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Tony Spawforth, "What the Greeks Did for Us" (Yale UP, 2023)
00:57:22
An interview with Tony Spawforth
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today, I'm very honored to be speaking with Dr. Tony Spofford about a wonderful book he published with Yale University Press this year. The book is called what the Greeks did for us. Dr. Tony Spoffworth is emeritus professor of Ancient History at Newcastle University. A renowned expert on the ancient world, he's the presenter of of eight archaeological documentaries in the Ancient Voices series on BBC2 and has published 12 books, including the Story of Greece and Rome. Tony, welcome to New Books Network.
- [01:49]
C
Thank you, Morteza. It's great to be with you.
- [01:53]
B
This is a fascinating book. When I was reading the book and I also was talking to a friend of mine, I told him that I was reading this book and of course, the title of the book reminded him of that famous, I think, Life of Brian line. What have the Greeks ever done for us? Well, I don't know if the title has anything to do with that, so maybe you could tell us. But I'm interested to know what fascinated you to this history and culture of Greece and why you decided to write this book. Because in the book you also talk about a lot. There are a lot of, let's say, memories or stories, personal stories that you bring into this book, and then you relate them to one particular aspect of Greek culture or history. So it would be great if you could talk to us about that.
- [02:41]
C
Well, Morteza, I. I mean, when. Well, certainly in my case, I would have to dig deep into my childhood, I think, to try to pinpoint what got me interested in old things, because I think that was really how it all began. Remember when I was sort of eight or nine, I was a choir boy in a local church which had an old graveyard. And I was interested, I don't think many of the other choir boys were, in reading the inscriptions on all these old tombstones. And I think perhaps that was a kind of early intimation of a fascination with the past and also with how the past interacts with the present, with memory, I suppose. And then at school, I studied Ancient Greek. From quite early on, I was already studying Ancient Greek at little school, and then at big school, I took up ancient history as well. And then once you're drawn into the ancient Greeks specifically, you tend to find that they have something for everyone. I mean, like most ancient civilizations, there's always some angle which you find you can have a personal response to. I mean, I was interested from an early age. I don't know why. In family history and in ancient history, there's a kind of whole sub discipline really devoted to family history, to the study of ancient individuals, their careers, their family ties and so on. And quite a lot of my published work on ancient Greek history has been in that area. The title for the book, and in fact the idea for the book was suggested to me by the publisher, Yale. I'd already published a book with Yale, a general history of the classical world called the Story of Greece and rome, back in 2018. And, you know, much to my surprise, a while later, they got back to me with not only the idea for this book, but also with the title itself. So in a way, I can't take any credit for the title. It was the thinking of the publisher. I mean, the reason why I was interested in the project once it was suggested to me is because we're in interesting times culturally where the classics are concerned. And there is a kind of critique among academics of generalizing books about the legacy of ancient Greece which paint too rosy a picture of the ancient Greeks. And there is now a bit more interest in a kind of warts and all approach. And I suppose that was what I tried to implement with what the Greeks did for us. That was the kind of thinking that's fascinating.
- [05:46]
B
And I think now it Makes sense, because when I was looking at the chapters, maybe many people would expect a book of history would expect to see a chronological narrative, but you have sort of a thematic narrative. You talk about politics, rhetoric, poetry, sports, the idea of beauty, architecture, Greeks on screen, Greeks on stage. So is that right? Is that why the rationale behind choosing this approach towards writing this book?
