Hard and Disappearing Work: Making Sense of the Leisure Project

Situated at a point of critical intersection between leisure and labour, ancient athletics was in the most essential respects just as complex and ‘modern’ as its contemporary counterpart and can thus benefit from the methods of contemporary sport sociology, which can in turn find in ancient Greece a useful comparandum. As with contemporary sport, athletic pursuits must be situated within the broader economy of leisure in ancient Greece. However, a process of professionalisation gradually developed during the fifth century bce, turning athletics into what was arguably a form of labour. While many continued to derive their pedigree from the elite ‘leisure class’ that almost exclusively dominated the sixth century athletics, a growing number came from less‐distinguished families, their inclusion rendered possible by the construction of public gymnasia, private patronage, cash prizes for victory and other forms of social advancement. Some scholars have pointed to this development as an index of democratisation, but I will argue that it was actually a continuation of elite hegemony by appropriation of the commercial and artisanal classes, parallel to what can be observed in the expansion of athletic participation in the late nineteenth century. Along with expanding the talent pool, the pressure to produce the best athletes for inter‐state competition led to a professionalisation and broadening of athletic training: originally informal and paederastic, it eventually became institutionalised and regulated by the state. Extension of elite privilege to a few successful athletes ultimately served to confirm the Panhellenic prestige and thus also the domestic power of each city’s hegemonic class.