Pasts Imperfect (1.26.24)
Ancient Sports, Remembering Sharon James, Disability in the Ancient World & More
This week, classicist and professional football & basketball referee Amy Pistone discusses the need for (ancient and modern) refs in sports. Then, Peter Brown reviews the new Africa & Byzantium exhibition, a new bibliography on disability in the ancient world relaunches, remembering Sharon James, a panel discusses solidarity with Palestine, new NEH-ODH awards, and much more.
What is the Purpose of an Ancient and Modern Referee? by Amy Pistone
For a classics professor, I have a somewhat unusual relationship with sports. When I’m not teaching ancient Greek things, I’m often refereeing college football or basketball. Unfortunately for all of you, I opted to cut out my lengthy discursus on my favorite dumb sports stories (the edible Pop Tarts mascot! The strange saga of super-spy Connor Stalions! NBA star Nikola Jokić is very into horses!). This was leading to a two-pronged piece on refereeing and spectacle, which are universally acknowledged to be the most important aspects of the Super Bowl. However, two prongs proved to generate more words than this newsletter can hold, so instead of examining halftime shows, commercials, and the possibility that Taylor Swift will be in attendance, you’re all going to have the distinct pleasure of learning more than you ever wanted to know about refereeing. You’re welcome?
Not to overstate the importance of me and people like me, but sometimes we like to remind audiences that “without referees, it’s just recess.” The rules and their agreed-upon importance are a central element of what makes something an athletic competition. When we talk about what defines sport (as distinct from other forms of play), one of the definitions that I tend to come back to a lot is Bernard Suits’ idea that sport is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (55). There are plenty of ways to stop a wide receiver from getting open for a pass, and the most efficient one is to simply tackle the receiver – if a player is stuck underneath an opponent, they cannot catch a pass.
Simple. However, the rules disallow this, so defenders have to do the same task while constrained by rules that make it more challenging, preventing a reception while making very little contact.If we take this as a central, necessary-but-not-sufficient definition of a sport, then even the angriest spectator might have to concede that officials are integral to the system. Before you object and bring up your least favorite controversial call, I would remind you that even Plutarch (Mor. 817b) knew that people who (literally or metaphorically) hurl mud at referees (βραβευτὰς ἐν ἀγῶσι προπηλακίζουσι) are “ignorant of the beautiful” (ἀπειροκάλων). So maybe think about that before you want to yell about pass interference.
With any discussion of referees comes the question of fairness and unfairness. I of course overanalyze refereeing, and I remain intrigued by the way that there is an expectation of perfect fairness within sports. When sports discussions seep out into less explicitly “sporty” parts of society, it’s often in deeply politicized (and, of late, both unscientific and transphobic) ways. But even among sports fans who recognize how bias and systemic power operate in every other aspect of the world, there is a very deep sense that sports should be fair, however we define that term.
The metaphor that’s often used for fairness in general is “a level playing field,” a necessary bar for most sporting events (and one often required in the various rulebooks). In fact, sporting fairness is even the gold standard for what it means to be an impartial judge (we’ve all heard judges say that if confirmed they will “just call balls and strikes”). A computer can call literal balls and strikes with greater accuracy than a human, and more sports are implementing the use of video replay to make some calls (out of bounds, whether a ball fully crossed a goal line, etc.). But at least for the time being, there has been a real resistance to replacing all referees with computers.
Why? I would argue that it turns out that fans actually don’t want complete and impartial application of the rules, but instead they want judicious application of the rules in a way that is done “for the good of the game.” In football, for instance, it’s a cliche that there’s holding on every play, by the letter of the rule. Nothing in the definition of the foul says that the holding needs to have an impact on the play, but no one wants a game called that way.
I can’t believe I’m citing this positively, as someone who hates the underlying arguments, but this is sort of what Athena models at the end of the Eumenides, isn’t it? Rather than look to the rules, she instead opts to privilege what’s reasonable and appropriate for the circumstances . Just as judges are expected to balance application of the law as written with a concern for equity, sports-judges need to do the same. And I suspect that they have always engaged in some version of this balancing act.