- [06:12]
C
Well, I mean, there isn't really a methodology to the book. I felt that I had to introduce the subject of how Greek civilization is still around today. And that did mean devoting at least one chapter. I think it's the first chapter to the way in which ancient Greek civilization was to a greater or lesser extent adapted, adopted by ancient neighbors, crucially including the Romans. And I then tried to compress, I mean, it's a ludicrous challenge to compress into one chapter a story about how the kind of debris, the detritus of ancient Greek civilization, how some of this found its way into the civilizations of the, of medieval Western Europe and the Mediterranean, including the civilizations of medieval Islam. And how eventually we get to the 19th century where Greece and Rome, at least in the west, are core components of education. And in a way, the world is being seen by educated people through a sort of ancient Greek and Roman filter. And from that down to today, and then with the bulk of the book, whatever, I think 13 out of its 14 chapters, as you say, I thought that the best way to dip into the meaning of ancient Greece today was thematic. To look at different areas of cultural activity, broadly defined, from things like Olympic sports to the restaging paging of ancient Greek plays, in order to sample, to offer a snapshot to the reader of how ancient Greece in different ways, remains with us today. And that really was what I was trying to do with the book. Not to show in great detail how, for instance, ancient Greek science has influenced human, I mean, has influenced, say, research into astronomy over the millennia. But exactly what the ancient Greek legacy means, means today. And of course, it's a ludicrous proposition to try to do that between two covers, not least because the ancient Greek legacy is something to which many different countries today and cultures today can lay claim to a greater or lesser extent. I mean, I was thinking in advance of this interview that I say nothing, for instance, about Russia. And in order to do so, I would need to immerse myself in Russian culture and history, which I'm not really capable of doing. I mean, you need to be able to read Russian in order to do something like that. So what I've done is rather partial. It's heavily skewed towards what I call the Anglosphere, the those parts of the world where English is the first language and it's heavily slanted also. To what? Towards, I suppose, what I'm calling the west, you know, Europe, North America, and the outliers of these parts of the world.
- [10:01]
B
As you mentioned, there are many themes in the book and I really love to talk about all of them, but unfortunately it's the tyranny of the time. So I tried to talk about. Ask you about some of the themes that might be more popular or I'm personally more interested in. In chapter three, you talk about how the Greeks conceived of the idea of ethnic distinctions. For example, how they sort of denigrated Asia, maybe. So can you talk about their perception of ethnicity or ethnic distinctions?
- [10:30]
C
Well, I mean, ethnic, in fact, is a word derived from ancient Greek. The ancient Greek word ethnos meant to the ancient Greeks something like people, population, group. Now, when talking about sensitive subjects, as potentially thinking about ancient Greek ethnicity can seem to be in a modern context, I think it's important to understand that any kind of generalizing about the ancient Greeks and what they thought is dangerous. It's as fraught with risk as generalizing about what people think today. And you have to allow always for complexity and nuance and at least where the ancient Greeks are concerned, for the limitations of the evidence. But once all those provisos have been taken into account, you can say for sure that the ancient Greeks were fascinated by what we call ethnicity, by which is meant the observation and the description of what made one population group differ from another. So cultural traits, somatic traits, and so on. And for Asia Specifically, in the 4002 and 3002 BCE, much of Asia was the home of the Persian Empire. And what you find is the ancient Greeks based in Europe. They won these great victories on land and sea over the Persian Empire in the early four hundreds bce. And this made the Greeks start to feel themselves superior, both to the Persians themselves, but more generally to the Asian peoples who had allowed themselves to become subjects of the Persian king. And you then get some Greek thinkers who theorize this perceived inferiority of Asian peoples by putting it down to differences in climate, which, for instance, made Asian people more prone to submissiveness. I mean, this is an ancient Greek way of conceptualizing this perception of inferiority.
- [12:54]
B
And throughout the book, you also try to debunk a lot of myths about the Greek culture in history. And I guess one of them is that the Greeks were all white. The idea of white whiteness maybe came From Greece. Is that true?
