rather than producing him, and represented him as a close family friend.52 The image of the trainer as the athlete’s whetstone, used twice by Pindar, responds directly to the vision of the athlete as a tool seen in the Hippocratic corpus: both trainer and athlete are things in this image, and the trainer sharpens but does not make the athlete.53
Epinician maintains a studied vagueness about the trainers’ responsibilities. These included technique, character development, and physical development, including diet, exercise routines, and recovery from any injuries. Athletes certainly sustained injuries—Hippocratic texts speak of dislocations needing to be reset in wrestling schools—and trainers need to be understood as healthcare workers, in competition in some areas with the physicians represented by the Hippocratic texts from the late fifth century.54 There is, however, no mention of injury in epinician. Obviously a victor is unlikely to have been injured in that particular competition, but one might expect recognition of past injuries, perhaps as an obstacle that the victor has overcome or as a reason for retirement. Injury is not evoked, however; rather, the epinician body proves itself immune to injury and a reliable platform for athletic performance, and 30-year-old epinician bodies are not distinguished from 20-year-old ones.55
Statue dedications, vases, and coins often depict the horses, mules, drivers, and jockeys involved in equestrian competition. The absences are more notable. Some fifth-century Olympic chariot victors dedicated single statues of themselves rather than large sculptures of a team,56 while at the end of the sixth century the Corinthian Pheidolas seems to have dedicated a statue of a racehorse that lacked a jockey. The story told to Pausanias at Olympia as he visited the sanctuary was that the horse had bucked its rider and won anyway.57 There is, in fact, a general tendency to privilege the horse over the jockey or driver: significantly more horses are named by memorials, and the horse is often given the credit. Bacchylides describes Pherenicus “taking care of his helmsman” (5.47), and Pindar claims the same horse won “ungoaded” (Ol. 1.21). The victory vase of Dysniketos says that his horse (as opposed to the victor) won, as does Bacchylides of Pherenicus (5.40, 183).
Agency is, therefore, not an issue for these events, but, as with trainers, the nature of the relationship with the victor. The horses slip easily into the role of close family friend; in this period, they were bred and raised in-house, as we can deduce from the fact that it was only in the second half of the fifth century that raising your own horses became something to boast of.58 Jockeys, too, were likely drawn from a wealthy entrant’s estates, although they may have been drawn from the surrounding community too, or even purchased as slaves, and seem to have been a locus of concern. Most concern was focused on the charioteers, however, as their achievements seem to have been genuinely admired and they may have served many victors. Epinician and other memorials largely ignored them, or at least kept them largely hidden behind the horses (literally, in the case of the Delphic charioteer),59 but two odes where the charioteer receives considerable attention should be noted. First, Pindar’s Pythian 5 generously praises the driver, Carrhotus, but he was genuinely a close family friend, being the victor’s brother-in-law. Second, Pindar’s Isthmian 2, for Xenocrates of Acragas, reveals the role of a Nicomachus in victories won both by Xenocrates and by his brother, Theron, tyrant of that city. It is surely no coincidence that this extended praise of a charioteer dominates the central section of an ode that opens with the image of the Muse as a prostitute selling herself for profit and addresses head-on the anxiety that epinician itself was a commodity. The charioteer passes without mention in the two odes that Pindar composed to celebrate Theron’s victory when it actually occurred.60
Competitors and Politics
Success in athletics required considerable investment, of resources and of time. For equestrian competitors, it was usually other people’s time, but serious gymnastic competitors dedicated their youth to training, as well as to regular travel for competition. Athletics was certainly a lifestyle, but it was not a diversion; it was a central route to prestige and political power. Kings, tyrants, and aristocrats used athletic victories to justify their positions of power. This meant not only investing in their own competition in equestrian contests, but also making a home for successful émigrés. Astylus of Croton joined Gelon’s expansion of Syracuse in 485/4 after his first two Olympic crowns, but before his next five, while Ergoteles settled in Theron’s Himera after being exiled from Cnossus, but before all of his eight panhellenic wins.61 Athletics could also be used to articulate relations among the elites, as less famous festivals or less prestigious events provided venues for lieutenants or lesser leaders to compete. Thus, while Hieron of Syracuse competed in the chariot and horseraces at Olympia and Delphi, his lieutenants competed in the chariot races at Sicyon and Nemea, or the mule-cart race at Olympia.62
Victories also enhanced the standing of those who sought power, as Athens’ history demonstrates: Cylon used an Olympic victory to foment an unsuccessful coup in the seventh century; the elder Cimon transferred his second Olympic chariot win to the tyrant Pisistratus in return for being recalled from exile, but when he won a third victory, after Pisistratus’ death, Pisistratus’s sons killed him; and Alcibiades used his Olympic victory in 416 (celebrated in an epinician ode commissioned from Euripides) to push for an invasion of Sicily, with himself in pole position to claim the expected gratitude.63 Relative status was worked out in many communities often in particular athletic events, without coups, invasions, or murders: Aeginetans jostled for position through combat events in the fifth century, and Spartans through chariot racing—a reminder that athletic cultures varied across the Greek world.64
Epinician certainly mentions special distinctions, such as Pherenicus’ pseudo-dustless victory for Hieron, or the 25 panhellenic victories accrued by one Aeginetan family (Pindar, Nem. 6.58–61), and sometimes odes include more powerful figures from outside the victor’s family within the ode (Pindar, Ol. 6.93, Pyth. 10.5, 64), but the overwhelming impression given is of unity, within cities and across cities, rather than competition, hierarchy, and a struggle for position. The different Aeginetan clans appear in their odes as part of unified elite, bound by shared values, shared history, and shared interests, and, while Hieron is evoked as the ruler of Syracuse in a victory ode for one of his commanders, he is pictured more as his friend than his king, hosting his victory celebration when it reaches Sicily (Pindar, Ol. 6.92–100). In epinician, all victors belong to the same elite panhellenic club.
Athletics certainly offered an effective means for those at the margins to claim a place at the center of Greek world. Marginalization came in different forms—ethnic, political, geographical, or social—but the more prestigious athletic festivals provided a venue where one could not only compete against others to stake a claim to priority within the aristocracy, but, more simply, share in the activities of the interstate aristocracy and claim a place within it. Epinician both recorded this participation, and reinforced through its very form the claim to a place in the interstate aristocracy. It was a truly panhellenic form, fitting patrons from all around the Greek Mediterranean into a limited repertoire of shared mythical paradigms and gnomic wisdom, and representing in its melodies an interstate synthesis of local instrumental traditions. The very figure of the epinician poet articulated a panhellenic vision: his authority was rooted not in his voicing of local tradition but in his capacity to move between communities and speak for himself, separate from a chorus.65
There seems to have been a formal process at Olympia through which competitors might be called upon to prove their Greekness,66 but this served more to affirm the fundamental Greekness of those taking part than to exclude entrants. Competitors whose Greekness was in question in some way could thus use athletic competition to burnish their credentials, and among the patrons of epinician Psaumis of Camarina, victor of Pindar’s Olympians 4 and 5, likely belongs in this category. His strange name, garbled by scholiasts and compilers of victor lists, indicates Sicel connections.67 More usually a competitor’s Greekness was threatened by his values or conduct, rather than his ancestry. The victories and odes of both Arcesilas, king of Cyrene, and the great Diagoras served to mitigate their close connections to Persia: Arcesilas’ family owed its position to Persian backing and were effectively client kings of the Persians,68