Epilogue

It is a central tenet of the present book that because of its popularity and longevity, both as practice and spectacle, Greek sport is a very suitable and promising entry-point for exploring aspects of the articulation and development of identities in the Greek world. That is because “sports are vehicles and embodiments of meaning, whose status and interpretation is continually open to negotiation and subject to conflict.” ¹ Building on the advances of scholarship on identity and cultural performance, the preceding chapters engaged in an exploration of facets of the articulation and representation of multiple identities through the embodied performance of sport in the ancient Greek world. Sport as practiced by the upper social echelons in the Homeric epics emphasized elements of elite exceptionalism as well as a trail-blazing articulation of a pattern of sport as a class-exclusive practice of social distinction that remained influential for some elites until the end of the Archaic period and, in isolated cases, for longer after that. At the same time, many athletes hailing from the ruling elite of Greek communities were mindful, starting at the late Archaic period, of the growing social trends towards egalitarianism. They thus actively engaged and appropriated facets of the middling discourse in law, politics and other aspects of social life by projecting individual athletic and equestrian victories as an integral part of a family tradition and, equally importantly, also as an organic component of civic ideology and values.