Eros and Sport: A Humanist's Perspective
Author(s): John McClelland
Source: Journal of Sport History , Fall 2002, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Fall 2002), pp. 395-406
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43611609
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Forum
Eros and Sport:
A Humanist s Perspective
John McClelland1
Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies
Victoria College, University of Toronto
Paul the Silentiary, a sixth-century Byzantine poet, began one of his amatory
epigrams thus: "The law? Eros recognizes none, fierce fighter that he is."1 This ancient
recognition that the erotic drive is fundamentally unruly and may intrude anywhere can
be illustrated by the following modern story. A lady of my acquaintance once confided
that she liked to run on the Hart House track at the University of Toronto because that
was where one of my colleagues - who is also a serious runner - trained. She found that, if
she timed her workout to coincide with his, contemplating his "tight little buns" (her
term) alleviated the boredom of running laps. I tell this brief anecdote to remind us of a
few basic facts. Firstly, the professor in question was in all likelihood not intentionally
exhibiting his erotic masculinity. That particular track offers no provision for spectators,
and it was mostly frequented by high-level male runners - marathoners and the like; if
anything, the masculinity being exhibited was purely athletic. On the other hand, the
lady s appreciation of that special portion of my colleagues anatomy seems not to have
been motivated by its biomechanical action, at least as it related to running. Her reaction
was frankly erotic, and yet I do not believe she was indulging in a process of "objectification,"
in the way she might have done with some anonymous hunk in a tank top and
shorts. The scholar/runner was someone she knew personally, though not well, and who
was not, for her, the focus of any sexual interest outside the confines of the gymnasium. In
tIn drafting this paper the author benefited from correspondence with Professor Thomas Scanlon.
Dr. Laura Willett contributed to the selection and preparation of the illustrations. The author is grateful
to both for their assistance.
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Journal of Sport History
other words, what would have been a perfectly inconsequential encounter had it occurred
in a purely social context became erotically charged when it occurred within the context of
athletics and sport.
Why should this be? In the first instance, the basic situation would lend itself to
thoughts of mutual sexual desire: active, muscular people of all genders in a state of seminudity
and promiscuous proximity, performing physical exercises that emphasized certain
anatomical features to the observer but that were for the performer so mind-numbingly
repetitive that they encouraged her or his thoughts to wander off in fanciful directions. Of
course, the erotic dimension of these encounters seems to have been purely subjective and
individual. The colleague, perhaps absorbed by thoughts of a meeting he had to chair or
the book he was working on, was probably unaware of the fact that his active posterior was
eliciting semi-lascivious glances. On the other hand, my only informant in this case certainly
seemed oblivious to the fact that she might have been producing an analogous effect
on him. Who but the scholar/runner can tell us whether or not he was reciprocating the
lady s contemplation of his buns every time he passed her? In short, eros is in the eye and
mind of the beholder, it may - or may not - be mutual, but it is certainly not just a matter
of spectators ogling athletes. The athletes themselves can feel erotic arousal at the sight of
their competitors even in the midst of participation, even if that arousal is not heightened
by actual physical contact.
My point here, of course, is to question how we are to react to this anecdote and to its
hypothetical ramifications. Are we to blame the lady, as early Christian moralists would
do, by assuming that her only reason for going running was to obtain some sort of lubricious
gratification, whatever the ostensible justifications she advanced for her activity? Are
we to emulate modern feminist moralizers and judge her severely for perverting the true
nature of sport by eroticising it and for displacing her sexual appetites from a legitimate
object of desire to the body of an unwitting fellow athlete? Or might we take another tack,
and congratulate her for being a free spirit and for enriching the athletic experience by
welcoming to it an erotic dimension that was fostered by the circumstances, that procured
additional satisfaction for her, that would have no aftermath, and that caused no harm to
anyone else? If sport is a pleasure, must we limit that pleasure only to the physiological and
psychological benefits that the activity itself was intended to produce and neglect any
inadvertent side effects that were not sought but that might accrue?