- [13:09]
C
The. Well, of course, the somatic appearance of the ancient Greeks, including skin color, you can't easily read it off from the surviving evidence. I mean, I was in Greece just now and I was hearing about the latest work on the DNA of a bunch of skeletons from the 500s BCE. And this work apparently allows the identification of one young male skeleton as having had blue eyes. Now, even if this is correct, it's hardly a basis for generalization. So you have to tread, in my view, very, very carefully on this subject of what the ancient Greeks looked like. What is certainly true is that from the 18th century onward, learned Europeans conceived the ancient Greeks as white skinned like themselves. And feeding this conception was the fact that the marble used by ancient Greek sculptors when they were carving the human figure, it tended to be white marble. And originally statues were painted, but over time the paintwork was usually lost. If you look at ancient Greek writings, insofar as they tell us much about skin color, we learn, for instance, that the ancient Athenians thought that white was the ideal skin tone for women and that for men, skin should look suntanned. And these are essentially ideological preferences. The underlying thinking being that the sphere of men was the outdoors, the sphere of women was the indoors. So, as I say, you have to be very careful in drawing inferences either from depictions in ancient Greek art or from ancient Greek writings about what the ancient Greeks looked like. It's a tricky area. But yes, the whiteness of the ancient Greeks has been a kind of. It's been a almost. It's become almost mythic, really, in traditional Western thinking about the ancient Greeks. And now it's being fairly rapidly overturned because you've got all these new scientific techniques, for instance, which pick up traces of color on these white marble statues. So you can hardly go into a major museum today with an important collection of ancient Greek sculpture without being confronted by attempts to reconstruct the original color scheme, the original paintwork of these figures. So this is an idea which is definitely no longer really current among academics or well founded, the idea that ancient Greeks somehow were Caucasian white.
- [16:15]
B
Another part of the book that I really enjoyed myself was, and I didn't know about that, was that there was no consensus about justification of slavery among Greeks. And again, just to show how important Greek culture and history is to us even today, again, it was interesting to me to find out that American Americans were pro slavery activists in the 19th century. Maybe you turn to Greek to justify this slavery. Can you talk about, for example, the way debates were being had about Slavery in ancient Greece and how maybe more modern Americans used it, pro slavery activists used those arguments to their benefits.
- [17:01]
C
Well, I think it has to be stated clearly that ancient Greece, it was a slave owning society, as was ancient Rome subsequently. And there was never an abolitionist movement. And to talk about a debate, evidence for an ancient Greek debate about the rights and wrongs and slavery, I think would be to push what evidence we have too far. What we do know, and we know it from one ancient Greek philosopher only Aristotle, who wrote and thought in the 3002 BC we know from Aristotle's writings that in his time there were voices raised against the justice of one human being subordinate, being subject to another. Aristotle himself believed that there was such a thing as natural slavery. He theorized that there were certain what in modern social sciences parlance would be called out groups who were naturally suited to slavery. And for Aristotle, this had nothing to do with skin color, it had to do with climate. And I've mentioned already this idea which we find in Aristotle and also in other ancient Greek writings. So it was evidently relatively widespread that the peoples of Asia lacked what he called spirit. And this made them congenitally prone to submissiveness. Now, because Aristotle has always been such a towering authority for those who respect the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, what he wrote about slavery was seized upon in the early 19th century by the pro slavers in the American south at a time when the abolition movement was gaining ground in the early 19th century. And so this was a way in which the authority of ancient Greek civilization could be used or abused or misused to support a certain way of thinking in more modern times. That, I think is the story there. So Aristotle, because he had these views nowadays, I mean, can be viewed slightly more ambivalently than I think he might have been viewed in the past when. His function as a kind of legitimator of certain more recent ways of thinking went relatively unchallenged. I mean, that's no longer the case today, obviously.
- [20:03]
B
Another one of the myths that you tried to debunk in the book maybe is the idea that ancient Greece was, was a haven for homosexuality, but apparently wasn't, despite popular belief. Can you talk about this part of the book, please?
