The materiality of athletic inscriptions in the sanctuary of Olympia during the Late Hellenistic Period

This work was significantly shaped by the intellectual environment of the Center for Hellenic Studies, whose own “landscape” of sustained dialogue and interdisciplinary exchange offered a modern parallel to the spatial and relational dynamics I trace within the sanctuary at Olympia. As an Early Career Fellow in Hellenic Studies, my project examined how athletic inscriptions and statue bases at Olympia functioned within the sanctuary’s physical and sociopolitical landscape during the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. Rather than treating inscriptions simply as documentary records of victories, it aimed to view them as rhetorical texts embedded in space, interacting with nearby monuments, visual culture, and broader public memory. Using the monument of Publius Cornelius Ariston, a boy pankratiast from Ephesos who won at Olympia in 49 CE as a case study, my research showed how inscriptions shaped the way viewers understood athletic achievement, civic identity, divine favour, and heroic status. When read in relation to other monuments in the vicinity, such as the Temple of Zeus and other, older dedications, these texts reveal a sophisticated commemorative culture in which writing, image, location, and memory worked together.

Statues and inscriptions were erected in great numbers in all cities in the eastern Mediterranean, especially from the Hellenistic period onwards. We read in Pliny the Elder that during his time there were “three thousand statues in Rhodes, and it is supposed that there are no fewer in existence at Athens, at Olympia, and at Delphi.” (Pliny, Natural History 34.17) Of course, these numbers may be an exaggeration but still, Pliny asks, what living mortal could enumerate them all? Only a few scholars have attempted to carry out such Herculean tasks: in the sanctuary of Olympia, which is the focus of this project, about 1200 statue bases have been documented, 340 of them inscribed, and 170 of which have been found in situ. From this number, only 274 have been identified as athletes, 98 of them inscribed. (Leypold 2014) Herrmann rightly spoke of a ‘forest of statues’, a Statuenwald that begun to grow in Olympia, already from the sixth century BCE. (Hermann 1972: 112)

From a modern point of view, it is easy to underestimate the density of honorific statues, their effect on the city’s landscape, and their powerful impact on those who viewed them. For example, variety of different views about athletes that exist – from idealised symbols of virtue, all the way to comical embodiments of excess and neglect of the mind– is partly a result of the large number of viewers in regular contact with these athletic images. (König 2005: 98) However, the spatial context of athletic monuments is still often ignored. Even though in recent years, epigraphists have moved the scholarly discussion about the materiality of texts intelligently forward, the wealth of athletic inscriptions is not often taken into consideration, making only brief references to this material, with very few notable exceptions. (e.g., Newby – Leader – Newby 2007; van Nijf 2000)

By combining epigraphy, spatial analysis, art history, and literary perspectives, the project attempted to offer a new way of understanding athletic monuments, not only as evidence for individual victors, but also as active participants in the construction of cultural and ideological messages, in one of the most important Panhellenic sanctuaries. This perspective is informed in part by John Bodel’s notion of the “epigraphic mode.” (Bodel 2024) While cognate terms such as the “epigraphic habit” or “epigraphic curve” have been used to describe quantitative and qualitative patterns in inscribed culture, the concept of “mode” is particularly useful here because it foregrounds the interplay of an inscription’s location, material support, language, script, layout, and register of expression in shaping its meaning for a targeted audience. As Bodel observes, the epigraphic mode captures “the degree to which a piece of writing engages the viewer in an interpretative process that involves more than the simple conveyance of information by text.” (Bodel 2024: 14-15) This project seeks to re-situate athletic inscriptions within their broader spatial and symbolic contexts, examining their relationships to other monuments and forms of visual culture, and exploring how meaning emerges through these interactions.

Ariston’s statue base preserves three inscriptions on its front, left, and right side. (I.Olympia 225) The two side inscriptions are poems, which are likely later additions, but which are meant to commemorate the same person and event. Even though all three texts repeat the same message – i.e., name, father, city, event, and dedication to Zeus – by commemorating the athletic achievement in two or more different inscriptions, the monument manages to draw attention to different facets Ariston’s identity, and perhaps even address different audiences more effectively. Reconstructing those goals is a key part of the process of “contextualization” of these inscriptions, a concept which the editors of the Archaic and Classical Epigram believe is crucial for the study of epigrams, because “the meaning of Greek epigrams must be decoded to a certain extent from different contexts, which are in dialogue with the epigram.” (Baumbach – Petrovic – Petrovic 2010: 8) This multiplicity helped monuments speak to different audiences: fellow athletes, local communities, pilgrims, officials, and citizens of the victor’s homeland.

The inscription on the left side of Ariston’s monument resembles what Kӧhnken described as “epinician dialogue epigram.” (Köhnken 2007: 303-309) The dialogue-inscription is especially important because it scripts the viewer’s response, turning reading into performance. It invites the viewer to address Ariston and to ask, who he is, and, what victories he boasts of “before the house of Zeus.” The statue effectively ‘answers,’ identifying the athlete, his father, and his city. It also reveals Ariston’s athletic exploits, which included winning without a bye, because of his aretē (excellence). This transforms the viewer from passive reader into participant. The monument stages a re-enactment of praise and recalls the victory proclamation that would have named the athlete before the crowd. In ither words, athletic inscriptions were not meant simply to exist as sources of information, but active mechanisms for producing memory and meaning.

