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Article Excerpt
After a lengthy prologue apologizing for the poet's delay in delivering his promised composition, (1) Pindar's Olympian 10 finally names the athlete who is to be celebrated, Hagesidamus of Epizephyrian Locris, an adolescent victor in boxing in 476 BCE:
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[Victorious as a boxer in the Olympics, let Hagesidamus give thanks to Ilas, just as Patroclus did to Achilles. A man aided by the arts of a god would whet one who is born to excellence and spur him toward awesome fame.] (O.10.16-21)
The ancient commentators on Pindar speculated that Ilas must have been the boy's athletic trainer, as suggested by the gnome in vv. 20-21; most modern scholars have followed this view. (2) What most critics have not fully understood, however, is why Ilas receives so much emphasis as to be mentioned side-by-side with the first naming of the victor, and in particular why his relation to Hagesidamus should be likened to that of Achilles and Patroclus. (3) William Mullen and Deborah Steiner have both suspected that there might be an erotic dimension to their relationship, but neither has argued the point in detail. (4) On the other side, Verdenius has explicitly rejected this possibility: "it would have been tasteless to suggest that there existed an erotic relation between the victor and his trainer." (5) The present essay aims to contextualize consideration of this passage within the broader perspective of the evidence we can glean from a variety of sources about athletic trainers and their personal relationship to young athletes under their care.
No one can doubt Pindar's own interest in the attractiveness of boys and pederastic themes generally. (6) The central reason for interpreting the Ilas-Hagesidamus relationship as not merely didactic is the application of Achilles and Patroclus as a mythological analogy. Nothing in the Iliad or mythological tradition makes Achilles a teacher of Patroclus; the one admonition Achilles offers Patroclus in the Iliad Patroclus fatefully disobeys. However, it is well-known that the myth of Achilles and Patroclus had been interpreted in explicitly pederastic terms in Pindar's own time by Aeschylus' tragedy Myrmidons. (7) This would therefore be one of several cases where Pindar reacts to a myth Aeschylus had recently put on stage. (8) Achilles is a teacher to Patroclus inasmuch as he is Patroclus' erastes and role model. This association of functions raises the obvious question whether Ilas, in addition to being Hagesidamus' athletic trainer, was also his lover or at least was presented as such. The term [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], which is used here to designate the thanks owed to the teacher, frequently bears erotic connotations in Greek, referring to the reciprocal favors a beloved grants his lover, whether physical or emotional (see, for instance, Theognis 956-57, 1263-66, 1299-1304, 1319-22, 1327-34, 1367-68). Vv.20-21 certainly suggest that Ilas' role involved building character as well as teaching the fine points of the pugilistic art.
The coupling of Hagesidamus' name with Ilas in the first actual naming of the victor in the poem stands as the climax of the entire first triad. (9) Interestingly, Pindar's last mention of the boy at the end of the poem links his name with the erotically charged epithet [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and with an allusion to another pederastic myth, that of Zeus and Ganymede:
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[I have praised the love-inspiring son of Archestratus, whom I saw triumphant in strength of hand beside the Olympian altar at that time, beautiful in physique and blessed with that youthful effloresence which, together with Cyprian born Aphrodite, once warded off from Ganymede death that knows no shame.] (O.10.99-105)
Pindar specifically praises the boy's beauty and his [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], that perfect moment of adolescent ripeness which became immortal for Ganymede and, by implication, will become immortal for Hagesidamus through Pindar's poetic celebration. (10)
Hagesidamus' relation to Ilas raises the question whether the prominence of trainers in Pindar's epinicia for boy victors may have been due to the trainer conventionally being an erastes. As abhorrent as teacher-student relationships may be to some modern constructions of sexual morality, as institutionalized today in the ethical codes of virtually every school and university, we must recognize that the bugbears of sexual harassment and child molestation did not possess the same valence in antiquity; pederasty and pedagogy were intimately linked. The educational historian H. I. Marrou, although no enthusiast for homosexual causes, was nevertheless forthright in acknowledging the pederastic basis of advanced education in all spheres: (11)
Pederasty was considered the most beautiful, the perfect, form of education--[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Throughout Greek history the relationship between master and pupil was to remain that between a lover and his beloved: education remained in principle not so much a form of teaching, an instruction in techniques, as an expenditure of loving effort by an elder concerned to promote the growth of a younger man who was burning with the desire to respond to this love and show himself worthy of it.