- [20:21]
C
Well, again, I mean, this is a, this is a complicated area and it's also an area which is very much subject to ongoing research and revision. It's. It was only in my lifetime, my adult lifetime, that the first English language scholarly study of what we call homosexuality in ancient Greek times was published. And we have to bear in mind that Some of our ways of thinking about sexuality are decidedly modern. Homosexuality is a 19th century concept and what it did, it, it diagnosed same sex desire as a kind of medical condition. Now in ancient Greek society, before the triumph of Christianity, you get the treatment of male desire for males as something essentially natural. It was taken for granted that sexually active males could be as attractive, attracted, I should say, to young males as to young females. And then because this was very much a warrior world, ancient Greece, you find that say, homosocial bonding between males could tip into what we'd call homosexual bonding. So one Greek city, ancient Thebes, had a crack regiment of its army. And this was made up of 150 pairs of male lovers maintained at state expense. Now, on the other hand, ancient Greek ideals of honor and of masculinity meant that some expressions or same sex desire between males could meet with social disapproval. So a free male of citizen stock who allowed himself to be sexually penetrated was seen as unmasculine and as dishonoring himself. And in that sense, ancient Greece wasn't a homosexual nirvana. And more broadly, men who behaved in public in an effeminate way, through their dress or gestures, for instance, that seems to have attracted disapproval. And well, there's then the question of same sex relations between females in ancient Greece. And these aren't well documented. You have a female poet called Sappho, who, whose poetry praises the beauty and the allure of unmarried girls. And this has been seized upon as having what in modern parlance we would call lesbian overtones or undertones. Although the interpretation of this poetry isn't in fact straightforward. I mean, it's not clear, for instance, that ancient Greeks themselves saw Sappho's poetry as a celebration of female desire for females. So always this question of interpretation is not straightforward. And if you want to use how the ancient Greeks thought about these things, to think about these things in our own time, you have to be prepared to do, as it were, the heavy lifting. You've got to be prepared to kind of dig down and take cognizance of what is uncertain as well as what is certain.
- [23:55]
B
Let's talk about the idea of rhetoric that's obviously has been really, really important to Greek and also it left its influence on Western culture as well. So why was this idea, the idea of being able to make a sound argument, important to them? And what does it tell us about their attitudes towards the idea of truth?
- [24:16]
C
I think with rhetoric, which comes ultimately from the ancient Greek sense of speaking or saying with rhetoric in ancient Greece, you have to be aware first of all, that ancient Greek society was intensely oral, although they had writing and they wrote things down. Modern research stresses how orality remained absolutely central to communication for centuries after the invention of writing and the dawn of the history of ancient Greek literature. And in the Greek city state, face to face deliberation was a core aspect of politics. So the ability to speak well, to carry an audience, say, to win an argument, this assumed great, great importance from early on. And it prepared the ground for another development, namely how in the 400s BCE you get Greeks starting to analyze and theorize what made a good speaker and a good speech. And this is something to do with an analytical cast of mind or propensity, which in certain parts of ancient Greece came very much to the fore from the 500s BCE onwards. This analytical compulsion and thinking about what made a good speaker and what made a good speech gave rise to a demand for teachers of what the ancient Greeks were now starting to call rhetoric, which means essentially the skill of speaking in public. Now, once this happens, at the same time, you find thoughtful Greeks who see the danger of rhetoric, and the danger for these Greeks was that you could get a skillful or well taught speaker who could persuade good people to do bad things. And the ancients came to see this as a weakness, in fact, of democracy. And it has this point of view, obviously a continuing resonance today. Now, rhetoric also colored truthfulness in ancient Greek history writing in the sense that, well, the most obvious sense is the way in which in the 400s BCE already you find Greek history writers who openly admit to inventing the speeches which they give to their historical characters. But more broadly speaking, in ancient Greek history writing, you get some ancient Greek historians whose texts are very obviously composed in the light of a rhetorical training in one form or another, you get exaggeration, you get, get drama, you get color. All of which is aiming to create a certain kind of mood in the audience or readership for the text. So, so in that sense, there's a, there comes to be a bit of an overlap between rhetoric and history writing. And what you also have to remember, finally, and this is terribly important, is that all educated Greeks, the educated elites of the ancient Greek states, they all came to be thoroughly educated in rhetoric because political leadership, as I've been explaining, required rhetorical skills. If your city was sending you off to, on an embassy to King Alexander to ask for something for your city state, you needed to be able to offer an eloquent speech before the king. And this colored many aspects of ancient Greek culture. In the end the idea of rhetoric, of persuasion, that you could make things seem what they were not.