That said, how similar can we really argue that modern referees are to ancient ones? Well, Pausanias tells us that the Olympic judges take an oath to Zeus Horkios (Zeus of Oaths) that they will act justly and without accepting bribes (5.24.10), though elsewhere competition judges swear to Hermes to judge fairly and not be swayed by enmity (SEG 27.261). Minus the part about oaths, the rest still holds pretty true. And in perhaps the most famous ancient quote about referees, Polybius (1.58) says that Fortune, who has just substantially (παραβόλως) changed the circumstances and condition of a battle, is “like a good referee.”
While I’m sure many of you watching the Super Bowl will disagree, I promise that the Platonic Form of a good referee is no longer someone who wildly changes the course of the game!
Public Scholarship and a Global Antiquity
Over at The New York Review of Books, historian of Late Antiquity Peter Brown discusses the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Africa & Byzantium exhibition.
“The aim of the exhibition is to give voice and density to the cultures with which Byzantium interacted over the many centuries of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. This interaction took many forms. In every case, what we learn is a new respect for the African side of the dialogue between Byzantium and the wider world.”
At Brooklyn College, there is an interview with alumnus Patrice Rankine. In it, he discusses how he overcame isolation as the only Black person in the Classics department at Yale during graduate school:
“I also addressed the isolation by reading the works of other African Americans who drew from the classics. I had always wanted to read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in college. I finally delved into the novel early in my career, and it blew my mind. My first book, Ulysses in Black, explores how Ellison and other authors, like Toni Morrison, drew from classical myth and literature. Ulysses in Black set me on a path to seeing the classics as ubiquitous tools for understanding our world, even if these tools are hidden in plain sight.”
The NEH-ODH has just announced their awards. A number of premodern projects look particularly splendid. At Stanford, Mark Algee-Hewitt and Eric James Harvey will work on Digital Accessibility for Blind Scholars of Antiquity: “The integration of six ancient languages into an open-source Braille digital translation platform to enable the creation of digital editions and primary sources for blind and low-vision humanities students and researchers.” And at the University of Maryland and McGill, Osama Eshera, Fateme Savadi and Sajjad Nikfahm-Khubravan, will lead a project called Idrīsī: An Open Library of Historical Geography of the Premodern Islamic World. They hope to create “new datasets containing geographic locations and place names extracted from transcriptions of premodern Islamic texts.”
Additionally, the Wellesley Humanities Faculty (led by Yoon Sun Lee, Dan Chiasson, Cord Whitaker, Eve Zimmerman, and Martha McNamara) have received a $1.5 Million Mellon Foundation Grant for “Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives: Rethinking Inclusion and Exclusion through the Humanities.”
A brand new and updated version of the “Disability in the Ancient World Bibliography” is now online. Of additional interest may be Alessandra Scimone’s newly published “review of studies on ancient and late ancient medicine and its reception, conducted between 2020 and 2023” (‘Medicina antica e tardoantica. Rassegna degli studi e complementi bibliografici [anni 2020-2023]’).
A new open access book, Jouer dans l'Antiquité classique (Play and Games in Classical Antiquity) edited by Véronique Dasen and Marco Vespa is now available. From Mark Golden’s analysis of ancient Greek ball games to Julien du Bouchet’s chapter on games in Roman dream manuals, this looks like a great book to dig into for those interested in ancient sports and games.
![Fig. 1. Astragalus of Didyma (c. 550-525 BC). Bronze. 39.0 × 24.5 × 27.5cm. 93.70 kg. Paris, Musée du Louvre, n° Sb 2719 [Pondera Online, #11255].](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe7a05a71-4d09-40c4-9c08-2af3b3c6d7bb_469x358.jpeg "Fig. 1. Astragalus of Didyma (c. 550-525 BC). Bronze. 39.0 × 24.5 × 27.5cm. 93.70 kg. Paris, Musée du Louvre, n° Sb 2719 [Pondera Online, #11255].")
