identified with a broader (even if still exclusionary) citizenry.34
Within the categories of gymnastic and equestrian athletics, there was a wide variety of events. Equestrian events included four-horse and two-horse chariot races and races for single racehorses. These basic events could be quickly multiplied by having separate races for colts, mares, and warhorses. Mule-cart races were also offered, and the Panathenaea held a race with some third kind of two-horse chariot called a zeugos. Some more complicated events graced the program, events such as the kalpe¯ at Olympia, which called upon the rider to run as well as ride. The second-century program for the Panathenaea included as many as 28 equestrian events for individual competitors, some open, others restricted to various citizen groups. There were eight fewer gymnastic events.35
The relative importance of the main equestrian events was clear: chariots won more prestige than racehorses, four-horse chariots more than two-horse, full-grown horses more than colts, horses more than mules. Questions were surely raised between the categories—was an open racehorse win better than a colt chariot win?—but Olympia avoided such questions by having a spare equestrian program, especially so in the period of epinician’s production. Before 408, Olympia offered only four equestrian contests: the four-horse chariot, the racehorse, a mule-cart race, and the kalpe¯, and the last two were added only around 500 and discontinued only about 50 years later.
By the end of the sixth century, the Olympics offered many more gymnastic events: four in running (the stadion; the diaulos or double sprint; the dolichos, a long race; and the race-in-armor), three in combat sports (boxing, wrestling, and pancration, a kind of kick-boxing), and the pentathlon (combining the wrestling, the sprint, the long jump, the discus, and the javelin). Three youth events were offered, in the sprint, the boxing, and the wrestling. Less prestigious venues offered more events, and multiplied the options for youths, both by opening more events to youths and by having more youth categories. Isthmia and Nemea offered two youth categories: their “beardless” category (perhaps, roughly 17–20 years old) may have constituted an intermediate category (and a more realistic opportunity for a victory) between the youth and adult categories at Olympia and Delphi.36 They also offered some different events, including the horse-course race, a longer running race than the Olympic dolichos, perhaps 800 m.37 As with equestrian events, there was likely a wide array of possibilities at the smaller games, including separate competitions in the long jump, discus, and javelin.38
Youth events ranked below open events. Among the open events, we have seen that Hippias’ chronology privileged the stadion, and, to judge by the Panathenaea in the fourth century, the stadion commanded the biggest prizes for a gymnastic event at regional contests,39 but the combat events enjoyed priority in other ways. The athletes from the late archaic and early classical period that occupied the most space in the oral tradition tended to be combat athletes: the boxer Euthymus of Western Locri with his victory over the vampiric monster of Temesa; the boxer-cum-pancratiast Theagenes of Thasos, whose statue was said to have fallen upon an enemy who was whipping it; the boxer Diagoras of Rhodes, whose children shared his success at Olympia; and, perhaps greatest of all, the wrestler Milo of Croton, who was said to have led a much smaller Crotoniate force to victory over the Sybarites dressed as Heracles and wearing his Olympic crowns. The great sprinters—Astylus of Croton, Crison of Himera—were comparatively anonymous. Most, though by no means all, of the athletes who became the objects of cult or were framed as heroes by the oral tradition were combat athletes.40
Various hierarchies, therefore, structured the complex field of athletics, some of them in competition with each other. But just as epinician downplayed differences between venues, so too it downplayed differences between events. It celebrated open and youth contests, and equestrian and gymnastic contests with similar grandeur. Despite the fact that equestrian victors were typically older41 and rarely participated in the physical work of victory, differences between equestrian and gymnastic contests seem to be actively erased. Gymnastic paradigms sometimes illustrate equestrian victories, and the victories are offered as evidence of the same virtues: hard work, generosity, wisdom and wise expenditure, divine favor, and excellence in general.42
Pindar’s two odes for Melissus of Thebes, Isthmian 3–4, illustrate this lack of distinction. Isthmian 4 celebrates an Isthmian pancration victory, and includes in its catalog the family’s prior equestrian victories, suggesting that the two athletic activities are part of the same story. This sense was then strikingly underlined when Melissus won a chariot race at Nemea. He commissioned a second ode—the ode we call Isthmian 3—but, uniquely among Pindar’s odes, the two odes share the same meter. The second ode does not seem to have been intended simply to extend the first ode (although the repeated metrical scheme would have made it much easier for both to be performed as part of a single celebration),43 but their extraordinary similarity does mark the two victories as part of a unitary athletic activity. The language used to describe the victory also promotes this idea: like the earlier win, the chariot win demonstrates strength and hard work—albeit the “strength of wealth” (Isth. 3.1–2) and the “toils of four-horse chariots” (Isth. 3.17)—as well as the same, vague “excellence” (Isth. 3.4, 3.13) lauded by the earlier ode (Isth. 4.13, 4.38).44
Epinician does not avoid descriptions of the events, but rarely spends much time on them.45 A particularly prized victory in the combat events and the pentathlon was called a “dustless” victory, a victory seemingly won without having to compete in the final bout. Bacchylides describes how, at the Olympics of 476, Hieron’s racehorse, Pherenicus, won without being soiled by “dust” (5.44) kicked up by any horses in front of him. Pherenicus is claimed to be literally clean here, but epinician’s victory descriptions also metaphorically raise the victors out of the dirt, transforming the sweat, dust and struggle, the blood and violence—the basic physicality of athletic competition—into a beautiful, bodiless radiance. At one point Bacchylides describes a wrestling bout as “the sparkling of the wrestling” (9.36).46
As Bacchylides’ inclusion of Hieron’s racehorse suggests, epinician did speak of what might be called the additional personnel involved in athletics. For equestrian events, several different bodies were involved: the horses (or mules), the drivers or jockeys, as well as grooms, breeders, trainers, and managers. In some events at regional or local festivals, the competitors were required to drive or ride, but in the main events it was optional and, while it may have been common for owners to drive at small festivals, at large venues the option was rarely exercised. Pindar records one adventurous victor, Herodotus of Thebes, who drove a team to victory at the Isthmian games, but the example of Melissus of Thebes was typical, and telling. Although himself a prize-winning athlete, he left his chariot to be driven by someone else.47 For gymnastic events, athletes typically required trainers when young, for the running events as much for the combat events, and many adults will have continued to practice with a trainer.48 Framing the participation of these different agents required care, as their relationship with the victor or the role they played in the victory might undermine its value.
Athletic trainers were largely omitted from victory memorials; their absence at Olympia in this period is confirmed by Pausanias’ surmise that the inclusion of a statue of a trainer in a third-century memorial required special dispensation from the Elean officials.49 Epinician follows this strategy for adult victors and youth victors in the running events, but odes for youth victors in the combat events mostly name the victors’ trainers. We thus learn of several trainers from this period: Ilas, Orseas, Melesias, and Menander.50 Menander seems to have been particularly successful as a trainer, and such success, while providing an excellent reason to secure his services for a youth, might also suggest that the real agency in a victory belonged to the trainer, and that victory itself was a commodity that could be passed around between strangers. A striking passage in the Hippocratic corpus compares a trainer training an athlete to a smith producing an iron tool.51 Such a vision of training must have provided strong motivation to pass over the trainer in silence, but epinician mostly confronted the trainer’s involvement directly, at least in the odes for youths in the combat events. It framed the trainer