- [28:43]
B
It was great that you talked about the idea of rhetoric and how important it was. And I think it would be remiss of me not to ask you about a great work of literature, Iliad's. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. You talk about that in your book. You say that these two works provide both a literary and also a moral education for the Greek. So I was wondering if we could briefly introduce, talk about this book, what you mean by these books providing moral education. And I'm also fascinated to know why these books have still remained with us and still resonate with us.
- [29:19]
C
Well, I think with Homer we need to start by realizing that the ancient Greeks, they saw Homer as the king of poets. And poetry in ancient Greece was not a cultural outlier, as with due respect to today's poets, it perhaps is today. You have to remember that when Greeks started to write literature, they always wrote poetry. The surviving plays, for instance, from the glory days of Athenian drama from the 400s BCE Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, they are, they're all written in poetic format. And the ancient Greeks look back on Homer as the master of poetic language. His, his poetry was drummed into them as part of their education. So all Greeks could quote Homer, but his value lay not just in the beauty of his language, but also in his morality. And this is because Greeks found in Homer, I suppose you could say, a collection of examples of how to act and not to act in relation to others, including in relation to the gods. So he was a kind of Greek Bible in the absence of any actual Bible in the sense of a collection of sacred precepts revealed by the divine, as you have with the Old and New Testaments or with the Quran. Now it, I keep saying things are hard to explain, but it is hard to, I think, sum up at any rate, why Homer has had such an influence and continues to be read even today. But you've only got to think of the repeated appearance of new translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey to appreciate the continuing pleasure and value which readers find in Homeric poetry. And I'm just talking really about translations into English, the ones which I'm aware of and come across from time to time. And I think to explain this continuing popularity, I mean, I would start by saying above all, the Iliad and the Odyssey are just terrific pieces of storytelling. They have almost everything. You've got, got fantasy worlds, but you also have this extraordinary humanity. You have war you have violence. What? You have suffering, you have cunning sex, you have family, you have heroic males, you have seductive females. And you only have to think of some of today's writers to see how you can spin this material to fit contemporary concerns. So just now you have an academic in the States, Emily Wilson. She's just translated the Odyssey with an avowedly feminist slam. So the hero disuse emerges in Wilson's translation with his heroism somewhat tarnished. You have Madeline Miller, an American author who's turned the Iliad, sort of homo social relationship between Achilles and his bosom friend Patroclus into a gay romance and so on.
- [33:04]
B
Yeah, I actually wanted to mention the new translation, which you just did it. It is fascinating how this work has still remained with. I mean, it still has influence on us and how many times it's been sort of, you know, rewritten to kind of highlight different aspects of it. As you just mentioned. Let's talk about the Enlightenment. So is this true that the scientific revolution and also the Enlightenment sort of started because European thinkers decided to get rid of the ancient Greek knowledge, science and wisdom?
- [33:43]
C
I think what is true is that from. From at least the 1500s on, you start to get the scientific advances of more recent times. And what these do is they correct, and in important areas, they supersede ancient Greek wisdom. So ancient Greek wisdom on, for instance, astronomy had continued to be a guide for the medieval world, both the world of Islam and the world of Christendom. But from the 1500s on, you start to get new discoveries which are making some of this wisdom obsolete, such as it becomes accepted that the Earth rotates around the sun, not the other way around, as the ancient Greeks believed. You get Western medicine finally discarding a central tenet of ancient Greek medicine, which was that the human body is made up of different types of what the ancient Greeks called juices or humors, as they've come to be known. And the ancient Greek idea was that good health was a matter of keeping these different juices in a state of balance. So you get the jettisoning gradually in early modern times of some of the key positions of ancient Greek science, as we would call it today. But what does remain true, of course, is that in many areas of Western thought, the ancient Greek thinkers, they started lines of inquiry which still form the subject matter of modern academic disciplines in the world in the West. And philosophy, I suppose, is the most obvious of these. Mathematics, about which I know nothing, would.