In other open access news, Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature Online: A Research Guide is now available from Brill. As they note, this is the “first Western-language reference guide focusing exclusively on Chinese literature from ca. 700 B.C.E. to the early seventh century C.E. Alphabetically organized, it contains no less than 1095 entries on major and minor writers, literary forms and ‘schools,’ and important Chinese literary terms.” You can peruse the entries here.
Peter Sarris’ new biography of the emperor Justinian, Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint, is available now. On the Converging Dialogues podcast, Sarris spoke with host Xavier Bonilla about everything from religious legislation to Armenia to Theodora.
The Washington Post reports that President Biden has endorsed the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, “a league of Indigenous nations in the United States and Canada — competing under their own flag in lacrosse at the 2028 Summer Olympics.” As they note, “His endorsement challenges traditional representation at the international competition and is seen as a step toward a historic moment for a team that has long fought for global recognition.” The 2028 Olympics will see lacrosse played officially in the Olympics for the first time since 1908.
On December 28, 2023, classicist Sharon James passed away. Her teaching, her research, and her extensive mentorship were an inspiration in the UNC-Chapel Hill community and well beyond it. Former students T. H. M. Gellar-Goad (Ph.D. ’12), Christopher B. Polt (Ph.D. ’10), and Serena S. Witzke (Ph.D. ’14) wrote an extremely touching and eloquent eulogy for her that you can read here.
“Plautus, Bacchides 1116-1211. Version 2: Version 2: Spoken in English, masked, using ancient costume. Filmed in Forest Theatre, on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Produced at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, July 2012, as part of the NEH Summer Institute, ‘Roman Comedy in Performance,’ co-directed by Sharon L. James and Timothy J. Moore.”
Good news keeps coming for fans of repatriation (and, honestly, who isn’t at this point): Emory University returns purportedly looted objects to Greece, California universities return artifacts to Indigenous communities in the state, and Harvard develops a fund to support tribal members who come to campus to repatriate their ancestors’ belongings. The necessary work is happening, people, and we love to see it. If you’re unfamiliar with the discourse and you want to know more, Olivia Ebertz at WBUR gives some valuable context in the work of legal repatriation, especially in a university setting.
If you would like to watch the Everyday Orientalism roundtable “In Solidarity with Palestine,” it is now available on their YouTube channel. This event was co-sponsored along with Critical Ancient World Studies (co-convened by Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward) with support from Hearing Palestine. Relevant resources, panelist biographies, and information can be found at the EO website.
And to round off this roundup: how spicy do we think Roman wine actually was? Like, chili crisp spicy? Ghost pepper spicy?
New Antiquity Journal Issues (by @YaleClassicsLib / yaleclassicslib.bsky.social)
[Stay Tuned: Colin will return in February]
Online Lectures, Workshops, and Seminars
On Sunday, February 4, 2024, Bernadette Brady will discuss “The Moon in Ancient Egypt: A Journey from Henchman to king-maker, to a god-enabler.” Brady looks at the role of the Moon in Egyptian religious astronomy. Register here.
On Tuesday, February 6, 2024 from 6 - 7pm GMT, Roel Konijnendijk will discuss “myths and histories of Spartan 'super soldiers.” Register here.
At Dumbarton Oaks (in-person and on Zoom) on February 15, 2024 at 6:00 PM ET, Benjamin Garstad “explores the relationships between the Roman-Byzantine world and the Read Sea (the kingdoms of Axum and Himyar, mod. Ethiopia and Arabia) through ethnographic and geographic textual sources.” Register for Zoom here.
We’re accepting pitches for our Spring 2024 lineup! Reply to this newsletter or forward it to someone you know who might be interested in being a guest writer.
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