This romantically engaged mentorship would be particularly characteristic of the most elite forms of aristocratic education, based on personal rather than group instruction. It might also be appropriate for some forms of technical apprenticeship. Marrou continues:
... it was still under the shadow of masculine erotic love that this high technical instruction flourished: no matter what branch was involved, it was carried on in the atmosphere of spiritual communion that was created by the disciple's fervent and often passionate attachment to the master to whom he had given himself, whom he took as his model, and who gradually initiated him into the secrets of his science or art. For a long time, the lack of proper educational institutions meant that only this one type of thorough-going education was possible--the type whereby a disciple was attached to a tutor who had honoured him by summoning him to his side, by electing him. Let us emphasize the direction of this vocation: it was a call from above, to one whom the tutor deemed worthy. For a long time the opinion of antiquity was to despise the teacher who made a business out of teaching and offered his learning to the first customer who came along. The communication of knowledge, it was believed, should be reserved for those worthy of it. (12)
Socrates' relationship with his pupils is often characterized in pederastic terms, even if he never actually sought physical consummation of the relationship. (13) Later biographical sources, although not always trustworthy, suggest numerous teacher-student relationships of a pederastic nature: the philosophers Parmenides and Zeno, Xenocrates and Polemon, Polemon and Crates, Crantor and Arcesilaus, the sculptors Pheidias and Agoracritus of Paros, the physician Theomedon and Eudoxus of Cnidus. (14) Iconographic evidence confirms that teacher-student relationships could be eroticized even in musical and other non-athletic contexts. (15)
In a bold and challenging revaluation of ancient educational models, Yun Lee Too has questioned the concept of educational mentorship as merely a "call from above," as Marrou termed it, in favor of an economy of reciprocal, two-way desire on the part of both teacher and student: in her view, the eroticization of the relationship can serve a beneficial purpose precisely inasmuch as it equalizes or "peers" the teacher and student, deconstructing the traditional model of prescriptive, omniscient pedagogy in favor of a more open, conversational, and dialectical exchange in which the student becomes closer to an equal of the teacher, able to develop and contribute his own original ideas like an adult, rather than as an acolyte kneeling before a magisterial discourse of self-contained totality and impassionate wisdom. (16) The teacher's desire for proximity to his student's beauty complements the student's desire to learn by proximity to his teacher's experience and wisdom; this mutual, if differentially determined, aporia makes each partner to the relationship of exchange equally needful and therefore equally vulnerable to the other's disapprobation. This conceptualization of a two-way relationship of mutual vulnerability and need is surely preferable to the reductive phallocratic formulation of Greek pederasty advanced by David Halperin and others. (17) On the other hand, it is precisely by refusing to love the beautiful student, as Socrates does with Alcibiades, that the teacher retains his self-sufficient authority and mastery: as Leo Bersani has noted in explicating Foucault's articulation of Greek ascesis, "the elimination of sex has transformed a relation of problematic desire into a pure exercise of power." (18)
The applicability of the pederastic model to athletic training is clear. Later sources distinguish between the paidotribes, who would lead classes of group instruction, and the gymnastes, a more accomplished professional who would train a competition-level athlete one-on-one and who would supplement his instruction in bodily maneuvers with a systematic dietary regimen and supervision over every aspect of the athlete's lifestyle. (19) Although the term paidotribes probably encompassed both forms of instruction in the fifth century, the separation between the two types of training nevertheless probably existed, with the gymnastes more likely to accommodate Marrou's pederastic model. The trainer would accompany an Olympic-level boy athlete alone on what could often be an extremely long and arduous journey (as in Hagesidamus' case, an overseas voyage from the toe of Italy) and would stay with him for the mandatory thirty-day training period at Olympia, lodged together at close quarters in accommodations that probably consisted of little more than a tent.
The private wrestling school (palaestra) is certainly identified as the prime arena of pederastic courtship in a range of texts from a variety of genres in both the fifth and fourth centuries. (20) Numerous Greek vases depict scenes of clothed men or youths admiring, crowning, or presenting gifts to naked athletes; strigils and oil flasks hanging in the background are also common means of giving a gymnastic setting to courtship scenes. (21) Some would argue that the institution of athletic nudity and the addition of separate competitions for boys at the major festivals reflect the emergence of a homoerotic aesthetic centered upon athletics during the archaic period. (22) Indeed, contests of euandria centered upon male beauty were a part of the Panathenaea and several other local festivals. (23) Is it legitimate to assume that pederasty entered the wrestling schools only from the influence of outside spectators and never among the participants themselves?
More than one Hellenistic epigram takes it for granted that a position as athletic trainer afforded almost unlimited potential for physical and even sexual intimacy with boys. (24) An early Hellenistic papyrus (P. Lugd. Bat. 20.51, datable to 257 BCE) contains a letter by a man worried that his supervision of a palaestra will give his enemies plausible grounds for accusing him of pederasty. (25) As the teacher responsible for a developing boy's physical formation and health, the trainer would closely inspect every inch of his anatomy; indeed, it was a trainer's role to massage sore muscles after a workout. (26) Touching and visual appreciation of the boy's physique would be daily activities. In the athletic, as...
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