- [35:43]
B
Be another and another part of the book that I'm sure many people have have, have always thought about is the idea of male beauty that you discuss in the book from the point of view of the Greek. So how, how did they conceptualize or represent the idea of male beauty? And I'm also interested to know why they filled their streets with statues and paintings. Was it a political, was there a political message to this?
- [36:13]
C
I think first of all, it has to be grasped just how exceptional this ancient Greek appetite for the depiction was of undressed males was. I mean, there was nothing like it in any other ancient culture that we know of. And, you know, that goes for ancient Chinese civilization as well. And the ancient Greeks, they had this. It was a sort of voracious appetite for representations of young males in the prime of life. And the fact that these representations from the start were of naked bodies, it indicates a society which was deeply appreciative of male beauty in all its aspects. And this deep appreciation, I don't know, it seems to have created a cultural climate in which artists felt free to experiment and to explore. And one extraordinary result of this freedom to experiment and explore was the gradual mastery by ancient Greek artists of the illusion of realism in the depiction of the human form. And where male beauty was concerned, this took the form of anatomical curiosity and it must have taken the form of observation from life. And then once you get Greek sculptors by the early four hundreds BCE able to realize in marble or bronze a lifelike depiction of male beauty, you then find them experimenting with different versions of ideal types of male beauty. And it's very hard for us because if ancient Greeks wrote about these things, the thinking behind their appreciation of young male beauty and its depiction in art, those writings don't survive. What we just tend to see are, for instance, you know, one Greek sculptor will come up with a rather kind of stocky, architectural looking construction of male anatomy. A later sculptor will come up with a sort of taller, thinner, more attenuated type of male physique. We can't entirely get at the thinking always, as so often with ancient Greece behind these cultural preferences, as, as far as the ubiquity of this kind of imagery is concerned, it's important to know that much of the public art of a Greek city, it took the form of offerings to please the gods in their temples and shrines. So context was religious, rather like medieval art in Western Europe was essentially Christian art. They also like to put sculpture and statuary to mark burials. So you get cemeteries full of statuary and sculptured monuments. Now, where the patron of an artwork was a Greek state, you certainly could get politics Creeping in. So we know that Greek states, for instance, express their rivalries through competitive offerings in shrines, religious shrines common to all the Greeks, places like Olympia and Delphi. So there's a political edge to the display of and the commissioning of a monument, say by Athens, which is directly opposite in Delphi, a monument put up by the Spartans because the Spartans and the Athenians were great rivals in the 1400s BCE. And when you get Greek monarchs, when you get monarchy as a powerful and indeed dominant form of state, with, say, Alexander the Great, you get kings who are interested in controlling their image. Alexander, for instance, we're told, controlled his image by appointing, in effect, court artists to paint and to sculpt him. I mean, it's hard to answer quite why Greek cities were so full of public art. There's been nothing quite like it either before or since. And because the ancient Greeks clearly took for granted this explosion of painting and sculpture in public, they tended not to think it needed explanation in their writings. One answer to me might be an appreciation of artistry for its own sake, especially once Greek artists were able to create the illusion of realism. And it is clear from reactions to artworks in ancient Greek writings that ancient Greeks could be moved to wonder by this kind of art. For instance, they would praise statues which seemed so lifelike as to be about to move, or say, paintings which could fool wildlife. So you get stories of marvelous paintings where birds, real birds, would come and peck at painted fruit, for instance. So this illusion of realism was something which really fascinated the ancient Greeks and caused them to marvel.
