ET CETERA
Paul Cartledge (1960-64) attempts to parse Adam Peaty’s tattoos.
Skin in the Game: Tattooing Ancient and Modern The Olympics have come and gone – again. The delayed 2020 TokyoJapan iteration of the ‘revived’ (post-1896) summer Olympics, that is. I personally was rather heartened and encouraged by the way the International Olympic Committee’s most senior officials attempted to draw attention to the (modern) Olympic Truce movement. That seems to me a far more healthy legacy of the ancient Olympics than say the pre-Games torch-relay invented ex nihilo by the German Olympic Committee for the HitlerNazi Berlin Games of 1936. As I write, the Beijing winter Olympics of 2022, no less politically controversial and for much the same reasons, are upon us.” Modern professional sport was once stigmatized by George Orwell as ‘war minus the shooting’ – a formulation borrowed by my Cambridge colleague Nigel Spivey for his splendid book of that title on the original ancient Greek Olympics, timed to coincide with the Athens summer Games of 2004. The ancient Olympics could indeed be a paramilitary exercise, and the political manipulation of their modern counterparts by regimes of a militaristic and authoritarian hue strikes an unpleasant chord. But it was not that aspect of the modern Olympics and professional sport that most caught my attention – or rather my eye – in 2021. It was tattooing. Specifically, the tattoos 30
ATRIUM
SPRING / SUMMER 2022
sported by the then 26-year-old multiple world-record breaking sprint swimmer Adam Peaty of the UK, now Adam Peaty OBE. The ancient Hellenes could be keen enough on swimming, especially when, as in a naval battle, the ability to swim could be a matter of life or death. The Athenians even equated an inability to swim with illiteracy. But swimming was not for them an Olympic sport nor, if it had been, would they have bothered (even if they had been able) to time anyone’s winning race. (For the record, Peaty’s winning time in the 100-metre solo breaststroke event in Tokyo was an astonishing 57.37 seconds. And he went on to win medals in two team-relay races, another notion alien to the ancient Greeks’ individualistic sporting mentality.)
have them luxuriantly tattooed. Not that tattoos were unknown to the ancient Greeks. In an outstanding article first published in the March/ April 1999 issue of the US magazine Archaeology the classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor amassed a wealth of ancient evidence for the practice, citing examples from Egypt, central Asia, and the Swiss-Italian Alps, as well as Bulgaria and Greece itself.
What mattered – all that mattered – for the ancients was who won, who came first: there were no silver or bronze medals at the ancient Olympics, indeed no medals at all, just a gloriously symbolic olive wreath for the victor, for the man or boy (or ultimately woman) who had found most favour in the sight of Zeus of Mt Olympus – and of the up to 40,000 crowd of spectators at hot, dusty, thirsty Olympia in the height of a northwest Peloponnesian Greek summer every four years.
Mayor offers a wide variety of possible motivations: medical therapy to relieve pain, magical protection, vengeance, or declaring victory over an enemy. But what she was not able to cite was any example of an adult, free, citizen Greek male, let alone any Olympic victor or even competitor, who had had his skin treated in this fashion. There was, I think, one powerful and overriding reason why not: tattooing was a ‘barbarian’ (non-Greek) – and therefore barbarous and barbaric – practice. Moreover, it was all too closely akin to a practice that the Greeks did not shrink from employing themselves, namely branding – which was used by them as a particularly painful and unpleasant
Nor – and this is my immediate point – would any ancient Greek Adam Peaty have had done to his arms what Peaty has had done to his: that is,
What mattered – all that mattered – for the ancients was who won, who came first: there were no silver or bronze medals at the ancient Olympics
