Research Basics: Seeking Ancient Athletes
Kimberly Deane is a sophomore Classics major from New Ipswich, New Hampshire. This article is an edited version of a longer piece Kimberly wrote about her experience in the Research Experience and Apprenticeship Program (REAP). Sponsored by the UNH Hamel Center for Undergraduate Research and the University Honors Program, REAP is a paid summer apprenticeship experience designed for highly motivated first-year students. Learn more at http://www.unh.edu/undergrad-research/reap.html.
Panathenaic Amphora. Bestiarius. SEG. You may be wondering what these words are or why they are important. At the beginning of my Research Experience and Apprenticeship Program (REAP) experience this past summer, so did I. Their significance in the ancient world, and in the Greek world, became clear as I worked with Professor Stephen Brunet of the Classics department on our project entitled “New Evidence on Ancient Olympic Athletes.” The main goals were to develop a more recent catalog of ancient athletes, especially those who won the Olympics, and extract the bibliographic information from this catalog. Establishing what scholars have accomplished in a particular field is the backbone and keystone of many research projects and can make finding new discoveries more feasible. For professional classicists and students like me just starting out in the world of ancient history, sorting and organizing new evidence and information, and extracting the bibliographic information, can prove extremely useful. This summer Professor Brunet and I were successful in our goals to continue making a catalog of athletes.
What is Classics? This is a question I often receive. Classics is the study of ancient Greek and Rome, including Latin and Ancient Greek, but also the history, civilization, traditions, and everyday life of that time period. Classics helps to define where we came from—our history. Many of our traditions stem from the classical world and are still with us today, notably the Olympics. The games were so important to the ancient Greeks that their 4-year cycle was the sole means of dating events in Greek society. Despite the importance of the ancient games, an up-to-date catalog of Olympic athletes does not exist. Winners of Olympic Games have been recorded since the day of Aristotle, but the most recent catalog of athletes was last updated in 1987. However, many more athletes have been discovered in the past 20 years, especially as archaeologists uncover and publish new material.
Compiling the information about these recently discovered athletes and creating the basis of a catalog can often prove difficult. Information about ancient athletes and the Olympics comes almost entirely from inscriptions from vases, tombstones, and similar documents. These artifacts can be hard to decipher, not just because the inscriptions are written almost entirely in Ancient Greek, but also because artifacts are often damaged or missing parts completely. Only half of an athlete’s name might be legible, or the date might be cut off. In the worst cases, only a few words out of the entire inscription are legible.
The first step in beginning the project was to locate literary sources and inscriptions that honor Olympic Athletes using Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (SEG). SEG is what can be referred to as the “bible” of classical inscriptions. It includes entries about every book or article about Greek inscriptions published in a particular year. The most recent edition is 2004 and contains 1919 entries about various publications. The publications are written in many different languages, in journals all over the world, and, as an added challenge, the SEG indexes are not standardized from one volume to the next. For example, if you wanted to look up every entry involving apples, you would expect to look up just that—apples. However, in SEG, there is no one way to look up a particular item. This is because of the nature of the publications that SEG covers and because of the damaged state of the inscriptions. In one volume or year, SEG might list entries on apples and fruit (unknown), and another year might list entries on trees (fruit). Hence the difficulty with locating specific topics across separate volumes. As the summer progressed, one of our tasks was develop a master list of Greek terms involving athletics and this made working with the SEG indexes easier.
Professor Brunet and I developed a detailed procedure for working through SEG and putting entries of interest in order. Starting with the most recent SEG installment, 54 (2004), which is still in a traditional printed format, not online, we scanned both the English and the Greek indexes for any entries that appeared to be useful. We searched for terms that included most anything athletic, such as boxers. We also searched for other terms like Kalos (the Greek word for beauty—Greek athletes were considered images of beauty), Gymnasium (a place where young men received instruction), Olympic victories, Bestiarius (beast fighters), and Panathenaic Amphora (ceramic vases given as prizes in Panathenaic games), and much more. We then organized, word processed, categorized, and sorted the entries—a lengthy and detail-oriented process.
I proceeded to read through entries to cite the references. SEG only uses abbreviated citations. To find the full citation, I used a website called L'Annee Philologique, which is a comprehensive database of scholarly classical works. I exported the full citations to Refworks, an online bibliographic management program. If I couldn’t find the exact article, I would type in the information in RefWorks using all the information SEG gave in the citation. This list of references was used as a guide for articles that Professor Brunet needed to order to complete the catalog.
REAP was a positive and educational experience for me. It provided me with the tools and know-how for future research projects, especially in Classics. Going into REAP, my goals were to get acclimated in the world of research, and get a thorough background of both ancient athletics and classics in general. With each volume of SEG, I became more familiar with what exactly I was looking for, and what would prove useful to put in the catalog. In the process, I became more adept at doing independent research. Several entries from SEG led to information about Olympic Athletes that could be included in the updated catalog. Though this is not the kind of research that leads to exciting discoveries, harvesting and organizing information helps scholars by giving them a single resource that contains all the information they are looking for, and it helps provide the “big picture” when studying a certain problem or area. Therefore, the project was a success for both me and Professor Brunet, and useful for other classicists interested in the world of ancient Olympics.
—Kimberly Deane
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