Summary
During the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, Greek populations coexisted with several other cultures, which were very often more multitudinous. Those ‘Hellenes’, however, came together in big Panhellenic and smaller, local festivals to honour their gods and celebrate their common Hellenic culture. As a result, numerous new festivals and contests were founded (and older ones grew bigger or were even re-founded) after the third century BC, gradually forming a large festival network. Even though this festival network has repeatedly been at the centre of scholarly attention – and still is – the rhetoric of athletic inscriptions, i.e. how athletic Panhellenism is demonstrated and what it is prompted by still remains largely unexplored. The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how the accumulation of citizenships by athletes contributes to Panhellenic self-representation, by showing another way that this association with Hellenic culture was communicated and negotiated in the public discourse. The portrayal of citizenships by an array of ethnic names along with the name of the honoree, presented the athlete as a larger-than-city figure and an essential part of that Hellenic community. One of the other aims of this paper is to suggest two factors in the development of these conventions of athletic representation, whose significance has not been understood in full: the athletic synod and the formation of Panhellenion. It is a central tenet of this paper that the study of citizenship in athletic inscriptions cannot only help us reveal more ways that Hellenicity was projected, but also better understand how all these different textual images helped shape views about what Hellas was.
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Acknowlegdements
This paper presents an important part of my doctoral research “Athlete and Polis”. The relationship between athletes and cities in the epigraphic record of the Late Hellenistic and Imperial periods’ which was undertaken at the University of St Andrews. For the completion of my research and this paper specifically, I owe a great deal to Jason König, who has offered invaluable feedback. I would also like to thank Myles Lavan, Zahra Newby, Sian Lewis, Heather Reid as well as the editors of Klio, whose observations and feedback helped to improve my work significantly. Any shortcomings or faults in this paper are entirely my own.
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