Before getting to those questions, I must, however, engage the central issue of this
forum that has been raised by Allen Guttmanns 1996 book, The Erotic in Sports , and the
responses it elicited (or failed to) - Thierry Terret s paper from last year s annual conference
of the North American Society for Sport History,2 and Guttmanns further reflections
on the subject, which form the first article in this set: the legitimacy and the moral/
political correctness of seeing or using sport from an erotic perspective. Guttmann argues
that to do so is merely to accept, even rejoice in, the richness of a physical continuum in
which sport melds into sex. He sees this continuum as innate to Western civilization, since
it was frankly celebrated by the ancient Greeks at a time when the active physical body was
an equal partner with the active cerebral mind. And he deplores the fact that though
Western society has lived beyond the medieval Christian denial of the legitimate mutual
impingement of sex and sport, other orthodoxies still impose on us a state of ambivalence:
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Eros and Sport
we are told that, despite our fundamental impulses, to see sport as sex demeans both t
athlete and the spectator, even if the former can see no harm in the equation. Terret, on th
other hand, has convincingly shown that the fusion of sport and the erotic in a series
postcards produced results that we can only disavow: women athletes - and thereby wom
in general - caricatured by semi-naked pin-ups who are manifestly not athletic and wh
only apparent interest in sport is to excite the male libido and provoke male condescen
sion.
It is difficult to argue with either scholar. Guttmann s book may indeed be partially a
catalogue of "historical anecdotes on coitus and sports settings,"3 but it is a very impressive
catalogue. Guttmann successfully achieved what few scholars can: rationally ordering and
intelligently interpreting a panoply of sources so vast and so varied that it can make the
head swim. He enunciates his position so convincingly that you have to willfully subscribe
to "prefabricated concepts" in order to deny the validity of his arguments. He is to be
congratulated not only for having reduced whole realms of human culture to manageable
proportions but also for having waded successfully through a morass of bad and wrongheaded
scholarship and having thereby made it possible for the rest of us to avoid reading
the kind of books and articles that have created "the sorry state of our profession."
Though only of article-length, Terret s "Sport and Erotica" covers a similarly wide
range of cultural issues (within the chronological limits imposed by his subject), is solidlybased
and carefully argued, and yet one is left with the nagging feeling that he may be
making a mountain out of a mole hill. Did the few semi-erotic postcards that constitute
his starting-point have any influence at all on the French mindset? That most French
males in the 1920s thought that women should refrain from playing sports - indeed that
they should refrain from doing anything except faire la cuisine and faire l'amour - is hardly
news for anyone who has some familiarity with France and French culture. As for dirty
postcards, the production and distribution of erotic imagery was a French specialty from
at least the late seventeenth century. Thus in William Wycherleys 1675 comedy, The
Country Wife , the chief male protagonist returns from Paris and forestalls his friends' inevitable
questions by announcing that he has brought back to England "not so much as a
bawdy picture."4 Since continued sales of French postcards depended on varying and
renewing the images, I am not surprised that in the 1920s, the decade of Suzanne Lenglen,
some entrepreneur came up with the idea of using sports as a theme.
Women's incursions into previously all-male domains were similarly mocked in America
after the Second World War by showing them, scantily clad, doing men s work in revealing
but awkward poses in the girly calendars that hung in barber shops and car-repair garages.
But however exploitative the postcards and the calendars were - not of single individuals
(the women who posed for the pictures were presumably paid for their work) but of
women generally - what remains of them now, beyond their value as witnesses to historical
attitudes, is only titillation. The fact that the women pictured are doing "mens work,"
whether athletic or practical, and doing it badly, no longer has any real resonance and may
not have had very much even at the time.
Terret s article ought to have stressed just how vulnerable French men were feeling in
the 1920s. There had been a very active and often virulent suffragette movement in France
from the 1880s, and it showed no signs of slowing down in the following decades. More
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Journal of Sport History
Gil Elvgren, "Girl Wanted," 1952.
Courtesy Brown and Bigelow,
Avalanche Publishing.
importantly, over 1.3 million mostly young males had been killed between 191
1918, and these premature deaths had left many large gaps in the socio-economi
ture. Women were either willing or were obliged to occupy these gaps and to br
mould into which they had previously been cast, to the extent that during the "
folles," longstanding gender distinctions began to break down. Social historian Mary
Roberts quotes a prominent journalist who wrote in 1923:
. . . [T]he war has tangibly changed the social condition of women. Obliged to
take care of herself, and often to support her husband, the woman has become
emancipated. She has entered new careers: a woman doctor, lawyer, engineer,
painter, sculptor or composer is no longer a phenomenon.5
The "erotic postcards of sportswomen" that Terret describes fit into a larger male r
that was trying to force women back into their traditional roles of mother and
maker. All that said, his paper is a very scholarly piece of work, very carefully craft
illuminates a whole segment of culture from the viewpoint of what first appear
nothing but an epiphenomenon.