- [42:00]
B
I have another question. I myself, my initial, let's say, or when I was in primary school and then secondary school, my initial knowledge of the Greek culture mainly came from classic Hollywood movies. And to what extent do you think Hollywood movies, special classical, would seem accurately depict or even popularized our passion for the Greek civilization?
- [42:31]
C
I think film, I mean, my sense is that film certainly helps to popularize ancient Greece, keep it in the public eye or introduce it to the public eye. It's a hunch. I mean, it's hard to prove. What you can do is you can look at box office figures, which can be very impressive. And you can look at the fact that as soon as you get a movie industry coming into being early in the 20th century, you start to get films being made of ancient Greek stories, what we call ancient Greek mythology, but also ancient Greek history. I think the first film about ancient Troy, the subject of Homer's poem the Iliad, it's made before the First World War. I mean, I think as for truthfulness. Nowadays, at any rate, there's less concern generally, I think, for accuracy on the part of either the maker or the consumer. I mean, if you think of the big blockbusters of the 21st century to do with ancient Greece, I'm thinking of Alexander or Troy or 300. They all took liberties to a greater or lesser extent. I have colleagues, academic colleagues, who are or can be horrified by these liberties. I personally think, as someone who made a living from teaching undergraduates about the ancient world, that anything that brings the ancient world to life should be, in a way, lauded, should be welcomed. I don't know, with the distant past, whether it matters so much that there's an element of distortion in what, after all, is popular culture. If you want to know more, if you have had your interest. Encouraged by having been to see a film about Alexander, it's not hard to go and find a way of deepening your knowledge by going off and reading a book, for instance. I think, obviously, with movies that distort recent history, it's a different matter and potentially a more serious matter. But that's another question.
- [45:03]
B
Another thing that I really found fascinating in your book was that the idea of nudity in Greek sports was actually seen as an indicator of social justice. I'm sure many people might find it a bit surprising. So it would be great if you could talk about how nudity represents justice or social justice.
- [45:24]
C
The fact that ancient Greek males competed, you know, in running contests or the javelin or the discus or whatever, with no clothes on. It's been much debated, although insofar as ancient Greek writings touch on the subject, what they imply, I mean, without quite stating the fact, is that the ancient Greek thought of male nudity and sports as a kind of leveling down. That is to say, if you all appeared naked, all athletes were equal, at least sartorially. And the context here is the fact that this was a world, the ancient Greek world, in which the rich, then, as now, could use dress and jewelry to assert social status. And nudity in this context, then becomes a kind of uniform which makes you all, in one sense, look the same. I mean, you would have to imagine that even loincloths, which we are told Greek athletes originally did wear before nudity became the norm, that even loincloths could be made in such a way as to express social difference. But there's not much point in speculating there. We simply don't have the evidence. But this is now the way in which ancient Greek nudity in sport is thought. There have also been ideas that it somehow made whatever the sport in question was more comfortable. I used to have a colleague, sadly no longer with us, who tried running somewhere in the north of England with no clothes on to see how it went. And, well, I mean, all he could report was that it didn't really impair him. But if we confine ourselves to what the ancient Greeks actually wrote about the question of athletic nudity, as I say, they seem to have thought originally more in terms of, of what I've called in the book, Social justice, to make things look equal.
- [47:53]
B
Now that we are talking about sports, I guess it's a good opportunity to also talk about Olympic Games, which you discuss in the book. What new elements were. How did they differ, let's say, from the Greek Olympic Games and what new elements were introduced. And I'm particularly interested in this story of how the Nazis distorted Olympic Games. And that character Pierre do, if I'm pronouncing the name correctly, Kubertin, that you talk about in the book would be great if you could talk about this part of the book.
