The Athletic Hero in Greek Tragedy: Exploring the Representation of Sports in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

Abstract

This athlete of Greek tragedy begun by Aeschylus continued if ever so tentatively by Sophocles and Euripides and this figure sort of draws us back and this is an athlete there was always the possibility of a porous zigzag border between sport and theatre out there between us and Greece where the concept of you know arete aspiring toward moral and physical excellence that is that for where we really kind of get our ideals of virtue or at least identity pre we did in the ancient Greeks an identity politics. For each tragedian, the concept of the agon employed as a metaphorical experience for ethical or psychological struggles both in literary and theoretical narrative is investigated. The old Greek code, which underlies bodily force, becomes for Aeschylus a moral alternative before his characters, and, as he writes them, his demigods are the moral embodiments of the divine purpose. Sucked in by the human ideal Sophocles this world where men at war with their own hearts cry to be told where they themselves transcend themselves. But Euripides assails and dismantles this ideal, pointing to its childishness and to humanity’s own fragility. Drawing on performance theory and the methods of literary history, this study argues that Greek tragedy is a renegotiation of the problems posed by the athletic contest as a metaphor for existence in experience itself, human well-being depends not on material success but ethical self-knowledge. And in this regard, the rise of the athlete-hero was a part of a wider philosophical trajectory within Greek thought from hero-figures who were defined by myth to humanity that was determined through philosophy.