The larger issue is, however, why was this forum created at all? The notion that
has some connections to erotic and sexual activity seems to me such a self-evident,
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Eros and Sport
proposition - and seemed so even before I read The Erotic in Sports - that it is curiou
find it a subject of debate. Sport has been a longstanding metaphor for sex. A recent rep
that revealed yet another of John F. Kennedys paramours described the late U.S. presi
as a "sexual athlete." In the "Lifestyle" section of a Toronto newspaper some years ago
wife of a couple that had spent a particularly strenuous weekend repairing their marr
used the term "sexual Olympics" to denote the high caliber of their performance.
Southern slang commonly used the term "sporting house" to refer to a brothel, and "
ing" is common slang for successfully achieving seduction.
This connection seemed self-evident to an earlier age as well. A comic sixteenth
century French poem describing the steps in seduction and foreplay does so in terms of
scoring system in tennis; modern Americans of course use the analogy of baseball ("gett
to first base"). Shakespeare himself links sport and sex when he has Gloucester say in
opening scene of King Lear that there was "good sport" at the conception of his bastard
Edmund.6 The fact that much of this discourse is merely the ingenious use of commonp
does not excuse it from infringing the canons of political correctness, but it does revea
things: that ordinary parlance has long induced us to imagine sex as a sporting encou
and that human beings have long thought that the satisfactions procured by athletic
commensurate with (though not necessarily equal to) those of the god Eros.
The correlation between sport and sex can sometimes be found in pictorial source
well. Renaissance historian Sydney Anglo reprints a mid fifteenth-century engraving
juxtaposes a fencing school, a bathhouse, and a brothel. He stresses the censorious m
inferences the picture had for contemporaries: the man in the bathhouse is portrayed
fool; one of the fencers is displaying his bare buttocks, for no apparent reason. The con
sion seems inescapable - fencing (and perhaps all sport) was just as depraved an activi
was fornicating and frequenting promiscuous bathhouses - but we may wish to read
three-part image consecutively as well: after exercise, a bath and then sex.7
An early Renaissance
fighting school, bathhouse,
and brothel.
R.L. Scott Collection,
Glasgow Art Gallery
and Museum.
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Journal of Sport History
As Guttmann has shown, and as other sources confirm, athletes themselves have connived
in this relation of eros and sport and have even sought to profit from it. Tourneying
medieval knights openly demonstrated that they were showing off to win a lady's favors by
wearing her colors. The short tops and very tight leotards that were the common costume
for young men in the Renaissance accentuated certain bodily parts and thus became provocative
when the wearers were playing strenuous sports. In his very influential Book of the
Courtier (1528), Castiglione advocates that for an audience that includes women, men
should put on a "fine show" ("un bel spettaculo") by doing horse vaulting or playing ball
games. The latter especially facilitates "showing off the disposition of the body, the quickness
and litheness of every member."8 In our own day, professional baseball players send
the batboy to obtain the phone numbers of women sitting in the field-level boxes whom
they think they have impressed with their play, and the sexual successes of NBA players are
legendary, even if we do not believe Wilt Chamberlain. Figure skaters of both sexes, whether
pairs or singles, accentuate the erotic in their performances (speed skaters do not, though
they are tightly sheathed in all-revealing spandex).9
It may, of course, be the spectator that brings eros to the event. The ancient Spartan
lawgiver Lycurgus reportedly made skimpily-dressed virgins parade and compete in sports
events. Whatever the feelings of these female athletes, the male spectators who watched
them were expected to turn their fancies to thoughts of marriage.10 In another erotic
register, two late fifteenth-century French manuscript illuminations show middle-aged
men (no women are present) taking a keen and perhaps non-athletic interest in groups of
younger men swimming in skin-tight boxers. The sixteenth-century French memorialist
Fifteenth-century swimmers and spectators.
Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque
NATIONALE DE FRANCE.