- [48:24]
C
It's important to understand that the modern Olympics, they were never intended to be a slavish revival of the ancient games at Olympia in the Peloponnese in southern Greece. And some very obvious differences are the inclusion of modern events for women and the admission of females as spectators. At ancient Olympia, the audience was also exclusively male, as well as the contestants being male only. And the modern games also include numerous new types of contests, such as Olympic swimming or Olympic gymnastics. And they also exclude some of the most popular contests in the ancient Olympics, namely charioteering. And last but not least, today's Olympic contestants keep at least some of their clothes firmly on. So those are just some of the ways in which the idea of the ancient Olympics is reshaped for a modern, a contemporary world. Now, the driver of the creation of the modern Olympics, I mean, the first modern Olympics took place in 1896. He was a Frenchman aristocrat, a baron, called Pierre de Coubertin. And what really interested him was the promotion of fitness and not least, how to make Frenchmen more fit. And by the late 19th century, in Western culture, you're in a world in which sport has become, I think, associated with good health, both of the body and of the mind. And by the late 1800s, there were people who wanted to scale up this association and encourage sportiness as a form of kind of national improvement. And this was a time when the ancient Olympic Games were more or less common knowledge in the West. And de Coubertin, you Know, he was a one off. And he had a vision which at the time was highly unusual. He had a vision of sport as an international movement where you could get representatives of different countries competing against each other. And the ancient Olympics provided a loose model because there too, the contests were organized on an interstate basis. You have Athenians competing against Spartans and so on. And the attraction of the ancient Olympics was that they offered this precedent which had all the prestige of ancient Greek civilization behind it, at a time in the late 19th century when admiration for ancient Greece was still pretty universal among educated people in the Western world. And so what they did was to legitimize in fact, what was a novelty at the time of, of the first modern Olympics in Athens. Now, as for the Nazis, they use their hosting of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a platform for advertising Nazi ideas, especially Nazi ideology, especially about race. And this is nowadays well understood and it's been well studied. And there's most obvious innovation, I would say, was the Olympic torch. Now, there was no such ritual of torch bearing in the ancient Olympics, nor was there such a ritual in the modern Olympics prior to Berlin, 1936. And the Olympic torch, this is a ceremony which sees the lighting of a flame inside the archaeological site of ancient Olympia in modern Greece. And in 1936, relays of athletes then ran holding the torch until finally it reached Berlin. And there the last relay runner, he used the flame to light a fire in a tripod at the Olympic stadium. And you have, in Hitler's presence, you have the president of the German Olympic Committee then making a speech in which he tells the audience of tens of thousands that what this ceremony of the torch had done was to create a kind of spiritual bond between the German fatherland and ancient Greece. And he then went on to say that ancient Greece had been settled nearly 4,000 years earlier by immigrants from the north. And this was a whole ideological strand in Nazi racism and eugenics, which actually made the ancestors of modern Germany also the ancestors of the ancient Greeks. Well, all this nowadays, I mean, it's not laughable because unfortunately, racism is far too prevalent still in the modern world. The interesting thing about this invented tradition by the Nazis of the Olympic torch is that it didn't lapse with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. I mean, as we all know, it remains very much a part of today's Olympic movement. With the ceremony in the archaeological site of Olympia, where you have young Greek women dressed in sort of ancient Greek looking garb and the, the torches lit and then nowadays it may well end up on a plane, given the globalization of the Olympic movement and the fact that hosts now include places like Tokyo and Beijing and so on.
- [54:44]
B
Professor Tony Spofford, thank you very, very much for talking to us about your wonderful book. I really enjoyed listening to and I strongly recommend this book to our listeners. What I really loved about the book was that, as we mentioned at the beginning, it was sort of thematic and you can sort of read the chapters maybe independently of one another. And it's fascinating because you have included a lot of of your own anecdotes into this story. So it doesn't really read like a history book in that sense, but it gives you a lot of information about the history and culture of the ancient Greece. Thank you so much for your time.
- [55:20]
C
Thank you, Morteza. And I'm very appreciative of the interest you've taken in the book. Thank you.
- [55:34]
B
Sam.