Hansen, P. ed. 1989. Carmina epigraphica Graeca saeculorum VIII-V a. Chr. n.
Berlin.
DAA: Raubitschek, A. E. 1949. Dedications from the Athenian Acropolis. Cambridge,
MA.
D-K: Diels, H. and Kranz, W. 1951. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (6th ed). Berlin.
FGrH: Jacoby, F. et al. 1923- Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Berlin and
Leiden.
IG: 1903- Inscriptiones Graecae.
K-A: Kassel, R. and Austin, C. eds. 1983-98. Poetae Comici Graeci. Berlin.
LSJ: Liddell, G. H., Scott, R., and Jones, H. S., eds. 1968. A Greek-English Lexicon (9th
ed. with supplement). Oxford.
PMG: Page, D. L. 1963. Poetae Melici Graeci. Oxford.
SEG: Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Leiden.
SH: Lloyd-Jones, H. and Parsons, P., eds. 1983. Supplementum Hellenisticum. Berlin.
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1

INTRODUCTION
“Anyone with time on their hands and a desire to make a substantial contribution
to human knowledge will find few more promising areas of investigation than
Greek bring-your-own ‘contribution dinners’, Attic cakes, the ‘second’ dessert
table, the consumption of game, gambling, perfumes, flower wreaths, hairstyles,
horse-racing, pet birds and all the various entertainments of the symposium,
including slapstick, stand-up comedy, and acrobatics.”

-James Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes (xix)

‘How can my body move?’
The exploration of the body and its capabilities is part of the lived experience of being
human. Acrobatics is one answer to the question ‘how can my body move?’ In that regard
it is also a medium of self expression and self discovery, if the body is an expression of
the self (as the social theorist Merleau-Ponty put it, “I am my body”).1 To explore the
utter limits of physicality is to explore the place of self in the world – and to offer the
world a way to evaluate that self. But the degree to which bodies might refine their
acrobatic skills, the ways in which those bodies are manifest in society, and the public
institutionalization of events, shows, and circumstances that feature them, are culturally
dependant social constructs. Not all persons and places at all times celebrate (or
condemn) extraordinary physical achievements, and certainly not in the same ways.
Therefore, acrobatics offers not only an investigation of how one’s body can move, but
how one can move one’s body in, among, and around a particular social and cultural
milieu.
There were acrobatic professionals in ancient Greece. There were acrobats who could
contort their bodies, stand on their heads or hands, perform back-flips and somersaults,
leap from horses, and dance among upright sword blades. There were acrobats at the
Greek equivalent of the modern ‘circus’, and at private parties, and at street-corners;
there were also acrobats who performed in athletic competitions, in group dances, and
onstage in drama. They were men and women, elite and slaves, athletes and entertainers;

1 Merleau-Ponty (1945, 151).