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Eros and Sport
The Limburg brothers, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry , the month of August. Musée du Châte
Chantilly.
Pierre de Brantôme provides a more traditional example. Whenever the handsome Duc de
Nemours was playing tennis or football, two very beautiful and very noble ladies of th
court tore themselves away from their prayers and ran to watch him. Though Nemour
was an accomplished sportsman, the attraction the ladies felt was surely more erotic tha
athletic and bore witness to the truth of Castiglione s assertion about the advantages tha
ball games procure for their male players.11 On the other hand, eros may remain absen
even when the situation is propitious. An illumination from the Très Riches Heures du Duc
de Berry (1416) depicts aristocratic ladies on a hawking expedition taking no interest at a
in some nearby male peasants swimming naked.
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Journal of Sport History
However, it is not enough simply to demonstrate that sports are and always have been
erotic or have provoked erotic responses and consequendy to invite those disturbed by this
fact to become accustomed to it. That there have been negative exploitations of the sexual
attractiveness of the athletic body seems equally undeniable, but it is similarly not adequate
to ascribe this exploitation to vague entities such as capitalism or dead white men or
to assume that it will always lead to rape or other forms of misogynistic violence. Indeed, I
do not believe we can solve the problem of non-violent erotic exploitation - most people
actually do not seem to mind it - but I think we can solve the conflict that has arisen
between the tenants of Guttmanns position and those who, like Terret, adopt the opposing
view.
The historical sources for defining the erotic in sports are necessarily written or iconographical,
that is to say, they are not actions but, in Aristotle's terms, imitations of actions;
not documentary presentations but constructed re-presentations . And because they were
mostly produced in cultures that were dominated by the ideals of rhetoric and the edifying
function of art and literature, they were shaped toward eliciting some sort of reaction on
the part of the viewer or reader. They hence cannot be taken as entirely realistic. The
historian of ancient sport, H. A. Harris, rightly emphasized that Greek vase paintings are
not reliable, incontrovertible evidence of ancient sports techniques:
The Greek vase painter was an artist, faced with the task of ornamenting a
panel often oddly shaped and on a curved surface. With him aesthetic considerations
always came first
What he says about the depiction of athletes on Greek vases is no less t
representation of the same subject.
On the other hand, modern feminist and neo-Marxist criticisms of
sport and the erotic seem to deal primarily with real sport and real
secondarily with their representation by photographic and cinematic
Guttmann traces the history of body image and the erotic in sport and w
on French postcards, they are relying on rhetorical and aesthetic docum
dence; but when Guttmann oudines the opinions of sport advanced by
ies and when Terret situates the postcards within the context of real
letes, they are dealing with arguments that are based not on pictori
certain perception of reality.
It is fundamentally important to distinguish between unmediated
ity, and hence between erotic arousal at an actual sporting event and
sioned by the pictorial or verbal representation of a sporting event. T
athletes going about their business is to be a peeping tom (or a "voyeur
would have it).13 Thus the lady I mentioned in my opening anecdote
the privacy of the scholar/runner and exploiting him erotically, even if
his clothes in a public place and was exhibiting his body in a semi-nude
hand, the lady was also being an athlete and her own physical exertion
her to react that way. Plato knew and even approved of the fact tha
exercised together, they would inevitably be led to have sexual interc
other.14 Reports that there was an unexpectedly high consumption of
Lake City athletes' village in 2002 bear out the truth of Plato's obser
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Eros and Sport
Edgar Degas, Young Spartans Exercising, [before 1917]. National Gallery, London.
another way, the Cole Porter song "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," in which a lady g
admits to becoming erotically aroused while playing: "While tearing off/A game of
may make a play for the caddy."
When it comes to photos of athletes, these either stress the expenditure of eff
required to achieve athletic success, or they portray the athlete as an attractive pers
the latter case, since athletes are almost invariably young and in good physical shape,
degree of eroticism seems to be an inevitable concomitant of the image for at least som
the people who see it. An untouched photo must, however, reveal the warts and all,
paintings, artistic photographs, and verbal descriptions are fictions that show only
the painter/ photographer A writer wants the viewer to see. If eros is present in Edgar
Young Spartans Exercising, it is because Degas put it there.15 To that extent, his paint
no more about sport than are Terret s French postcards - or, extrapolating backwards,
are the numerous depictions of models posing as athletes that we can see on Greek
To read any of these as hard evidence of the erotic in sport or of eroticism using sp
nefarious purposes is in my view mistaken; they are rather evidence of public taste
artistic imagination and creativity catering - or even pandering - to that taste. Gut
tells us that
The athletic male body [in ancient Greece] was unquestionably a cultural ideal.
