1.    Define athletics.  Define sport.  What do these two terms mean to you?

 

2.    Response to Naked Olympics, ch. 1

 

3.    Response to Swaddling pp. 7-12.

 

4.     How far back to do you think we can trace athletic competition in human culture?  How would you go looking for evidence?  What might we expect to find?  What do you think of the evidence for Bronze Age athletics as outlined in The Eternal Olympics, pp. 13-23? 

 

5.    Response to Naked Olympics, chapter 2- The Greek Sports Craze

 

6.    Response to Naked Olympics, chapter 13 - To Race with Immortals

 

7.    Response to the running events.  Think about what you have learned thus far about the running events and compare them to what you know of running events today.  Why such a straight track, rather than the oval that we use today?  Do you agree with the theory that the starting position was intentionally designed to focus on speed rather than quickness?

 

8.    Read Eternal Olympics, pp. 13-23.  What do you think of our evidence for Minoan sport in the Late Bronze Age of Greece, particularly boxing and bull leaping?  Can it be suggested that an athletic ideal was a characteristic of Minoan culture?  Is the evidence strong enough? 

 

9.     Read Naked Olympics chapter 9 and think about our experiments with the javelin, discus, and long jump events.  Think about the leather cords used in the ancient javelin events, think about the shorter wind-up in ancient discus, and think about the jumping weights in the long jump, and assess how do you think the ancient events compare to the modern? 

 

10.     Record keeping.  We moderns are obsessed with record keeping - with personal bests, indoor records, outdoor records, Olympic records, world records, etc.  How do you think the ancient Greeks felt about records?  How did they measure the winners?  What kinds of measurements did they use in track and field events?  What was the impact of not having an accurate timer?  What was the impact of having no standard foot measurement?

 

11.    Read Miller pp. 1-16.  What is your response to Homer's description of competitions in the Iliad and the Odyssey?  What kinds of contests were held, who got prizes, and how do they compare to the later Olympics, both ancient and modern?

 

12. Response to the Naked Olympics, chapter 14.

 

13.    Read Lee (on reserve) and the Eternal Olympics, pp. 77-87 (also on reserve). Now think about the earliest evidence for the contests at Olympia from mythology and archaeology.  What are the foundation myths of the games?  What kinds of objects and structures were found by excavators?  What is the evidence for the foundation of the games in 776 BCE?  Do you think that the games might have been founded earlier?

14.    Read Naked Olympics chapters 4 and 12, and Swaddling pp. 13-29, and write a journal entry describing the principal features, buildings, and monuments of the Altis - the sanctuary - at Olympia.  How were they used, and when?

15.    Read Naked Olympics chapter 16 and Swaddling pp. 71-81, and compare and contrast the heavy combat sports - wrestling, boxing, and pankration - with their modern equivalents.  How are the sports alike?  How are they different?  Is there a movement to revive pankration, and if there is, how do you think it would be received by the modern public if the ancient rules of the sport are revived today unchanged?  This journal entry may require you to review your notes from the class reports and a bit of on-line investigation, so please be sure to cite your sources of information. 

16.    Read Swaddling pp. 29-37 and outline in your journal entry the basic sporting facilities at Olympia, including training facilities and competition facilities.  Read Naked Olympics chapters 5 &6, and review past chapters to flush out your sense of how the sporting facilities, along with living conditions, could have affected athletic performance.  How do the ancient facilities compare with modern athletic complexes today?

17.     Read Swaddling pp. 44-49 and Naked Olympics chapter 17, and discuss the pros and cons of ancient training programs of diet and exercise.  What is your sense of performance enhancing drugs by ancient athletes?  Were drugs widely used, and if so, what kinds, and what effects might they have had on the ancient athletes?

18.    Describe the other panhellenic games at Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea.  How were they like the games at Olympia, and how were they different? 

19.    Reflect on our class discussion of the Battle of Marathon, and the invention of the marathon as an Olympic competition.  How, when and why was this particular event chosen to be memorialized in a foot race?  What does its symobolic content mean today?

20.    Find an image of a Greek statue of an athlete - or a Roman copy of a Greek statue - and put a photocopy in your journal, along with a complete identification of the piece (name, where from, which museum it is in, its date, etc).  Then explain how this piece exemplifies uniquely Greek ideas about the importance of athletics and arete.  Do you think the focus on physical conditioning associated both with athletics and with hoplite warfare could be connected with the Greek invention of the ideal and organic vision of the human form?  Is your selected statue Classical in style?  If so, what does that word mean?  How is your statue "Classical"?