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 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.)

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.

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, 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.

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

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

punishment of an enemy, fellowGreeks not excluded.

Compare and contrast Adam Peaty… who has no fewer than thirteen tattoos on his arms and hands. ‘For me’, he has explained, ‘tattoos represent character, especially in swimming where you are pretty much naked’. (For the record: in the ancient Olympics all competitors in the – men-only – athletic competitions competed stark naked. 2008 in Beijing was, however, an exception to the near-naked rule for today’s Olympic swimmers, when they covered themselves up in speed-assisting techno bodysuits.) I shall not describe all thirteen (there are lavishly illustrated websites) and will focus specifically on those with a Hellenic – ancient Greek – derivation or association.

On the upper part of his left arm Peaty has a lion, a ‘British’ one, since ‘I’m very patriotic’. On that same arm he also has the 5 Olympic rings, 2016 in Roman numerals (MMXVI) for his last Olympic gold won at Rio, and ‘equilibrium’. But it is his right arm – the one the ancient Greeks would have valued far above the sinister southpaw – that interests me most.

For there one may see, intermittently, as he breaststrokes his way winningly up and down the pool, images of four figures drawn from the world of ancient Greece. The overall Hellenic effect is, admittedly, slightly diminished by the inclusion of ‘divide et impera’, but we shall draw a Homeric veil over that. Choice of the Olympian god Poseidon was a no-brainer, for his clear associations with water. Achilles clearly appealed as being the most heroic – or at least one of the most lethally efficient – warriors of the ancient Hellenic repertoire, fictional or real-life, and of course we might add that his mother, Thetis, was a water (sea) goddess. But the third image is a little more enigmatic: Athena. True, she was an Olympian warrior goddess, and, being born from her Olympian father Zeus’s cranium, she tended to favour the masculine side. But Athena and swimming? The fit is not obvious. Finally, but not least, on the right forearm is inked a clearly Greek, possibly Spartan, heavy-armed infantry warrior.

Adam Peaty is by no means alone in drawing on the ancient world for tattoo inspiration. A quick internet ‘research’ trawl yields Rasheed Wallace, an American basketball champion who sports images of Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaten, his wife Nefertiti and their two children on an arm; and Matt Kemp, an LA Dodgers baseballer who, also on an arm, wears a sword-bearing ancient Greek warrior. And I already remembered that retired Australian-Greek tennisplayer Mark Philippoussis proudly carried – and indeed presumably still does carry – on his right arm an image of Alexander the Great.

But for me Peaty wins the crown, the stephanos, for the range, power and indeed coverage of his Hellenic tattoos. He indeed has skin in his game, no question.

Editor: An earlier version of this article appeared in ARGO: A Hellenic Review, a journal of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, of which Paul is the current President. 