From the visual evidence of our museums, where hundreds of statues and thousands
of vases have been preserved, a composite image of that cultural ideal can
readily be reconstructed.16
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Journal of Sport History
But in fact that "cultural ideal" was artistic and erotic, but it was not athletic. In his
second-century A.D. book on sports, On Gymnastics , Philostratos oudined in some detail
the different body types athletes needed to have according to whether they were boxers,
wrestlers, runners, or pentathletes.17 His contemporary, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus,
expressed the same idea but grounded it in explicitly aesthetic terms:
What makes a pancratiast beautiful does not make a wresder good, and more
than that makes a runner quite absurd; and the same man who is beautiful for
the pentathlon is very ugly for wrestling.18
The erotically ideal male athletic physique was as much a figment of the painter s imagination
as are the female figures drawn in modern-day fashion magazines and clothing adver-
tisements.
I am not, however, trying to refute the proposition that sport is and should be erotic.
Instead, in order to end on a positive note, I want to return once again to the humanists
standby, Plato, and to a point I adumbrated in my opening anecdote, that the erotic in
sports is as much a matter of athletes becoming mutually aroused within the context of the
gymnasium or the playing field as it is of spectators fantasizing about players or players
trying to provoke an erotic reaction from spectators. In his book Guttmann quoted the
text from Platos Symposium (217c) in which Alcibiades recounts his failed attempt to
seduce Socrates by wrestling with him,19 and I have already looked here at the passage
from the Republic (358d), also quoted by Guttmann (p. 24), in which the philosopher
takes a eugenicist tack and advocates athletic young heterosexuals moving naturally from
the gymnasium to the bed to produce healthy offspring for the state. A final text from
Plato serves, however, to situate the erotic in sports on a nobler plane, while still underlining
the fact that the fundamental form of arousal occurs between performing athletes and
not between active players and passive spectators.
In the middle of the Symposium (182a-c) Pausanias, one of the participants in the
debate, devotes some fifteen lines to an explanation of the superiority of Athens over the
other Greek states and over the Greek-speaking areas that are governed by "barbarians."
This superiority hinges on the way that erotic desire is integrated into the larger scheme of
things. In the barbarian states, pederasty is banned outright. The Greek states of Elis,
Sparta, and Boeotia go to the other extreme and require it by law. But in Athens the lover
must persuade (peithein ) the object of his desire to respond to his passion {eros), not with
ant er os, reciprocal desire, but with philia , intense friendship or even love. And the place
where physical desire and emotional love meet and turn into strong relationships is in the
shared fondness for knowledge and for physical exercise: philosophia kai philogymnastia (a
linking that reminds us that the gymnasium was as much a place for intellectual formation
as it was for physical pursuits). Other Greek states must legislate erotic relations into
existence because their older men lack the eloquence of the Athenians {sophoi legein) to
win over younger men. The barbarians legislate them out of existence because they want to
keep their subjects away from anything that elevates the mind to great things (phronemata
megala).20
Like Paul the Silentiary whom I quoted at the top of this essay, Plato begins this
passage by connecting eros, passion, and nomos/ thesmos, the rule of law, but he does so in an
affirmative rather than a negative sense. For Plato erotic desire can be regulated and con-
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Eros and Sport
trolled through its integration into culture, in the best sense of that word. And when it i
it can be used to produce very desirable results. This he illustrates by an historical anecdot
that brings the passage to a close, in which eros and philia joined together to destro
( katelusen ) despotic power {arch eri). 21 Between these two poles, which speak implicitly
self-government, we find three of the peaks of the Athenian achievement arrayed in cl
symbiosis: rhetoric, philosophy, and gymnastics. The erotic dimension of sport is not ju
in the "bawdy pictures" found on Greek pottery or the animalistic desire to sexually p
sess an athlete with a perfect body. It is part and parcel of what raises us above the anima
and makes us truly human: ruling ourselves, using language effectively, feeling stron
emotions for another person, acquiring knowledge for its own sake, and improving ou
bodies by exercise and sport. In the ideal world that Plato imagined we might create, er
does not debase sport but rather elevates it to an equal footing with the disintereste
pursuit of wisdom.
x"Thesmon Eros ouk oide biemachos ." Paul the Silentiary 292.1 in Anthologie grecque, anthologie p
latine, tome II, livre V, ed. Pierre Waltz (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1960), 128 (translated by author).