The front inscription records the basic facts: Ariston’s name, father, city, event, and dedication to Zeus. Its simplicity echoes older victory formulae and places Ariston within a long tradition of athletic and votive commemoration. At the same time, the use of the nominative form identifies the statue as an image of the athlete himself, reflecting a wider shift from dedications of gods and heroes to monuments representing human victors. Ariston’s monument, though later and commemorating a boy, participates in this same environment of heroic comparison.

Although Ariston’s base was not found in situ, its inscription evokes the area before the Temple of Zeus. The phrase which placed the athlete ‘before the house of Zeus’ may refer either to an original location near the temple or to a symbolic topography associated with the award ceremony. In either case, the inscription asks the viewer to imagine Ariston in relation the surrounding monuments, such as the east pediment of the temple, which had Olympian Zeus in the middle, with the head tilted slightly right, looking below, towards the athlete being awarded. Close by, other monuments also added to the envisaged topography. For example, the statue the statue of Nike of Paionios, which would appear as if it was approaching the victor; the so-called Achaean monument, which would identify the athlete as one among Achaean heroes, such as Agamemnon and Odysseus, and the crown as Nestor, drawing a lot to determine who of the heroes shall face Hector in battle (Barringer 2021: 109-110) – drawing interesting parallels to the drawing of the lot that paired athletes in combat sports: Ariston reminds us that he alone did not receive a bye, “and always paired he beat them all.” In the wider area, other famous athletic monuments, such as those of Polydamas of Skotousa and Euthymos of Locroi, which we learn from Pausanias that stood close by, similarly blurred the line between athlete and hero through stories of superhuman strength, combat, and posthumous fame. The monument’s meaning therefore depended not only on what was written, but also on where the viewer imagined or encountered it.

Ariston’s inscriptions repeatedly stress toil, youth, physical excellence, and divine favour. These themes resonate with the sculptural programme of the Temple of Zeus, especially the labours of Heracles and the athletic qualities visible in the pediments and metopes. The comparison is not a claim that Ariston became divine, but that his athletic struggle could be interpreted through heroic paradigms. Victory demonstrated aretē: an excellence of body and character worthy of public display and divine dedication. Just east of the temple of Zeus, the statue base of Polydamas of Skotousa, a pankratiast who had won the 93rd Olympiad (408 BCE), also tells a similar story. (Museum of the History of the Olympic Games in Antiquity, Inv.no. Λ45) His strength was notorious, and eputation reached Persia, where king Darius II invited him to his court for an exhibition. Unarmed he fought three, armed immortals, the elite unit of the Persian army, killing all of them in the process. In the front side of his statue base, Polydamas is depicted raising a Persian in the air, ready to smack him on the floor, and the Persian king, seated holds his head amazed. On the left side, he is seen killing a lion with his bear hands. Polydamas wanted to be seen as another Heracles, and his feats on the statue base surely paralleled those of Heracles on the temple. His statue (now missing) possibly also made its own statement. Heroes are notoriously tall, and in art, especially iconography, are always depicted larger in size than mortals. For Polydamas, Pausanias (6.5.1) tells us that he “represents the tallest of all men, except those called heroes, and any other mortal race that may have existed before the heroes.” “Polydamas, the son of Nicias is the tallest of our own era.”

The case of Tiberius Claudius Rufus complicates the idea that later athletics were defined only by professionalisation or decline. Rufus, a pankratiast from Smyrna, was honoured at Olympia at some point between 98-117 CE, despite not being an Olympic victor. Yet he was granted the honour of setting up a statue in Olympia, on the grounds of the extraordinary virtues he displayed—endurance, courage, and decorum—which were construed as an honour to Zeus himself. (I.Olympia 54) His near-heroic performance, extending to exhaustion and nightfall, evoked the paradigmatic labours of Heracles depicted in the temple metopes and aligned him with the moral and symbolic stature of the sanctuary’s greatest athletes. It will be naïve to think that rewarding moral excellence and athletic prowess was the only motivation behind the decision honour Rufus. The latter was no insignificant person. In a second inscription on the same monument, we learn that Rufus, a citizen of Smyrna, had won many, sacred contests and was a member of the international synod of athletes. (I.Olympia 55) More importantly, he knew personally the imperial family. (I.Olympia 55, l.7-8) Regardless of the true motivation behind honouring Rufus, the rhetoric of the inscriptions emphasizes, and adds further to the symbolisms present everywhere in the sanctuary. Inscriptions continued to frame athletic achievement in moral, religious, and civic terms, even well into the Imperial Period.

The materiality of athletic inscriptions fundamentally shaped how victory was remembered at Olympia. There, but also elsewhere, athletic inscriptions were not defined solely by their own structure, but also by other material and texts in their immediate vicinity or sometimes remote surroundings. Therefore, these texts should be read as material performances, not merely as documentary evidence. They preserved names and victories, but they also staged encounters, invited speech, activated memory, and placed athletes within sacred and heroic landscapes. Their effectiveness depended on the interaction of wording, statue, base, location, surrounding monuments, and viewer response. At the very least, we should not see them as “a series of soulless marble statues… empty and silent, in romantic desertion,” as Kazantzakis wrote (Kazantzakis, Travel to Morea).