2Allen Guttmann, The Erotic in Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Thierry Terre
"Sports and Erotica: Erotic Postcards of Sportswomen during Frances Années Folles, " Journal of Spo
History 29 (2002): 271-287.
3The label was applied to the book by Brian Pronger in an article entitled "Outta My Endzon
Sport and the Territorial Anus ," Journal of Sport and Social Issues 23 (1999): 387. To be truthful I did
find much coitus in The Erotic in Sports.
4William Wycherley, The Country Wife 1 . 1 , ed. James Ogden (London: Black; New York: Norton
1991), 13. "Feelthy peectures" in the form of postcards were still being hawked rather openly to (mos
American) tourists on the streets around the Paris Opera in the 1940s and 1950s, but the market seem
to have dried up when the Anglo-Saxon world lost its sense of shame and modesty concurrendy with t
1959 court decision that authorized the publication of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterleys Lover.
5Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes : Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917
1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 179. Although he knew of this book indirecd
Terret might have made more use of it and of Roberts' more recent Disruptive Acts: The New Woman
Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
6 King Lear 1.1, "Though this knave came something saucily to the world before he was sent for, y
was his mother fair; there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged."
7Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts in Renaissance Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Pres
2000), 14.
8Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier 2.22, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1959), 39.
9Just as this article was going to proof, Olympic gold medallist Jamie Salé posed revealingly for
FHMy a "young mans magazine" and was quoted in the Toronto Globe and Mail (8 December 2003) as
saying "Guys should know that figure skating is sexy."
10Plutarch, Life ofLycurgus 15.1 (I quote Plutarch - and later Plato and Epictetus - according to the
paragraphing system that is common to all reliable editions of their texts.)
11 Pierre de Bourdeilles, seigneur de Brantôme, Oeuvres complètes , ed. L. Laianne, 10 vols. (Paris:
Renouard, 1868), 4: 165-166.
12H. A. Harris, Greek Athletes and Athletics (London: Hutchinson, 1964), 29-30.
13By definition a "voyeur" is someone who derives pleasure - who can only derive pleasure - from
observing surreptitiously or from imagining the sexual congress of other people.
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Journal of Sport History
14Guttmann interprets a euphemistic rendering of Republic 358d to mean an "erotically suffused
relationship" ( The Erotic in Sports , 24). Whereas what Plato unmistakably said was that young men and
women living, eating, and exercising together would go on from there to sex - "pros ten allelon mixing
15There seems to be some confusion about the tide of the painting. According to the National
Gallery of Britain's website (www.nationalgallery.org.uk) Degas never displayed the picture or let it out of
his studio, hence, presumably, never officially baptized it. The painting came to Britain in 1924, seven
years after Degas' death and seems to have been known as Young Spartans Exercising ever since.
16Guttmann, The Erotic in Sports, 17.
17Philostratos, On Gymnastics , paras. 31-35, in Stephen G. Miller, Arete, Greek Sports from Ancient
Sources , 2nd ed. expanded (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 21-22, 25-27, 31-32, 39.
18Epictetus, Discourses , 3. 1 .5-6, trans. W. A. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann,
1928).
19Guttmann, The Erotic in Sports , 20-21. Curiously enough, H. A. Harris completely misses the
erotic dimension implicit in two naked young men wresding with each other: "[In the palaestra' or
wresding-school] young men met their comrades and enjoyed a friendly bout of wresding with them,
just as today they would play a set of tennis or a game of squash." Sport in Greece and Rome (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1972), 21.
20I became aware of the importance of this text from reading Thomas Scanlon, Eros and Greek
Athletics (Oxford: Oxford University Press., 2002) where it is quoted on p. 199.
21In 514 B.C. Axistogiton (the erastes) and Harmodius (the philos) together assassinated Hipparchus,
brother of the dictator Hippias.
406 Volume 29> Number 3
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